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- A theme I’ve been teasing out on Medium, a theme that I’ve slowly been trying to find a way to articulate: the tools we build to make our lives better (or more efficient etc), covertly steal the grace from our lives in the name of efficiency. According to the radical theologian, Ivan Illich:
For a hundred years we have tried to make machines work for men and to school men for life in their service. Now it turns out that machines do not “work” and that people cannot be schooled for a life at the service of machines. The hypothesis on which the experiment was built must now be discarded. The hypothesis was that machines can replace slaves. The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men. Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools. The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person’s range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tools that “work” for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves.
2. On numerous occasions, I’ve faced the question (or posed it to myself): why write on the internet if you’re going to complain about the internet? Why bemoan the transformation of our culture and lives using the very tools of that…
