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A PROFILE OF IVAN ILLICH

“Illich’s radical anarchist views first became widely known through a set of four books published during the early: Deschooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973), Energy and Equity (1974) , and Medical Nemesis (1976). Tools is the most general statement of Illich’s ideas. The other three volumes expand on examples sketched there in order to critique what he calls “radical monopolies” and “counter productivity” in the technologies of education, energy consumption, and medical treatment. This critique applies equally to both the so-called “developed” and the “developing” worlds, but in different ways to each.”

Illich came to mind during these last few months while I have been learning GNU/Linux (I hate being this purist using this name for it, but I think the underlying GNU ideas and WORK are vital

The reason is that i have this memory from the seventies of Illich philosophy which advocated tools that people could fix. Car engines that one could get into, even valve radios because they were modular. Well, did it work for technology in the world of matter? Perhaps the success of the PC is an example. But in the world of software it is *imperative* to keep access open. When one person fixes something it can be available to all, instantly. Making that impossible is so wrong. It is worse than dumping food while people are starving… information is of a higher order and knowledge could lead to a better world. Dumbing down the world for profit – that is not only MS but all closed software projects. How can this be prevented?

I’d like to revisit Illich on this…

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Evan Williams

 

EVHEAD.. (Unsafe? and redirects to https://ev.medium.com/). Updated.

What’s this?
“This is the personal web site of Evan Williams, president/CEO of Pyra Labs, the creators and operators of Blogger, a web application used to publish, among other things, sites like this (so, you see, this is work!). Here, I write about the Internet, business, blogs, San Francisco, my life, and various other things as they occur to me.”

Thursday, 06 October 2022 Update

updated link above old one dead

https://ev.medium.com/

 

 

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the invisibles

Psychotherapy: Why some people have abandoned it, more from Cliff Bostock:

So, in soulwork, our task is to imagine our way to truth, our calling in the world. The work does not require artistry, only the willingness to engage in the imaginal. The psyche naturally communicates metaphorically and in images (thus the work is often called “psychopoetics”). The imagination places us in the realm of “the invisibles,” to use Hillman’s term, or in mundus imaginalis, to use Henry Corbin’s term. This is the place where our destiny reveals itself — between the literal and the wholly imaginary. In this place, so unfamiliar to most people in our society — and even scorned by much psychology — life speaks clearly to us through the autonomous voice of personified soul.

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Cliff Bostock

Writings
Deiknymena: Erotic revelations in cyberspace

by Cliff Bostock

“But who is imagining in cyberspace?As we surf the Web an apparent random series of images begins to arise that at some level has coherence to the psyche (if we can presume some kind of coherence is necessary to maintain our attention). Any web surfer can verify that this “dialog” can go on for hours. The lived experience is not of incoherence and disassociation. It is instead of fascination and learning. One feels in contact … but with what?

This too is similar to accounts of the mystery cults. One is taken over by the experience – specifically by the “god” in the experience at the center of the cult. Despite the balkanization, the fragmentation into various cults with different contents, the shared experience in all of them is of being overtaken. The same is true in cyberspace. To put it in Marshall McLuhan’s terms: We are re-tribalized (into newsgroups and chat rooms), but the particular content of the tribe doesn’t matter so much. Why? Because the medium itself is the message.
But, again, what is the fundamental quality of the medium – or, as the Greeks might put it, what is the god in the medium? Perhaps, as Ulansey seems to suggest, it is the collective psyche or anima mundi – the “megasynthesis” of matter and thought into a self-reflective colelctive envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin (1959).”

The line “…what is the god in the medium?” interests me here. It is a project of mine – the archetypes of cyberspace.

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