The Limits and "Good" of Public Goods
Originally written Aug 2021 as The Language of Public Goods. (here's my attempt to put down some thoughts around language/technology, limits/balance, the commons)
Is language itself a public good? We can't easily exclude anyone from learning or communicating in one. Being able to speak it doesn't limit anyone else's access; the whole purpose of it is to speak with others. Nor can we really stop the creation of new slang, variants, or new languages entirely. We might even say that this innate freedom to proclaim and enact new ways of life, starting with language, is what creates culture itself.
While language as a whole may not be excluded, we find ways in which it is flattened. We dampen the complexity of thought through a desire for efficient speech; a uniformity of lingua franca, whether in trade, administration, or religion, crowds out personal variants and local dialects. Schools may enforce a certain kind of proper speech or writing through standardized tests. Every medium of expression can be formalized into its own melody: we learn to intake from a homogenized "news anchor voice", or more recently a YouTuber/TikTok one.
Language can become monotonous even at the level of words. Tech monopolies with enough reach can replace previous verbs; after all to google is to search. Some words such as "progress", "value", and even "life" have transcended all reasonable limits to become plastic words. Their malleable use by those in power expands their connotation (what it implies) so as to lose all denotation (what it refers to). Advertising, corporations, and politicians justify and camouflage their actions with these linguistic ego blocks: Why not go ahead with my strategy? Don’t prevent The Future! Why stop Progress? We are moving forward!
The prevalence of this kind of thought in the tech industry is worth a second look. That software has eaten the world gives a worldview that can't think otherwise, where the idea of inevitability becomes its own self-fulfilling tyranny. "Big tech" cannot wait to internalize every externality into value. "All jobs will be automated", "code is the new literacy", "self-driving is happening", and (tongue-in-cheek or not) "Bitcoin solves this" become our prized proclamations.
"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." - Marshall McLuhan
Why do we think we have the authority, that level of power and control? If we believe the myth that something is bound to happen, we give up our agency to the prophets who tell us so. Why try to bring about (or stop) what will happen anyway? Why think critically about what is actually happening? If neither helping nor hurting the cause doesn't change progress, what is left for us to think, much less do?
If, as Marshall McLuhan says, media (used interchangeably with technology) is an extension of ourselves and creates a whole new environment that we immerse ourselves in, then we need to understand the societal implications of our use of tools. Because technology becomes a part of us, it becomes hard to understand. We take it for granted, as we already do with our own physical bodies.
Whether it's language (as previously mentioned, it extends our inner thoughts) or any other tool, seeing these goods as a form of technology may be a helpful lens to understand their impact on the world, subject to the same kinds of inquiries we’ve had of technologies throughout time, whether it be a physical clock or a digital protocol.
When we uncritically evaluate technology, we tend to treat it as inanimate blocks, standing reserve, inventory in a warehouse simply waiting to be used (recall language as simply interchangeable blocks as opposed to poetry). In contrast, Questions Concerning Technology shows us an alternative beginning, where L.M. Sacasas reminds us of the ethical nature of our artifacts.
The things we create are not neutral. It seems difficult to put the same kind of responsibility on the user of a pencil, a car, a bomb, or an algorithm. But this also means thinking beyond whether something is simply good or bad, and seeing how we live with technology as a two-way relationship and all of its implications. As the saying goes, "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." In what ways does Google Maps change our experience of being human, our experience of time and place, our relationships to people, or even ourselves?
In the 1970s, Ivan Illich was already pamphleteering the social effects of our tools. As a radical, he spent his life determining what he called the "certainties" of our time, our unquestioned assumptions, our sense of reality. Who, if not what, defines it for us?
Many technologies have opened up paths for expression: the printing press for books, Flash for animations, Youtube for videos, Unity for games. But who gets to decide what gets changed in a platform? Even setting aside trust, does anyone really have the ability to balance their goals with their community's input? Platforms given the means, can’t help but act like controlling parents that smother us with love (this is for your own good), acting in some cases more like carpenters than gardeners.
He recognized how computers were already doing this, becoming the root metaphor of existence (inputs and outputs, modular components, zeros and ones), even foreseeing a future self-perception where we would rather change ourselves to match the inputs of our tools than to change the tools themselves: "the new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to 'communicate' with them and with each other on the terms of the machine." What are we giving up by living on another's terms?
