Bryan Appleyard » Blog Archive » Tools for Conviviality? Once we get beyond the bloated trade union, bosses, the hyper- inflation, the ineffectual politicians, the violence, the bleakness, something much more interesting emerges – the first tentative sketches of the world in which we now live. TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY Ivan Illich Fontana/Collins. In each of several dimensions of. Ivan Illich - Tools for Conviviality V - Political Inversion. The critical use of ordinary language is the first pivot in a political inversion. Ads related to tools for conviviality Mechanics Tools Warehouse www.MechanicsToolsWarehouse.com Take Advantage of Our Huge Savings. Order Your Auto Tools Today! The Power Plant’s Summer 2012 group exhibition, Tools for Conviviality, addresses social and individual agency in contemporary art and life. Scopri Tools for Conviviality di Ivan Illich: spedizione gratuita per i clienti Prime e per ordini a partire da 29 ![]() In September 1. 97. Milton Friedman appeared in the New York Times Magazine. It was a very cleverly structured attack on the idea of the “social responsibilities of business in a free- enterprise system.” Business men who argue for such responsibilites are, says Friedman, preaching “pure and unadulterated socialism” and they are “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”In 1. Ivan Ilich published Tools for Conviviality, an attack on the way elite groups were creating economic growth at the expense of human flourishing. Also in 1. 97. 3, Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post- Industrial Society which forecast – and advocated – a move to a service and information economy. And, finally, in 1. Steve Jobs started going to meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in a garage in Menlo Park, California, or at the nearby Oasis Bar and Grill. Friedman’s amoral company whose sole purpose was to use every possible legal means to reward its shareholders was the, in retrospect, surprisingly exotic and dangerous concept that was to dominate most of the next four decades. Bell’s thesis feels obvious if quaint now that everybody is yearning for a return to industrial productivity. Illich is due for a rebirth now that left wing philosophers like Jean- Claude Michea – as well as quite a few right- wing commentators like Charles Moore, Peter Oborne and Dominic Sandbrook – are questioning the validity of the Friedmanite settlement if not capitalism in general. But Jobs in that garage is the image that really leaps across the decades. What did he want to make and why? Of course, we now know the answers to the first of those questions – i. Macs, i. Pods, i. Phones and i. Pads – but his early death at the age of 5. If psychology is unavailable, however, context certainly is and it is that seventies context, in which what we make and why was being so intently discussed, from which sprang Jobs and the defining industries of our time. But Jobs in that garage is the image that really leaps across the decades. What did he want to make and why? The social and political ncontext of the garage was hippie or, perhaps yippie. Hippie defines the lotus- eaters of Woodstock; yippie the more aggressive political types who emerged after the disruption of the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1. Yippies wanted to “stick it to the Man”, the Man being the government, the corporations, or simply “the System”, a term which embraced all manifestations of oppression. To a group of people wishing to bring computing to the masses, both the Man and the System were IBM, a monopoly that saw computers as big, expensive, few in number and all made and programmed by IBM.(This is not to say that Jobs was a hippie, a yippie or any other denomination, only that his ambitions at the time – like all ambitions at all times – were defined by the rhetoric by which he was surrounded. Jobs was all about what might be described as narcissistic auto- marketing; he was the ultimate user of all he produced and, it was said, the only market research he ever did was in a mirror. It is this self- identification with his customers and his social and political climate that makes him such an important and effective figure.)Sticking it to IBM involved making cheap(ish) personal computers which is what, in 1. Apple, the company founded on April 1st by Jobs and Steve Wozniak, proceeded to do. As Microsoft, founded a year earlier, was also about to undermine the grip of IBM by seizing control of the operating system, . That culture was one in which the nature of capitalism was being hotly debated, the twin poles of the debate being Friedman’s amoral company and Illich’s tools for conviviality. Scroll forward forty- five years we can see that Friedman triumphed until 2. This has led to a revival of the seventies debate about the nature of capitalism. ![]() Meanwhile, the Menlo Park garage has become Apple’s Cupertino campus, the home of a $3. Up in Seattle is Amazon, a $1. Silicon Valley, there is Facebook worth perhaps $5. The yippies have become The Man. Their products are now as seductive to us all as were those first personal computers to the geeks of the mid- seventies. They are, overwhelmingly, made in China and, especially in the case of Apple’s, they are designed with a breathtaking refinement so potent that they have created a new category of product porn. Videos on You. Tube show Apple products being . ![]() TOOLS CONVIVIALITY IVAN ILLICH 1989 02 