Before the second watershed

Illich gave counterfoil research two tasks. The second, “to devise tools and tool systems that optimize the balance of life, thereby maximizing liberty for all,” gets most of the attention because it is the hopeful one. The first comes before it, and it’s not an easier task. It’s the diagnostic first step — “to provide guidelines for detecting the incipient stages of murderous logic in a tool.”¹

Incipient means beginning. Illich was not asking for a way to recognize a tool that has already gone bad. Harmful and failing systems tend to be very visible. They get called out, but it’s also rare for them to be fixed or fixable. (This is a key reason why open tech and the right to repair matter but are also bandaids — coping mechanisms more than large scale solutions, since most people won’t adopt a hacker or indie tech mentality, sadly.) Illich wanted a practical way for everyone to see and clearly expose future failures on the way to us, and to head off the harm before it was too late. Great idea. Does it sound familiar?

Early-warning research of the kind Illich called for has had mixed results. Identifying atmospheric ozone depletion and remediating it is often counted as a win: what is supposed to happen. Resistance to a similar consensus on the topic of anthropogenic warming suggests no amount of warning will have much effect when economic growth, or national and personal incomes are on the line, absent a strong regulatory state that can cope rationally with public good vs. economic growth conflicts — a tradeoff that has many problems of its own.

Despite all that, and maybe precisely because it’s hard, thinking through the tradeoffs for solutions to costly dilemmas needs to be something we’re capable of doing, as individuals and groups. It’s worth trying to get better at it, starting with the small, mundane, everyday tools we use.

In this essay I try to say where the beginning of the road to Hell lies in technological systems, why it is so hard to see, and what it means for the way this catalogue places “tools” on its scale, from coffee makers to local versus hosted generative artificial intelligence, to vernacular versus imposed literacy.

Each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying, and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation.

Illich, Energy and Equity

Where the incipient stage lies

The first chapter of Tools for Conviviality, “Two Watersheds,” supplies the map. Around 1913, Illich says, medicine crossed its first watershed: a patient began to have “more than a fifty-fifty chance” of being given a specifically effective treatment.² By the mid-fifties it had “passed a second watershed and had itself created new kinds of disease.”³ Those two turning points are the two ticks on our catalogue’s threshold scale.

What matters here is that Illich describes the second watershed as something approached before it is crossed:

The second watershed was approached when the marginal utility of further professionalization declined, at least insofar as it can be expressed in terms of the physical well-being of the largest number of people. The second watershed was superseded when the marginal disutility increased as further monopoly by the medical establishment became an indicator of more suffering for larger numbers of people.

Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 15

Those two sentences mark two points, not one. At the first, each further development of the tool still helps, but less than the step before. At the second, each further step does harm. Between them the tool is still doing good, and still growing, improving, or developing in some way, probably while the scale of its adoption increases.

Unfortunately, it is running out of good to do. That stretch is where I place the incipient stage. Illich does not join the two passages himself; the reading is mine. But it fits his metaphor. A watershed is a ridge: you climb towards it long before rainwater starts to run the other way.

There is a further turn after the margin goes negative. The tool’s total record can still look like a gain for years, because the good it did on the way up is counted along with the harm it does now. Averages hide the margin. By the time the average turns, the margin has been negative for a long time.

Why it is hard to see

Illich gives several reasons, scattered across the books, and they add up to an explanation of why nobody rings the alarm bell in time.

The first is that an institution measures itself. “After the passage of this second watershed, medicine still claimed continued progress, as measured by the new landmarks doctors set for themselves and then reached.”⁴ Progress against your own targets is real progress. It just isn’t evidence that the tool still serves the people it is meant to.⁵

The second is that the harm doesn’t add up. Illich says that “society can have no quantitative standards by which to add up the negative value of illusion, social control, prolonged suffering, loneliness, genetic deterioration, and frustration produced by medical treatment.”⁶ The benefits come in units that can be counted: procedures, graduates, kilometres. The losses come in units that can’t be — or rather, typically aren’t counted.

The third is the deepest. Nobody has to behave badly. In Medical Nemesis Illich contrasts the old goddess with the new. In the ancient world, religious myths “guaranteed disaster to those few who tried to outwit the gods.” Only the rebel “fell prey to Nemesis, the envy of the gods.” Industrial nemesis is different. It is the retribution for “dutiful participation in the technical pursuit of [our collective] dreams.” We’ve all bought into systems defined by their overreach.

In Nemesis, the goddess of limits, I traced how the ancient goddess was lost to modernity as a useful source of restraint. Here the point is practical: when the harm comes from people, tools, institutions, and systems doing what they are supposed to do, there is no villain to watch for. Illich’s own summary of the modern position is that “we act as if these limits did not translate into critical thresholds for human action.”

From incipient harm to paralysis

If the incipient stage is the beginning, paralysis is where it ends. Illich uses the word literally. In Energy and Equity he argued that past a certain speed, transport takes more time from a society than it gives back. Tools for Conviviality puts it in one line: when transportation had passed its second watershed, “vehicles had created more distances than they helped to bridge.”⁷ Medical Nemesis makes it a law: “No new fuel, technology, or public controls can keep the rising mobilization and acceleration of society from producing rising harriedness, programmed paralysis, and inequality.”

