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.
The threshold scale
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.
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 publish our findings as we go.
02
Catalogue
Every tool we catalogue gets a ticket identifying what it does, where it stops, how easily you can stop using it, and where it sits between the two watersheds Illich described.
03
Workshop
We build software to the same standard: open, repairable, and no bigger or more complex than its users need. The first example is this site’s own catalogue, built in the open on WordPress.
From the catalogue
Start here
The bicycle
- 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.
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The smartphone
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
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 -
Vernacular literacy
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 -
The fediverse
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 -
Medicine from 1913 to the 1950s
Treats illness and injury with a growing set of remedies that work: antitoxins, insulin, sulfa drugs, penicillin, vaccines, and safe surgery.
No. 016 -
Catalogue · Communication · Learning
Hosted language models
Produces text in response to text, as a service run by a company: answers, summaries, translations, drafts, and computer code. It works by predicting likely next words from patterns found in a very large body of writing.
No. 015 -
The book
Holds text and pictures on pages bound along one edge, so a reader can carry it, open it anywhere, and return to any passage without power or permission.
No. 014 -
Imposed literacy
Teaches a whole population to read and write one standard language, fixed by rule, certified by schools, and required by offices.
No. 013
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.
Research
Reading, evidence, and working notes on tools, limits, and scale.
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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.
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Why more makes less
Self-sabotage, iatrogenesis, nemesis: what Illich meant by each, and the named laws, from road congestion to software, that describe the same pattern.
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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.
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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…
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Tools or systems?
This catalogue assumes that its subjects are tools and that someone can stand outside them.
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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.
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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…
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Ellul, Charbonneau, and Illich
Illich called Jacques Ellul his master. Ellul said his best-known book belonged as much to Bernard Charbonneau as Ellul himself. What the two men from Bordeaux saw first, and what…
A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others.
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. Counterfoil looks for the second watershed approaching before a tool reaches it.