01 can be very useful guide, and TOOLS CONVIVIALITY IVAN ILLICH 1989 02 01 play an important role in your products. Trailblazer TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY. Ivan Illich (1973) Traditionally, in the English language, Tools For Conviviality WikiOne of Jobs’s most brilliant auto- marketing coups was the creation of a product delirium which cause new devices to be reported on the TV news and inspired people to queue overnight outside Apple stores. Jobs, the ultimate user, partook of this delirium – he liked to describe Apple gadgets as “insanely great”. The . The yippies have become The Man. This delirium – not just for Apple’s devices but also for all the other smartphones and computers as well as internet services like those provided by online retailers like Amazon and social network sites like Facebook – is more significant than it may at first seem. It is a symptom of the fact that these are truly unprecedented products. The buyers expect them to change their lives, all of their lives, and the sellers expect them freely to give them these lives so that they may profit from the information through advertising and marketing. On the face of it, these gadgets of connectivity represent the . Idealistic, even utopian claims have been made for the efficacy. Clay Shirky, perhaps the most prominent spokesman for the internet generation, speaks of the . What had once been an audience has become . The publisher Tim O’Reilly has spoken of the internet as providing “an architecture of participation”. Schmidt is the most provocative of the internet prophets in his insistence, first, on the inevitable ubiquity of the new machines – children in the future, he says, will have only two states “asleep or online” – secondly, on their moral stature – “computers make us better humans” – and, finally, on their authority – “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”Then there is the Arab Spring. After Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, was harassed and humiliated by the police, he set fire to himself in protest and, eighteen days later, he died. Thanks to the internet, Bouazizi’s self- immolation set the whole region on fire. The Tunisian and Egyptian governments both fell, Bahraini leaders clung on thanks to massive concessions to the protesters and Libya and Syria became the latest territory to be subjected to the human penchant for massacres. Young, technologically adept people were on the front line. Thanks to satellite TV, they saw different ways of life in other countries, they imagined change in their own and, using the internet and mobile phones, they organised. Facebook and Twitter were the tools of revolution – grateful Egyptians started to name their children Facebook. A Google executive, Wael Ghonim, emerged from eleven days of police detention to become both a hero and a leader of the revolt. In Libya, an internet shutdown was subverted by protesters who crossed the border into Egypt bearing flash drives from which they uploaded videos of state brutality. This, surely, was dramatic evidence that the crowd, democratic and wise, had been empowered and these new gadgets were far more than toys or labour- saving devices. This wave of cyber- boosterism – involving, as it does, prophecies of peace and, if not love, then at least absolute global connectivity – is, at one level, an echo of the hippie/yippie dreams of the sixties and seventies. That, after all, is the generation which has been in charge during the development of the internet and which has, as a result, constructed the new commanding heights of the world economy. But, in constructing those heights, the generation has been subjected to the new pressure of shareholder value. Much of the boosterism has to be seen as gadget advertising and a necessary adjunct to the system which combines American technology and design with Chinese productivity. Over the last couple of years a counter- wave of scepticism has emerged. In his book The Net Delusion, for example, Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus- born scholar, pours well- researched scorn on the political claims of the boosters. Tyrants, he points out, quickly learn how to use the internet and, a further twist, he suggests net revolutionaries had better make sure they win – internet and mobile communications are written in ink, not pencil, and the identities of their opponents will easily be traced by an oppressive regime. MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle has questioned the way the gadget makers feel justified in taking over the lives of our children. She provides chilling evidence of children for whom connectivity has become a new form of anomie and even, paradoxically, intense loneliness. Eli Pariser in his book The Filter Bubble has pointed out that the internet is no longer the window on the world we thought it was. Increased personalisation of searches means that we get Google results that are increasingly tuned to our known preoccupations. As a result, the more we search, the less we learn. From writer Nicholas Carr – and many others – comes the anxiety that these machines are changing the way we think, shortening our attention spans and making us incapable of prolonged contemplation. This is accompanied by suggestions – notably from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield – that they are indeed altering the structure of the human brain.
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