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Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)
- profsummergig 1y agoComputers could hardly do anything back then. Mostly backend data processing. Yet this speech could have been written today. Intriguing.
- ttoinou 1y agoSimilar to Guy Debord in The Society of Spectacle, what he wrote witnessing the beginning of TV and mass cinema applies for us in 2025, 100 fold
- profsummergig 1y agoI just looked up the Wiki page for the book. Prescient.
- layer8 1y agoNeuromancer was published only half a year later. Or take The Machine Stops from 1909.
- noosphr 1y agoPeople act like you need a petaflop for something to be useful. The US census of 1890 would have been impossible to complete before the next one started without puchcard machines. One may as well say the information age arrived then. Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point.
- profsummergig 1y ago> Anyone with basic numeracy and imagination could imagine what the future held at that point. Yet most of us (myself included) are in denial (willful or just delusional) about what AI is going to do.
- forinti 1y agoData processing by itself was a major leap in productivity. My city ran its payroll on a single computer with 64KB of RAM. This would have required weeks of work from a whole team of bureaucrats.
- profsummergig 1y agoI remember armies of "stenographers" and "bookkeepers" in the central areas of office buildings.
- ttoinou 1y agoWhy is Ivan Illich so underrated ? He predicted and theorized free software 10 years before it happened in Tools for Conviviality, made the most obvious and needed critic of education and hospitals alone against the Zeitgeist, studied step by step a lot of field of society to find patterns to simplify understanding. He created simple concepts that everyone should know —- counter productivity, vernacular, iaotrogenic, radical monopoly, conviviality, poverty vs. misery etc. He is much more pragmatic than all his leftists colleagues. He might not go very deep in economics but at least he’s not a basic marxist. He might not go as deep as Jacques Ellul in his critics of technology, but at least he is very understandable, anyone can be inspired by his books. I read most of Illich writings at 19 years old and it stayed with me for years
- taylorlapeyre 1y agoI agree with you. Is it perhaps because of his religious background (he was a Catholic priest)? For much of the last couple decades, there has been an anti-religious streak in the educational mainstream universities.
- mousethatroared 1y agoHalf agree. The other half, as a very conservative Catholic, conservative Catholics are neglecting our great teachers like Dorothy Day.
- edwardbernays 1y agoCould that perhaps be a reaction to an anti-intellectualism streak in the mainstream religious narrative for the last couple decades?
- kragen 1y agoThe last couple of millennia, really. Who lynched Hypatia? Who burned the Timbuktu Manuscripts? Who burned Giordano Bruno alive? Who burned the Maya codices? At the same time, religious institutions have always contained many intellectual traditions, perhaps most of them. When the Christians extirpated knowledge of the hieroglyphs, it was the Egyptian priests they scattered. We don't know what was in the Maya codices, but large parts of the surviving Maya inscriptions are religious in nature. European universities began as seminaries; al-Azhar University is over 1000 years old and initially taught only sharia, fiqh, and the Quran. And everyone knows how Irish monks saved civilization. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed.
- Belichi 1y agoInteresting
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoSpeech is sometimes said to be a commons.. So it's really more about the medium in itself, rather than what it is or is not used for
- Nevermark 1y agoIllich seems to have been an interesting thinker. He also seems to prompt many interesting book review comments. I have now found my mission! > The thing is, Illich is more like Plato than Marx. Nobody ever tried to mount a Platonic revolution. [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2LL7H3HL0WENO/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2LL7H3HL0WENO/re...
- aspenmayer 1y agoNon-referral link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2LL7H3HL0WENO/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2LL7H3HL0WENO/
- Nevermark 1y agoThanks. Didn't know just grabbing a link defaulted to a referral program.
- antonvs 1y agoA Platonic revolution would be the ideal Form of a revolution that all other revolutions are merely shadows of.
- Nevermark 1y agoYes, and more grounded in friendly, as apposed to romantic notions, of the world.
