While growth is generally understood as an economic ideology to be addressed by restructuring the economy, Illich saw growth as technological. Beyond a certain tipping point, technology transcends from a tool humans use to satisfy their needs, to end in itself. This “end” is fulfilled by making humans “means” – shaping them to fit the technology. This perspective shapes Illich’s criticism of computing technologies, which contrasts those of many proponents of degrowth who consider open-source and open-access to be potential new commons.

Although there is a tendency for degrowth proponents to ignore or accept immaterial technologies (like schooling or healthcare systems) as necessary or benign, Illich centred these technologies in his critique of growth. He argued that there are technologies that are inherently destructive, regardless of who uses them and how. These “manipulating tools” replace people’s “native capacities”- to travel on foot, to learn, to care for one another, to communicate and to know. The car restructures the city in its image, restricting the (formerly free) movement of pedestrians. The school shapes students to reproduce the system as it is, and prevents students from shaping the school to meet their need to learn. Each human capacity is removed from the autonomy of the individual, professionalised and standardised.

Further, people are “disembodied” as they are integrated into systems, their self-perceptions and subjectivities manipulated to fit. The hospital defines health and disciplines bodies accordingly, and people relinquish their capacity to feel their own health within their bodies and decide what it means to be “healthy”. Cybernetics replace the diversity of face-to-face interaction with abstracted communication, with people as data within a pre-defined digital system. People outsource knowledge to computer systems, and so no longer know themselves and their surroundings directly from their senses. Computing technology does not represent the revival of the commons, but further encroachment on users’ freedom.

Limits to technological growth, then, are needed in defence of “the vernacular” – people’s existing capacity to meet their own needs. These capacities can be enhanced with tools, provided they deemed appropriate upon critical reflection, and are decided upon autonomously from the mind-altering technologies which shape people in their own image.

Read more (paywall/institutional access): Tools for degrowth? Ivan Illich’s critique of technology revisited, Silja Samerski, 2018

Abstract: “Based on the works of Ivan Illich, this article reformulates growth not as the result of a certain economic imperative or ideology, but as a question of technology – namely as a historically unique relation of humans to their instruments. This sheds new light on a key question of degrowth, namely what to limit, and how and why. First, it emphasizes not the ecological, but the social harms of growth, namely the paralyzing and disembodying effects of modern technologies, be they high speed trains, smartphones or health care services… Second, it argues that degrowth, if it does not want to degenerate into an alternative strategy with which to manage scarce resources, has to seek limits to all manipulative tools, be they digital technologies or social technologies. These limits, if they are to be meaningful, cannot be defined by experts or determined by ecological indices, but have to be rooted in the common will to defend a vernacular and convivial sphere against industrial and technological encroachment. Thirdly, based on Ivan Illich’s later work on the way contemporary technologies shape bodily experience, it calls for the cultivation of a technological ascesis, that is a critical distancing from the symbolic effects of mind-boggling tools such as the computer that increasingly shape self-perception and subjectivity…”

We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is thaught in them…

School initiates the Myth of Unending Consumption. This modern myth is grounded in the belief that process inevitably produces something of value and, therefore, production necessarily produces demand. School teaches us that instruction produces learning. The existence of schools produces the demand for schooling. Once we have learned to need school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to other specialized institutions.

Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited, all nonprofessional activity is rendered suspect. In school we are thaught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates.

In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it”, yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

Once a man or woman has accepted the need for school, he or she is easy prey for other institutions. Once young people have allowed their imaginations to be formed by curricular instruction, they are conditioned to institutional planning of every sort. “Instruction” smothers the horizon of their imagination.

“The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.”

“The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society’s time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.”

“Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. The bicycle lifted man’s auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible.”

“Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems.”

Quoted form “Energy and Equity“, Ivan Illich, 1978. The image was found on the website Old Woodies. Previously: Cars, out of the way. More bicycle posts.