"You may not interact with me, nor do I wish to be downloaded by you. I should like very much to talk to you, to stare at the tip of your nose, to embrace you. But to communicate – for that I have no desire"
We use means (tools) to accomplish some end. But one means may become its own end. Illich’s term, radical monopoly, best describes what can happen to tools given power without limit. It means not the domination of any single brand (Tesla), but the social need for the commodity itself (cars). When drinking Sprite to "obey your thirst" becomes more necessary than water. He used this approach to critique such beloved institutions (he considered these tools) as school (Deschooling Society), cars (Energy and Equity), and medicine (Medical Nemesis).
We might say Illich was a paradox: a teacher that disliked compulsory school, a rebel Catholic priest, a critic of cars yet an extensive traveler. But he cared about balance, a constitution of limits. He didn't believe that any of these things were inherently bad on their own, instead he recognized that there was a threshold at which an institution becomes so large (think too big to fail) that it does the opposite of what it intends, it frustrates its own purposes.
This is the way that school turns into a substitute for learning, cars a substitute for walking, the hospital a substitute for healing. Each of those ways are perfectly valid, but they start to harm when they crowd out all other possibilities. These means become counterproductive when they start to believe that there is only one way to accomplish things, namely their own way.
Think about the classic example of induced demand, when those that build the highways believe that traffic can be solved with more lanes. Sacasas explains that this is both an inability to imagine differently but also a moral duty: "What can an institution possibly offer you except more of itself? For example, the one remedy for the problems it has unleashed that Facebook cannot contemplate is suspending operations." Facebook cannot comprehend a metaverse where it isn't the one making connections on your behalf; Google's goal is to think for you by autocompleting your every email, conversation, purchase.
While they begin as augmentations of ourselves, Illich finds that "the institutions of industrial society do just the opposite. As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers."
"The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men."
He discovered the conditions that would allow for this pathological monopoly with using the language of scarcity. Illich desired to unveil the mirage that this scarcity was only caused by a lack of supply (not enough institutional commodities) rather than the excess of manufactured demand. But let's be real. Who could really challenge the issue of unlimited wants with a sense of enoughness? The financialization of the world has long become one of the metaphors we live by, exemplified by phenomena such as the Gamestop short squeeze. Even our alternative systems may not be free of the same problems, or are even leaning into them.
"...if blockchains serve a 'public' today, it is primarily one of decentralized finance. Fundamentally, these tokenholders share only one common object of concern: price."
Should any of us have to think about life in financial terms so much? We minmax our time and space like resources for a side hustle. Desire lines become paved by our investments rather than by our curiosities. There was a time where all my conversations started to end with the thought, "that would make a good podcast".
Can we escape this language of scarcity, of value? The crypto ingroup are known as "tokenholders", while the outgroup are "nocoiners". HR abbreviates humans as resources to be measured, managed, discarded. Even if not explicit, this reductionism becomes the water we swim in, our cultural liturgies.
Follow count, subscribers, page rank, h-index. This reduction is done everywhere: taxi drivers are measured solely by their number of miles driven, students become their grades or even their attendance record. Even in the spiritual realm, faith becomes solely a belief, ritual disappears, the transcendence of a sermon may become a TED talk, covenant community becomes more like a Costco membership.
Programmers aren't immune to this characterization either; they become lines of code on GitHub. The abstraction of the "standardized repo" hides how each repo is maintained (it’s governance, scope, purpose), not least because each one looks the same way. Maybe they are even "open source, not open contribution". A repo can be seen as it’s own city, with its own rules, customs, and language. Traveling to a new physical country comes with an understanding of how different cultures may greet, eat, work, and play differently.
This sort of quantification and objectification comes up as this universal concept of value or utility. For Illich, value has taken over the place of what was known as the good. Value is what can increase indefinitely, has no end. And as we know "stocks only go up". Why not move fast? More is better.
Rather than being the opposite of evil, he uses the language of virtue ethics to describe how what was good had a proper place, a golden mean. Confidence is to tread the middle ground between self-deprecation (too little) and vanity (too much). So he felt that we had lost the language of the good, and thus the language of limits.
So how can our tools balance what we can do for ourselves with what a professional service can do for us? To reiterate, Illich’s suggestion wasn’t to stop using technology entirely, but to voluntarily impose boundaries on our tools. Namely, "tools to work with rather than tools that 'work' for them." These "convivial" tools nurture each person's call to help themselves and their neighbor. Industrial tools end up "deskilling" ourselves; we externalize our "native capacity for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead." This is why he made the case for the disestablishment of compulsory school (akin to the separation of church and state) rather than its abolition, as is commonly misunderstood.
