Counterfoil

Counterfoil research and development

Tools for humans.

Counterfoil studies the threshold where a tool stops serving the people who use it and starts ab/using them. We catalogue tools that keep people in charge. We also build and maintain a few of our own.

Read the research
Browse the catalogue

The threshold scale

Before the first watershed

The proving zone: works for some, not yet most

The convivial range

Past the second watershed

First watershed

Second watershed

Not Useful

The tool cannot yet do reliably what it claims to do.

Convivial Range

The tool does its job and still leaves its users in control.

Actively Harmful

The tool starts to defeat its alleged purpose.

How we evaluate tools • The catalogue schema • The six balances • Try the scale

How to read the map

A hollow marker is a provisional record. A solid marker is a reviewed record. (No record has had a final review yet.) Each marker sits at the lowest position its record supports. Point at a marker, or move to it with the keyboard, and a dashed line shows how far right the tool could sit if every balance not yet assessed turned out to be lost. The line shows what has not been assessed, not a measured risk. The shaded band is the convivial range, and the small mark at its centre is where a tool sits when all six balances are holding.

01

Research

Counterfoil research has two tasks: to detect the early signs of a tool turning against the people who use it, and to devise tools that preserve the balance of life. We’ll publish what we learn as we go.

Research

02

Catalogue

Every tool we catalogue gets a ticket saying what it does, where it stops, how easily you can stop using it, and where it sits relative to the two watersheds: nearing, within, or lost beyond the convivial range.

The catalogue

03

Workshop

We build tools to the same standard: open, repairable, and no bigger or more complex than their users need. The first example is this site’s own catalogue, built in the open on WordPress.

The workshop

From the catalogue

All tools

Start here

Catalogue · Mobility

The bicycle

since 1885 · Established

What it does:
Moves a person, and a modest load, three or four times faster than walking, for about a fifth of the energy walking takes over the same distance (Illich’s figures). It runs on food and needs nothing more than a passable path.
Where it stops:
At human speed and human range. It extends what a body can already do without making walking impossible or claiming the street for itself, and it doesn’t need a dedicated network to be useful. It never reaches the point Illich called a radical monopoly, where everyone is forced to use it.
How easily you can stop using it:
Repairs need common parts and simple hand tools, and community bike shops teach them. Leaving costs nothing: you can walk, and nothing in your life has been rebuilt around the bicycle.
No. 001

  • Catalogue · Mobility

    The high wheeler

    1871–1890 · Superseded

    Moved one rider fast and far. A pedalled front wheel of forty to sixty inches, sized to the rider’s leg, carried the rider farther on each turn. A good rider could cover more than a hundred miles in a day.

    No. 019

  • Catalogue · Mobility

    The boneshaker

    1867–1870 · Superseded

    Once upon a time, what it did was move one rider faster than walking, by pedals attached directly to the front wheel. It was the first bicycle with pedals; its makers called it a velocipede, and riders named it for the uncomfortable ride.

    No. 018

  • Catalogue · Food and drink

    The Breville Barista Express

    Established

    Grinds coffee beans and makes espresso at home, one to four shots at a time, and steams milk. It automates the pressure and the temperature while leaving the grind, the tamp, and optionally a 1-2 stage (pre-infusion and extraction) start/stop timing to the person using it.

    No. 021

  • Catalogue · Communication

    The smartphone

    Established

    Puts a telephone, a camera, a map, a wallet, and a general-purpose computer in a pocket, always connected, with its software supplied through its maker’s store.

    No. 020

  • Catalogue · Communication · Learning

    Local language models

    Emerging

    Produces text in response to text, on a computer you control, with no connection to its maker. It works by predicting likely next words from patterns found in a very large body of writing.

    No. 019

  • Catalogue · Learning

    Vernacular literacy

    Established

    Lets people keep words outside memory: write them down, send them across distance and time, and read what others have written, in the tongues they already speak and for uses of their own.

    No. 018

  • Catalogue · Communication

    The fediverse

    Emerging

    Lets people on thousands of separately run servers follow and reply to each other, using a shared open protocol. Posts arrive in the order they were written; no company ranks them.

