Research
Watersheds
Illich’s two turning points: where a tool starts to work, and where it starts to work against its purpose.
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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. They apply to systems and tools as well as fish populations. Counterfoil’s tool catalogue…
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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 lost. Let’s look at one example of each and what…
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What is “counterfoil research?”
Ivan Illich used this phrase in four books between 1971 and 1974 but never fully defined it. Read together with the questions this site starts from, Illich’s remarks about counterfoil research concern the public study of how tools and technological…