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
crabmusket 7 hours ago [-]
You might enjoy a newsletter called The Convivial Society, which is heavily influenced by Illich.
I'm just starting Tools For Conviviality. I suspect that Illich's ideas are underrated because, at least today, most people want more and Illich does not offer that. He offers freedom, I think, in his definition of conviviality... but it seems to be quite clear that offered freedom or comfort, most of us today (I'm not excluding myself from this) prefer comfort.
vouaobrasil 1 hours ago [-]
I suspect it's because he's like most of the more radical writers: if you actual dissect his writing, it really gets to the heard of a lot of what is rotten about modern industrial society. And the rectification of the problems he highlights pretty much necessitates disassembling a lot of modern technological society and getting rid of most of its institutions.
So while he makes sense, no one wants to discuss his work, because then they must also come to a lot of the same conclusions he did, which is: the global society we have today is a lost cause, and a lot of it needs to be torn down. Which of course goes against the status quo.
It's a lot different than the fluffy, weak criticism of many today that recommend making changes that don't change anything. But then at least people reading that stuff can convince themselves that they are doing something, when they are not.
xhevahir 4 hours ago [-]
The fact that he's a very eclectic thinker and not very systematic, although that's one of the things that a lot of people admire about him. His religious commitments, as well, I would guess. But also he had some very odd ideas--like refusing to get a tumor removed from his face. He also was not the best at communicating his ideas.
taylorlapeyre 8 hours ago [-]
I 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.
edwardbernays 6 hours ago [-]
Could that perhaps be a reaction to an anti-intellectualism streak in the mainstream religious narrative for the last couple decades?
kragen 3 hours ago [-]
The 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.
taylorlapeyre 3 hours ago [-]
yes, certainly
mousethatroared 7 hours ago [-]
Half agree.
The other half, as a very conservative Catholic, conservative Catholics are neglecting our great teachers like Dorothy Day.
zolland 5 hours ago [-]
Poverty vs Misery?
ttoinou 1 hours ago [-]
The distinction between lack of wealth/goods/services and lack of access to services that you now mandatory need to get wealthy/goods/others services (because of how society just changed commons into privatisation). Note that I’m not anticapitalist yet I think there are interesting concepts there
Majid RAHNEMA wrote a book about this in french, “Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté” based on similar ideas than Illich
ants_everywhere 8 hours ago [-]
This was a whole cottage industry during the cold war, kind of like it is now that we're in another sort of cold war.
The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.
xg15 8 hours ago [-]
Well, was it wrong what they said?
ants_everywhere 8 hours ago [-]
Yes. In general that's why you resort to propaganda and polemics rather than giving a formal argument that can be disproved.
appreciatorBus 4 hours ago [-]
I completely agree that Marxism and its descents are bankrupt ideas, but I’m not getting the connection to Illich.
I’ve only read one of his books, Energy and Equity, but I don’t really recall any strain of Marxism or leftism, though it was a long time ago so maybe I’ve forgotten.
ants_everywhere 3 hours ago [-]
He's connected with liberation theology, which is what the KGB was promoting in Catholic countries to recruit for militant groups. Similar to how they promoted revolutionary Islam to people like Goddafi. I think the Soviets actually claim to have invented liberation theology, but who knows.
His deschooling and Limits to Medicine stuff were standard Soviet tropes and still are today. The obvious purposes are to get the US to weaken its education and medical systems. They ran similar strategies to get the US to weaken its nuclear system and to me it looks like they're also trying to weaken adoption of AI through similar ideas. But basically schools are bad, medicine is bad. Claims we're "pathologizing" everything. You see the same ideas in socialist spaces online today. Especially these days around psychology. Similarly with the "factory school" trope.
When Energy and Equity was written in 1974 it was a year after the 1973 oil crisis. The Soviet Union was destabilizing countries in the middle east and wanted to secure access to oil especially at the expense of the US. Their normal propaganda would be about American imperialism and how they're evil and oil producing countries should side with the Soviet Union instead. I haven't read the book, but that would be the Soviet take at the time.
