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
Before the first watershed
- Medicine before 1913 (until 1913) 12 (provisional)
- Carbon capture and storage 15 (provisional)
The proving zone: works for some, not yet most
- The boneshaker (1867–1870) 40 to 60 (provisional)
- The high wheeler (1871–1890) 40 to 60 (provisional)
The convivial range
- The bicycle 50 (provisional)
- Vernacular literacy 50 to 80 (provisional)
- The Breville Barista Express 50 to 85 (provisional)
- Current, the RSS reader 53 (provisional)
- The book 53 to 83 (provisional)
- Medicine from 1913 to the 1950s (1913–1955) 53 to 98 (provisional)
- The public library 57 to 85 (provisional)
- WordPress 57 to 95 (provisional)
- The fediverse 57 to 80 (provisional)
- Local language models 57 to 85 (provisional)
- The telephone 63 to 85 (provisional)
Past the second watershed
- The algorithmic social feed at least 78 (provisional)
- The smartphone at least 78 (provisional)
- The electric car at least 80 (provisional)
- Imposed literacy at least 80 (provisional)
- Hosted language models at least 88 (provisional)
- Compulsory schooling at least 90 (provisional)
- Hospital medicine since the 1950s at least 90 (provisional)
- The private car at least 93 (provisional)
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.
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.
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.
From the catalogue
Start here
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.
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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
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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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, counterproductivity, iatrogenesis, and Nemesis — from ancient to modern times, from road congestion to software, humans have described the same patterns.
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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.
Technique is the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.
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.
- Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. Calder & Boyars, 1973.