- thadk 1y agoIllich's 1983 Japan talk seems to be in response to McLuhan's 1971 convocation talk where he critiques Illich: https://mcluhan-studies.artsci.utoronto.ca/v1_iss5/1_5art3.htm https://mcluhan-studies.artsci.utoronto.ca/v1_iss5/1_5art3.h... (The spacing on this document I'm linking is hideous. Excerpts inlined below, paragraph breaks my own) Both talks center "enterprise" and communication. Thanks Claude for validating my hunch about the late-century subtweet. > What has happened today is that there is a new hidden ground of all human enterprises, namely a world environment of electric information, and against this new environment the old ground of 19th century hardware—whether at school or factory, whether of bureaucracy or entertainment—stands out as incongruous. ... > It is this situation that Ivan Illich addresses himself to in Deschooling Society. He is vividly aware of the irrelevance of current curricula, drills and certification. He knows that these can no longer help us relate to the new world, and he frankly appeals to the forms of preliterate, and even prenatal experience as models for the training now needed. > As Coleridge said "If you wish to acquire a man's knowledge, first start with his ignorance." Illich is unaware—I'll repeat: Illich is ignorant of the new all-inclusive "surround" of electric information which has enveloped man, but it is his instinctive response to this new ground that in some measure validates the figure-image he suggests for the new school. For example, he says "Since most people today live outside industrial societies. Most people today do not experience childhood. In the Andes, you till the soil once you become useful: before that you watch sheep; if you are well nourished you should be useful by 11, and otherwise by 12." > Illich relates this story: "Recently I was talking to my night-watchman, Marcos, about his 11 year old son who works in a barbershop. I noted in Spanish that his son was still a nino. Marcos answered with a guileless smile, 'Don Ivan, I guess you are right.' I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons." What Illich has in mind, although he does not state it, is that childhood was unknown in the Middle Ages and was a renaissance invention that came in with printing, and is ending very rapidly now in the television age...
- felineflock 1y ago> "Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure underlines the local autonomy of community. Enclosure of the commons is thus as much in the interest of professionals and of state bureaucrats as it is in the interest of capitalists. Enclosure allows the bureaucrats to define local community as impotent..." That was made much more evident with the government restrictions/mandates during Covid. The endgame seems to be that people will be treated as farm animals.
- low_tech_love 1y ago“We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking…” One thing that bothers me about the ubiquitous encroachment of LLMs into most areas of human writing is that it helps us write faster, but does not necessarily help us read faster. Producing large amounts of human-looking text is instantaneous, but reading (and acting upon) still takes the same amount of time. I was e.g. called to read and review a report from an academic committee with hundreds of pages that mostly looks human but also not, with pages and pages of slop after slop. I felt like I was staring into the abyss, spending hours to read something that probably took seconds for someone to produce with AI. It felt like an absolute meaningless waste of my time. The thing is that I think people have missed the fact that the act of reading is inherently connected to the act of writing; I take the time to read something because I know that someone took the time to write it. For those who live/work by writing it seems that the act of writing has become so detached and matter-of-fact that they think “words are words” regardless of whether they were written by a human or an AI. If it helps you write faster, then why not? Like someone who used to cut trees with axes and suddenly gets a chainsaw as a gift. But the problem is that, inevitably, we will go down the road of “if you can’t bother to write it, I won’t bother to read it” and AI will also be used to read and interpret the writings that it itself generated. So we’ll have documents with thousands of pages that are never going to be read by humans, with AI processing in both ends, so the writing will basically be a payload, a protocol, and nothing more. As such processes become the norm, we’ll be entirely dependent on the AI to both produce text and read what it produced, and become enslaved by whatever hidden (or not?) ideological bias it has been fed by its masters.
- Herring 1y agoDifferent perspective: I'm currently using a LLM to rewrite a fitness book. It takes like 20 pages of rambling text by an amateur writer and turns it into a crisp clear 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc. I sent it out to friends, and they all love the new style. My experience is LLMs can write very very well; we just have to care enough to ask them to do so. Those 4 pages needed a whole lot of fine-tuning. But I'm optimistic eventually people will figure it out.