Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality (1973–) [EN, DE]

“Ivan Illich has aroused worldwide attention as a formidable critic of some of society’s most cherished institutions – organized religion, the medical profession, compulsory education for all.

In Tools for Conviviality he carries further his profound questioning of modern industrial society by showing how mass-production technologies are turning people into the accessories of bureaucracies and machines.

Tools for Conviviality was published only two years after Deschooling Society. In this new work Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen. Illich proposed that we should ‘invert the present deep structure of tools’ in order to ‘give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.'”

Publisher Harper & Row, New York, 1973
World Perspective series
SBN 060121386
xxv+110 pages

Reviews: Michael G. Michaelson (New York Times Book Review, 1973), John L. Elias (CrossCurrents, 1974), John Touhey (World Affairs, 1974), Romesh Diwan (Economic & Political Weekly, 1975), Galye Avant (American Political Science Review, 1975).

Tools for Conviviality (English, 1973, 4 MB, added on 2019-10-1; HTML)
Tools for Conviviality (English, 1975, 2 MB, updated on 2019-10-1)
Selbstbegrenzung. Eine politische Kritik der Technik (German, trans. Ylva Eriksson-Kuchenbuch, 1975/1998, added on 2019-10-1)

Fred Turner: From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006)

“In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.

Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2006
ISBN 0226817415, 9780226817415
x+327+16 pages

Review: Samuel Goëta (Questions de communication, 2013, FR).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated 2019-2-25)

Marc Stumpel: The Politics of Social Media. Facebook: Control and Resistance (2010)

This thesis examines the governance of contemporary social media and the potential of resistance. In particular, it sheds light on several cases in which Facebook has met with resistance in its attempt to exercise control. This social networking site has raised concerns over privacy, the constraints of its software, and the exploitation of user-generated content.

By critically analyzing the confrontations over these issues, this thesis aims to provide a framework for thinking about an emerging political field. This thesis argues that discursive processes and (counter)protocological implementations should be regarded as essential political factors in governing the user activities and conditions on large social networking sites.

A discourse analysis unveils how Facebook enacts a recurrent pattern of discursive framing and agenda-setting to support the immediate changes it makes to the platform. It shows how contestation leads to the reconfiguration and retraction of certain software implementations. Furthermore, a software study analyzes how the users are affected by Facebook’s reconfiguration of protocological assemblages. Several tactical media projects are examined in order to demonstrate the mutability of platform’s software.

Keywords: Facebook, Network-making power, Counterpower, Framing, Protocol, Tactical Media, Exploitation, Open-source, Agonistic Pluralism, Neodemocracy

Master thesis
Media Studies (New Media), University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Dr Thomas Poell
Second reader: Dr Geert Lovink
Date: August 16, 2010
82 pages

author

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