    No. 017

  • Catalogue · Health

    Medicine from 1913 to the 1950s

    1913–1955 · Superseded

    Treats illness and injury with a growing set of remedies that work: antitoxins, insulin, sulfa drugs, penicillin, vaccines, and safe surgery.

    No. 016

Open call

Know a tool that’s great, or terrible, for the people who use it?

Three surveys are open: WordPress plugins, proprietary software, and coffee makers. Each asks a few plain questions, and the most useful nominations become catalogue records.

Nominate a tool

Research

All notes

Reading, evidence, and working notes on tools, limits, and scale.

  • Shifting baselines and the second watershed

    In 1995, Daniel Pauly named the way we quietly lose track of our place in an objective decline and become blind to impending ruin. Shifting baselines apply to systems and…

  • Before the second watershed

    Ivan Illich proposed counterfoil research to detect the corruption of useful, widely adopted technologies before the rot set in. (Think Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” in webtech.) Let’s look at where that…

  • Nemesis, the goddess of limits

    The Greeks worshipped Nemesis as a goddess of equity and equilibrium — the balance of life within limits. Over two thousand years, Nemesis shrank into a word for revenge. Today…

  • Six ways of making coffee: which is best?

    A moka pot, a Turkish pot, a French press, an AeroPress, a drip machine, and an espresso machine: which one can I most easily understand, repair, and replace? And which…

  • Nominate a WordPress plugin, best or worst

    Help us tell the WordPress plugins that extend what people can do from the ones that take something away. Five plain questions.

  • Why more makes less

    Self-sabotage, counterproductivity, iatrogenesis, and Nemesis — from ancient to modern times, from road congestion to software, humans have described the same patterns.

  • Elinor Ostrom and the open source commons

    Ostrom showed that people can govern a shared resource without a sovereign or a market. Her eight principles, read as questions for WordPress, and what Illich adds.

  • Judge a tool by what it does

    Illich’s “counterproductivity” and Stafford Beer’s “the purpose of a system is what it does” reach the same destination by different roads. Justin Warren puts the same tests to work on…

  • Tools or systems?

    This catalogue assumes that its subjects are tools and that someone can stand outside them.

  • Public interest research and counterfoil research

    Nader’s PIRGs and Illich’s counterfoil research began in the same years, aimed at the same institutions. Illich read the consumer movement closely, and his objection still marks the difference.

  • Carl Hedman, 1934–2026

    Carl was a philosopher at UWM who had worked on cooperative neighbourhood projects since the 1960s. He introduced me to Ivan Illich’s work as we both volunteered our labour on…

  • Holding, tipping, lost

    How do you tell a tipping scale from one that’s tipped over? This is the first test for our catalogue’s evolving method, where we use the terms holding, tipping, and…

Man is the only animal whose evolution has been conditioned by adaptation on more than one front. If he did not succumb to predators and forces of nature, he had to cope with use and abuse by others of his own kind. In his struggle with the elements and with his neighbor, his character and culture were formed, his instincts withered, and his territory was turned into a home.

Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis (1976)
Line drawing of a paperback cover: ILLICH, Tools for Conviviality, with the words “Read this strange book closely,” New York Times, and a cyclist in a red sweater riding out of the frame.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973), redrawn after the 1975 Fontana paperback. Illich wrote it at CIDOC, the centre he ran in Cuernavaca, Mexico, two years after Deschooling Society. It asks what limits tools need if people are to stay in charge of them. Among its readers was Lee Felsenstein, a designer of early personal computers. Still in print and widely read in the appropriate technology and degrowth movements.

The question we ask of every tool

Does it make people more capable, or more dependent?

Ivan Illich demonstrated how modern tools and institutions pass through two watersheds. After crossing the first, they become useful and start doing real good. After the second, they start to undermine the purpose they were built for. Medicine, he argued, crossed the first watershed around 1913 and the second by the mid-1950s.

New to Illich? Start with What is “counterfoil research”? then Why more makes less and Judge a tool by what it does. The reading list has his books and the writing about them.