With industrial tools, we aren't able to make use of the use value of our own bodies, maybe to the point our self-perception changes completely. People used to narrate their lives to doctors that listened to their stories. They understood themselves within their own words and lived experience. Now both the system itself and those in it (patients and doctors) have less need to know anything beyond what is precisely measured by instrument, whether in child care or palliative care. Patients come to believe that the main way to understand oneself is by an abstracted notion of themselves, their charts or their risk cohort group.
The unlimited space of the digital has happily incorporated the same kind of alienation while simultaneously being connected to everyone. It masks our sense of the physical; even the nebulous language of the "cloud" that gives the illusion that this cyberspace is disembodied when its very foundation is miles of cables, data centers, and servers. We become creators and yet by our revealed preferences, we feel as if our Googled keywords can know us better than ourselves. We grant algorithms our ability to choose, and increasingly our ability to think. Our innate sense of thirst loses out to an app; maybe we feel better represented as a wilting plant that needs to be hydrated. We become like tamagotchis that desire to be managed. Even our very existence is digitally mediated: losing your phone, getting shadowbanned, or being ghosted is essentially death.
There is a clear pull to automate away all our decision making, whether to a corporation or even the computer. Maybe the myth of technological neutrality hasn’t died. This is pretty clear in some notions of "trustlessness" within crypto and the dreams of "code as law". We see ourselves as entirely subjective and thus biased. Any chance we have to remove ourselves, we take, forgetting that it is precisely our personal commitments that motivate us to make art, create structures, practice science. We outsource to our end.
T.S. Eliot has this to say:
"They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be."
We could easily replace no one will "need to be good" with "need to choose". But it doesn't have to be this way. Vitalik Buterin at least argues that "the goal of crypto was never to remove the need for all trust." He suggests that using multi-sigs or social recovery wallets (which involve people) doesn’t betray the goal of crypto, but "give people access to.. building blocks that give people more choice in whom to trust." In a similar vein, DAOs should refer to the freedom of each party to make decisions rather than a desire to make organizations operated without human control. This at least can suggest a view of living with technology rather than being dominated by it.
Living with technology means sitting limits on the power of our tools, reducing our dependence on industrial commodities. Illich suggests that we need to rediscover what was vernacular, as non-economic ways of thinking and being. Typically referring to local languages and architecture, Illich remixes the term to be a domain that is homemade, and thus within bounds. Like a book dedication, it’s when we create for particular people (that we know by name) rather than the abstraction of a user story, cohort, or "the world". Grandma’s homemade cooking doesn’t necessarily need to be incorporated into the economy as one step on the road to becoming a professional chef. Maybe it’s for no purpose, no views, no revenue. It’s the earlier hacker ethos, a spirit of leisure and play, for no reason at all. For its own sake, on our own terms.
Against this backdrop of the vernacular, Illich asks us to look beyond the modern dichotomy of private and public space (public goods), managed by explicit rules, and towards the commons.
"A commons is not a public space. A commons is a space which is established by custom. It cannot be regulated by law. The law would never be able to give sufficient details to regulate a commons."
To break this mold, he tells the forgotten past of a commons in our own personal space, namely our body. He makes the (kinda gross) point that before things like pesticide, our skin was regularly inhabited with animals. Bed bugs, lice, fleas. It was a "shared" space, and we didn’t think much of it (there was nothing that could be done).
Now we can’t help but think of our skin as this dividing line between ourselves and the outside world, it becomes that much harder to understand a shared commons. The door that separates our private homes from the street represents our buffered, isolated self. But reminiscent of Jane Jacobs' sidewalk life, Illich reminds us that we aren’t necessarily separated by rigid lines. He writes that even our "inhabited hair, belonging at the same time to inside and outside, makes the division more fuzzy".
Let us wish to recoup such a notion of commons. Not seeing ourselves as sovereign individuals or homogeneous components in a global program, but as interdependent members within a body of many parts. That we may share a proverbial table with those around us, in an intimate space where our neighbor’s aura, can assure us we are heard. Maybe it’s there that even our words can find their limits, in silence.
"The first set of tools produces according to abstract plans for men in general; the other set enhances the ability of people to pursue their own goals in their unique way." - Tools for Conviviality
What convivial tools can help us recover these limits: of institutions, of language, of ourselves?
Big thanks to Scott Moore + Public Goods RFP for the initial push to write something, I honestly wouldn't have done so otherwise! Checkout his latest post for similar ideas. And if your curious about Illich, please give L.M. Sacasas a follow.