Counterfoil

Author

Dan Knauss

Dan Knauss Avatar
Dan Knauss is a deprofessionalized academic and a writer of code and poetry in Edmonton, Alberta. He has worked with (mostly WordPress) hosting, product companies, and agencies, where the job usually centred on translating between designers, engineers, and the people who end up using what gets built. Dan has long-running interests in the digital commons, open-source infrastructure, the right to repair, and tools for conviviality. Working in local cooperative institutions, and building civic media projects in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 2000s led him to Ivan Illich and related thinkers concerned with appropriate limits on technology and tools fit for human use.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Tools or systems?

    This catalogue assumes that its subjects are tools and that someone can stand outside them.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Holds, tipping, lost

    How do you tell a balance under pressure from one that has gone? A first test for the catalogue’s scoring, one example of each, and what an outside reviewer found wrong with it.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.