Research
Research
Reading, evidence, and working notes on tools, limits, and scale.
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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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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 early corruption lies on the road to Illich’s second watershed.…
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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 she returns as a term for the structural, endemic harm…
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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 makes the best brew?
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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.
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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 open source.
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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 Saturday mornings.
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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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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 Illich did with their ideas.
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What would Ivan Illich make of large language models?
Ivan Illich would ask about thresholds, call the hosted language models a radical monopoly, and relate them to the first loudspeaker that ended silence as a commons in a community of equal voices.
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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…
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Limits are a design brief
For tool design, limits and scope are not obstacles to engineer around; they define the most essential features — the ones that will not be included.
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How many people can a tool serve?
Dunbar’s number is contested, but the finding behind it is not: human social capacity is finite and layered. Tools that ignore the layers work against the grain.
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A group is its own worst enemy
Clay Shirky took Wilfred Bion’s study of therapy groups and applied it to software. Groups are a runtime phenomenon, so tools for groups have to plan for how groups fail.
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Small is beautiful, fifty years on
Schumacher and Illich both published books about scale in 1973. Schumacher’s idea of “intermediate technology” adds a complementary test to Illich’s counterfoil research: is a tool capable, yet simple enough for its users to maintain?
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The gift is always being given
Lewis Hyde’s gift economy explains why free software and open protocols last. Gifts gain value by circulating; a tool for convivial tools should be one.
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No mother tongue
Illich grew up with several living languages and said he had no mother tongue. His distinction between learned vernacular speech and a taught, standard language shapes how we understand literacy.