I don't know whether he was supported by the Soviets. He was a public intellectual who traveled a lot especially to South America. It's very likely he was approached and attempted to be recruited by the KGB. But whether he rebuffed them or not isn't public knowledge.
One thing we're learning as more stuff gets declassified is how many household names were more actively involved in the cold war than we realized. For example, Howard Zinn being actively involved in communist organizations despite lying about it for years. Or Earnest Hemingway actively collaborating with the KGB (although in the end wasn't very successful). There are a few other examples.
ttoinou 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting information. Most of what Illich says applied equally to the USSR regime though
parineum 18 minutes ago [-]
Was it available in the USSR?
6 hours ago [-]
profsummergig 9 hours ago [-]
Computers could hardly do anything back then. Mostly backend data processing.
Yet this speech could have been written today.
Intriguing.
layer8 8 hours ago [-]
Neuromancer was published only half a year later.
Or take The Machine Stops from 1909.
ttoinou 8 hours ago [-]
Similar 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
Nevermark 3 hours ago [-]
Illich 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]
> "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.
thadk 3 hours ago [-]
Illich'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.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...
Belichi 6 hours ago [-]
Interesting
gsf_emergency_2 4 hours ago [-]
Speech 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
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
I'm just starting Tools For Conviviality. I suspect that Illich's ideas are underrated because, at least today, most people want more and Illich does not offer that. He offers freedom, I think, in his definition of conviviality... but it seems to be quite clear that offered freedom or comfort, most of us today (I'm not excluding myself from this) prefer comfort.
So while he makes sense, no one wants to discuss his work, because then they must also come to a lot of the same conclusions he did, which is: the global society we have today is a lost cause, and a lot of it needs to be torn down. Which of course goes against the status quo.
It's a lot different than the fluffy, weak criticism of many today that recommend making changes that don't change anything. But then at least people reading that stuff can convince themselves that they are doing something, when they are not.
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.
The other half, as a very conservative Catholic, conservative Catholics are neglecting our great teachers like Dorothy Day.
Majid RAHNEMA wrote a book about this in french, “Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté” based on similar ideas than Illich
The Soviets would fund anyone applying Marxist thought to this or that. There may be some interesting ideas for those willing to sort out the chaff, but for the most part you know exactly what they're going to say if you're already familiar with the propaganda that came before.
I’ve only read one of his books, Energy and Equity, but I don’t really recall any strain of Marxism or leftism, though it was a long time ago so maybe I’ve forgotten.
His deschooling and Limits to Medicine stuff were standard Soviet tropes and still are today. The obvious purposes are to get the US to weaken its education and medical systems. They ran similar strategies to get the US to weaken its nuclear system and to me it looks like they're also trying to weaken adoption of AI through similar ideas. But basically schools are bad, medicine is bad. Claims we're "pathologizing" everything. You see the same ideas in socialist spaces online today. Especially these days around psychology. Similarly with the "factory school" trope.
When Energy and Equity was written in 1974 it was a year after the 1973 oil crisis. The Soviet Union was destabilizing countries in the middle east and wanted to secure access to oil especially at the expense of the US. Their normal propaganda would be about American imperialism and how they're evil and oil producing countries should side with the Soviet Union instead. I haven't read the book, but that would be the Soviet take at the time.
I don't know whether he was supported by the Soviets. He was a public intellectual who traveled a lot especially to South America. It's very likely he was approached and attempted to be recruited by the KGB. But whether he rebuffed them or not isn't public knowledge.
One thing we're learning as more stuff gets declassified is how many household names were more actively involved in the cold war than we realized. For example, Howard Zinn being actively involved in communist organizations despite lying about it for years. Or Earnest Hemingway actively collaborating with the KGB (although in the end wasn't very successful). There are a few other examples.
Yet this speech could have been written today.
Intriguing.
Or take The Machine Stops from 1909.
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/re...
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.
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...
So it's really more about the medium in itself, rather than what it is or is not used for