A pattern perhaps common to many technology waves is innovation followed by ossification or enshittification, as coined by Cory Doctorow. Technology does appear to have a pattern of diminishing returns. You can see that in public health. Early stunning victories over infectious diseases giving way to nagging lifestyle tweaks. The progress of information technology might be mapped similarly. Early society shaking inventions gives way to monopoly. Unlike mere diminishing returns enshittification is where we end up in a worse place quite expectedly, as it is written into the business plan. Platform enshittification is corrosive, monopolistic and draining technology of its potential to make human life more joyful and fulfilling.
Examples abound: An electric car manufacturer makes its reputation through its product than finds it can make serious money selling carbon credits. Its business then becomes one of subsidy farming and attention getting, not building cars. Worse , In the 90s/aughts mobile phone companies were so stuck for money making ideas that people paid their network for ringtones. It was truly the worst of times. That kind of rent seeking and planted obsolescence have ere been present in capitalism.
Platform effects introduce two new problems, disconnection and degradation of know-how. The Chinese have a penchant for life shaped by fortune telling. Deepseek has now consumed that, replacing human connection with machine dependence. A ride share service uses venture capital funding to provide below cost services to monopolize taxi services. In the process it destroys local tacit knowledge. In the case of London cabbies, literally ‘The Knowledge’. The Knowledge means more than just memorizing streets 6 miles around Charing Cross. It is knowing how traffic ebbs and flows , where popular spots are and why. Deep knowing .
Krugman posits that it is not just bad luck. Any business reliant on network effects will succumb to the logic of enshittification. It is the destruction of that know-how and connection which is most concerning. It destroys our ability to recover and reinvent these services. Personal, economic and social resilience come from connection and having enough folk willing to gie it laldy. Loss of resilience worries me. I found the covid lockdowns wildly disproportionate and damaging. Depriving a generation of human contact in a vital life stage was wicked. Rather than assess costs and benefits we were just bashed over the head with the weasely, meaning-free ‘follow the science’ (Ts & Cs apply , in case of political awkwardness or identity politics, please no longer follow the science). The more networked we are, the less connected we become.
Is there a counter-pole to rally for? Writing in the 1970s, the last half-decent decade on account of disco, all-round critic of industrial society Ivan Illich called for tools for conviviality. Illich’s convivial tools may offer a way out of enshittification. His critique of technology stood alongside criticism of education and medicine as institutions. He was damning of tools of separation, of caste-making.
He is baleful of industrial power’s mechanisation of the human. Tools became alienating. Labour becomes torturous. Productivity does not beget freedom. He is hostile to tools that depend on scaling, on tendentious claims of quantity and quantifiability, and to compulsory consumption of education, health, vaccination. Medical professionalisation and specialisation separated family members from care. He favours flat connectivity. He cited the telephone as a case of convivial technology. Connect and say what you want, no mediation. Illich might say that social app networks are likewise manipulatory not convivial. They create new castes like verified /unverified.
The book is Khmer Rouge-y in favouring simple hand tools. It has an underlying sympathy with Third World rural poverty. He was very critical of the Green Revolution. You might want to spend your days bent over in a rice paddy. I am sticking with me combine harvester. I find his point of view to be scornful of the generational efforts required to get us to a position where people worry about too much growth, where the Third World has more of a problem with obesity than with malnutrition. This is critique with a full belly. Like many at the time he overcooked environmental limits and underestimated human productivity. Environmental pessimism has been a constant since Malthus and typically overcome in time. We were meant to run out of oil and food in every decade since the 1970s. Now the problem is we have too much of the stuff. The impressive strides towards making solar power abundant may save us yet .
You can favour tech autonomy without going full prepper. What is the way out ? How about some pointers. “I choose the term “ conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment.” (Illich, 1973, p. 36).
Overall tools that enable autonomy can counter platforms that shrivel autonomy. Adapting his terms I am defining convivial tools for the information age. They should have the following qualities:
- Distributed to the lowest level possible, like a household level solar grid .
- Maintainable, infrastructure independent and resilient, like a bicycle .
- Allow the wielder to shape their world, give it meaning and used purposefully,
- Its elements can be repurposed
- Resists manipulation, avoiding staging, programming and classifying users
- De- professionalising – no brahmin caste
- Are risky – Failure is possible
- They have a modest purpose and expectation. They will not solve everything. Minimal ideological alignment needed .
In sum everything the prevailing business model and safety /nofail culture is not . But the model might place extra hidden demands on people or only be accessible to a few. It is why I am not just saying ‘go open source.’
One of the problems with attempts to remodel digital life on autonomy promoting lines is they are often high effort and the only people willing to make the effort are, and I say with the deepest love, just a tad intense. It is why attempt to create platform equivalents such as the fediverse have limited effect. It is like a party where everyone is pretending to be drunk. Something is missing and a little forced. They invite you to be part of a movement. I do not want to make a whole life commitment . Hence the rule that the tools we seek ask minimal ideological alignment. You can think Musk is messiah or muppet as you please.
Funnily, the hated apps can generate convivialities. Uber in South Africa quite unintentionally provides a vital trust function. It validates people to each other, allowing them to set up communication outside the app. The Jo’burg taxi monopoly was nothing good either. So I am not proposing to burn it all doon. We can perhaps take a little more time in the sun and have less digital weight pressing on us.
Seeking the practical embodiment of conviviality I looked at different places . Chinese organic chicken farmers using blockchains to validate and sell produce is connection promoting at the lowest possible level. It is one of the only effective uses of the blockchain I have seen. Next an activity core to my work, analysis of qualitative data. I use Nvivo for qualitative data analysis. I have been entirely unthinking about the choice. Nvivo is custom designed for qualitative data analysis and it is just ‘there ‘. It has a serious learning curve, demands you use its language, employs a proprietary format, and now features bewildering licensing. It is heavy. Slower than the speed of thought. It does some things well such as search/autocoding.
Recently I have been using an app called Obsidian for drafting . It is just a note taking app that allows you to link notes and visualize links between them or between text blocks . It is extensible, and uses the open markdown format. I thought I would experiment using it for data analysis. Treat each note as a case and install the Quadro plugin by Chris Grieser and pretty soon you have a theory building instrument. I import just by adding to a folder on my desktop , or getting a script to do that. Data can be dropped in automatically in many formats. I can add my daily summaries of the news on organized crime, or an auto generated interview transcript. It is a tool you shape in the using, that grows with you. You can for example create a presentation within it.
Conviviality means feasting together. Convivial tools are resilient . They are less brittle, infrastructure dependent and prone to being wiped out by a software update or license change. Markdown notes will survive the failure of a licensing server. Convivial technology requires some assembly but ultimately make life lighter and freer, pushing us on and giving us a chance to break the enshittification cycle. The tools have to be used and cultivated. You will not have to use a hoe. We use gentle experimentation to build resilient technologies that leave us lighter and able to resist the dark pull of the less-than-human.
Read on:
Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row New York.
