Six ways industrial values threaten people of the world
(from Tools for Conviviality (1973) by Ivan Illich)
1. Biological Degradation - Overgrowth threaten the right to the fundamental physical environment (which man has evolved with)
The materialization of values trap men within their own artificial creation. The prisoners of their own technologies.
2. Radical Monopoly - Industrialization threatens the right to Convivial works
Radical Monopoly is when a certain type of product has total dominance, contrast to the dominance of a brand in the concept of monopoly. In this case, it means the industrial production is in total control of satisfying human needs, and exclude nonindustrial activities (which can also fulfill the needs.) For example, thirst = canned drinks, move = car, curious = school.
Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereby restrict personal autonomy. It's a kind of special control because it enforce the consumption of standard products that only large institutions can provide.
People have native capacities to satisfy these needs long before the industrialized values transform people to give up these capacities, in exchange for "better" that can be provided only by industrial process. This create radical Scarcity of Personal
3. The overprogramming of man for the new environments dull his creative imagination
Overprogramming occurs when the "balance of learning" is disrupted, shifting from that gained through creative personal action to from programmed institutional training. As society's tools become more specialized and less convivial, they require "highly programmed operators and clients," meaning that individuals learn less from primary experience and more from what others have designed and forced upon them. This transformation turns learning into a scarce, marketed commodity known as "education," which renders people insecure in their own autonomous abilities and dependent on professional instruction for even basic human activities like cooking or courtesy. Ultimately, overprogramming paralyzes the "poetic ability" of individuals to endow the world with their own meaning, reducing them to mere components or "puppets" of a manufactured environment.
4. Polarization - New levels of productivity threaten the right to participatory politics
Polarization is when industrial productivity concentrates the power in the hands of a small professional elite, and destroying the right to participatory politics. Society shifts its focus from individual autonomous action to the consumption and redefining justice as the equal distribution of commodities rather than the equal right of input (to work or shape one’s environment).
5. Enforced obsolescence threatens the right to tradition
Obsolescence force the renewal of products, process and machines for the sake of infinite progress. In order for this process to continue, the system need to generate demand for the "new". New become the most wanted, the privileged, while the "old", the root and normative past, is devalue. This process continue endlessly as consumer chase the never-ending new.
But Illich did not object the innovation and scientific exploration, he argued that the stationary-state economy could also foster innovation by shifting the research towards more Blue skies research rather than power and efficiency driven research.
6. Frustration - The Reversal of Means and Ends
When industrial tools reach a point of "overefficiency" and beyond, it become antagonistic to their original aims, it no longer extends human capability but instead consumes more of a person's time, energy, and freedom than it returns. And thus, frustration arises when human ends become subservient to the tools.