The mechanism is radical monopoly: one way of meeting a need crowds out the others until people can no longer meet it by themselves.⁸ A society that cannot move without cars, and cannot move well with them, is paralyzed in the plain sense. Illich extends the word to the mind. The institutionalization of knowledge, he writes, “leads to a paralysis of the moral and political imagination.”⁹ People stop believing they can act without the tool, and so they can’t.

Institutionalization carries the tool across

What moves a tool from one watershed to the next? Illich’s answer in chapter I is an institution that turns past success into a licence. At first, new knowledge is applied to a clearly stated problem. Then “the progress demonstrated in a previous achievement is used as a rationale for the exploitation of society as a whole in the service of a value which is determined and constantly revised by an element of society, by one of its self-certifying professional elites.”¹⁰ In medicine, “more conditions were defined as needing treatment by creating new specializations or paraprofessions to keep the tools under the control of the guild.”¹¹

This is why Illich in Medical Nemesis refuses to blame bad engineering. Nemesis, he says, is “a rampant delusion fostered by the nontechnical, ritual structure of our major industrial institutions.” Late in life he traced that structure back much further, to the fusion of care with the machinery of empire. (I discuss that argument, corruptio optimi pessima, in the section on the corruption of the best in What is counterfoil research?) The incipient stage, on this account, begins when a tool that worked becomes the property of the people who run it, professionalize themselves around it, institutionalize it, and assert ownership of it.

From myth to politics

The Greeks had a myth to warn them. Illich did not think myth could do that work any longer: “Myth alone can do the job no more. Politically established limits to industrial growth will have to take the place of mythological boundaries.” Counterfoil research is his proposal for what should stand where the myth stood. Its job, he says, is to “clarify and dramatize the relationship of people to their tools,” and to “impress on people the existence of any trend that threatens one of the major balances on which life depends.”¹²

Note who that is addressed to. Detecting the incipient stage is not a job Illich gives to experts. Experts are the self-certifying elite whose landmarks hide the slide into corruption and enshittification. The warning has to be public, and it has to be made in terms people can check against their own lives.

The case for people voluntarily cooperating on such a project in their own communities rather than defecting from it in a short-sighted, mercenary self-interest has to be made at a basic cultural level. It can’t be imposed, although public policy can play a role with its stick and carrots.

What this means for the catalogue

On our threshold scale of 0–100, the first watershed is the tick at 30, and the second is the tick at 70. Inside the convivial range between these two points, a tool moves toward the second watershed one tipping balance at a time. Our method calls a balance tipping when the tool “has begun to cause the problem that balance names, without yet going past the limit.” That is the incipient stage in all but name. The upper half of the convivial range (50–70) is where counterfoil research’s first task does its work.¹³

Medicine shows how this plays out. Medicine from 1913 to the 1950s sits at 53, with one balance tipping: radical monopoly, because each new drug deepened dependence on a licensed doctor. Hospital medicine since the 1950s sits at 90. The first record asks when, and by what evidence, medicine crossed the second watershed. Illich’s own wording suggests looking for two dates, not one: when the marginal utility of more professional medicine began to fall, and when the margin turned to harm.

I am not sure our catalogue’s scoring and Illich’s test measure the same thing. The catalogue places a tool on our scale by counting its balances: how many are holding, how many are tipping, and whether any is lost. Illich’s test is marginal. It asks whether each further increment of a tool (one more specialist, one more lane of highway, one more year of school) still adds to the tool’s purpose and value, and whether it adds less than the one before.

The two can come apart. A tool could be tipping on one balance while each addition still pays off. (Think suburban sprawl-based development keeping ahead of infrastructure costs in the short term but eventually being overtaken by massive deficits.) Another could keep all six balances while its returns fall. Our scale would put that second tool at the centre, though by Illich’s test it may be nearing the second watershed. Telling those cases apart may be the most useful thing a record can do.

Open questions

• What evidence shows a tool’s marginal utility falling before any harm is visible? For medicine it would mean spending set against outcomes, year by year.
• Can the people who use a tool see the incipient stage from inside it, or only afterwards? Illich puts the job in public hands, but his own reasons suggest it is hardest to see from there.
• Does every tool pass slowly through this stage, or can a tool cross the second watershed almost as soon as it crosses the first?
• Should a record show the falling margin separately from its tipping balances, and if so, how?

Notes

1. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), 94. ↩︎
2. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 9. ↩︎
3. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 10. ↩︎
4. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 15. ↩︎
5. Goodhart’s Law always applies to institutionalized goals and metrics, too: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Inevitably, people game the systems that assess their organization’s and their own performance, so this sort of internal, wilful self-deception is essentially incentivized, rewarded, amplified, and protected. It can become a culture as disconnected from reality as a cargo cult or authoritarian state, isolated in its own self-protective lies. ↩︎
6. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 15. ↩︎
7. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 15. ↩︎
8. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 64. ↩︎
9. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 103. ↩︎
10. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 16. ↩︎
11. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 11. ↩︎
12. Illich, Tools for Conviviality, 100. ↩︎
13. I try to clarify where the line is between tipping and lost in Holding, tipping, lost. It is a work in progress and an open question. ↩︎