Counterfoil

Research

Systems

Systems thinking and cybernetics, and Illich’s late argument that systems absorb the people who use them.

  • Tools or systems?

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

  • 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.

  • 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.