[HN Gopher] Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)
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       Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)
        
       Author : entaloneralie
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2025-07-18 21:21 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.davidtinapple.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.davidtinapple.com)
        
       | profsummergig wrote:
       | Computers could hardly do anything back then. Mostly backend data
       | processing.
       | 
       | Yet this speech could have been written today.
       | 
       | Intriguing.
        
         | ttoinou wrote:
         | Similar to Guy Debord in The Society of Spectacle, what he
         | wrote witnessing the beginning of TV and mass cinema applies
         | for us in 2025, 100 fold
        
       | ttoinou wrote:
       | Why is Ivan Illich so underrated ?
       | 
       | He predicted and theorized free software 10 years before it
       | happened in Tools for Conviviality, made the most obvious and
       | needed critic of education and hospitals alone against the
       | Zeitgeist, studied step by step a lot of field of society to find
       | patterns to simplify understanding.
       | 
       | He created simple concepts that everyone should know --- counter
       | productivity, vernacular, iaotrogenic, radical monopoly,
       | conviviality, poverty vs. misery etc.
       | 
       | He is much more pragmatic than all his leftists colleagues. He
       | might not go very deep in economics but at least he's not a basic
       | marxist. He might not go as deep as Jacques Ellul in his critics
       | of technology, but at least he is very understandable, anyone can
       | be inspired by his books. I read most of Illich writings at 19
       | years old and it stayed with me for years
        
         | taylorlapeyre wrote:
         | I agree with you. Is it perhaps because of his religious
         | background (he was a Catholic priest)? For much of the last
         | couple decades, there has been an anti-religious streak in the
         | educational mainstream universities.
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-18 23:00 UTC)