Research
Essays
Reflections on tools, limits, and counterfoil research.
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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, iatrogenesis, nemesis: what Illich meant by each, and the named laws, from road congestion to software, that describe the same pattern.
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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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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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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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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.