AI Apocalypse Edition
Illich on relinquishing the servitude of machines. Forte, Herzog, Neruda, Perl. Finches in false spring.
You may have noticed that recent advances in large language models have created a new fever pitch over AI. Evangelists and doomers alike intimate that we are on some sort of threshold. It’s even escaped the usual tech-sector hotbox. Financial firms are issuing guidance. Teachers are worrying about plagiarism. Publishers are being overrun. The subculture I wallow amongst most, artists, are by turns panicked, dismissive, and curious about how image generation tools could upend their trade.
I find it a good excuse to return to Ivan Illich, that mischievous provocateur on the subject of tools and their consequences. He wrote “Tools for Conviviality” in 1973 but his ideas seem to fit even more precisely in a culture enamored of algorithms. I’ll link one easily available online chapter for my purposes here—I am not an Illich expert by any means and I think I understand about half of it so the following is just a collection of notes for my own interest and not anything definitive.
What is and is not a convivial tool? Illich begins by defining conviviality. This will help tease out necessary distinctions, notably between tools per se and the systems of thought and behavior (which he calls institutions) in which they are embedded:
People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call “conviviality.”...I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment.
Anti-convivial tools, then, shape their users according to decisions made by others.
His first example starts in an odd place, which makes sense later. He begins with the development of institutionalized education in the Middle Ages. He sees formal schooling as one of the first systematic efforts to commodify human life, abetted by a leap in technology, the printing press. It advanced a model of knowledge that was to be newly centralized, standardized, and dispensed by a caste of authorities.
Like many pre-modern scientists, the men behind it were fervent alchemists, and they conceived of schooling as a sort of alchemical gnosis of rationality. Their rhetoric was egalitarian but like all mystery cults it evolved toward favoring an elect who were to be progressively initiated into higher levels:
The industrial mode of production was first fully rationalized in the manufacture of a new invisible commodity, called “education.” Pedagogy opened a new chapter in the history of the Ars Magna. Education became the search for an alchemic process that would bring forth a new type of man who would fit into an environment created by scientific magic. But no matter how much each generation spent on its schools, it always turned out that the majority of people were certified as unfit for higher grades of enlightenment and had to be discarded as unprepared for the good life in a man-made world.
For Illich this was an early revelation of what he calls “the industrially determined shape of our expectations.” That is, pedagogy was one example of a particular epistemological paradigm that emerged out of the process of industrial modernity, one which understands humans not as autonomous tool-users, but as the tool-like input to be used by systems that exist above and beyond them, ultimately in the service of increasing industrial output and consumption. Which, in ouroboros fashion, they then come to depend on.
This is how “machines enslave men,” despite all intentions to the contrary. Technology was meant to liberate us from servitude and, more importantly, from enslaving others:
In the past, convivial life for some inevitably demanded the servitude of others. Labour efficiency was low before the steel axe, the pump, the bicycle, and the nylon fishing line…The illusion prevailed that the machine was a laboratory-made homunculus, and that it could do our labour instead of slaves. It is now time to correct this mistake and shake off the illusion that men are born to be slaveholders and that the only thing wrong in the past was that not all men could be equally so.
Replacing human slavery with machine slavery only transferred the terms of our slaveholding. We still suffer the degradation of being slavemasters, alienating ourselves and others from labor. We are enslaved by our dependence on our servants, whose operations we barely understand.
Still, the answer is not to reject technology, as tool use is fundamental to our creative humanity. It is to search out the right relation to our tools:
By reducing our expectations of machines, however, we must guard against falling into the equally damaging rejection of all machines as if they were works of the devil.
A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence.
Tool use is not just a matter of economics, labor, or production. It forms the heart of our relationships with each other and the world around us. It is, as Christopher Alexander might say, a language:
Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.
The conviviality of a tool is defined by how readily it allows for and enhances the autonomy and creativity of the tool-user, and the ability to freely exchange the fruits of that creativity with others. The opposite occurs when tools, being controlled by distant owners or designers, use the user for their own ends, funneling their energy and attention through predetermined pathways. Illich calls these “manipulative” tools. Some of this may be ringing a bell.1
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user…They allow the user to express his meaning in action.
It should be clearer now that the sheer complexity or technological advancement of a tool is not the defining factor in its wholesomeness, though higher complexity often tends to create the conditions for centralized and algorithmic control that denude human beings of their agency. High complexity can also be paired with emergent decentralization and personal sovereignty, as one might see in the ethos of the open source software movement.
Likewise, we might conclude that manipulative tools are wholly a consequence of the industrial era, that is, the instantiation of the social and economic power embedded in fossil fuels. But that would be an incomplete reading. This is not primarily a critique of industrial society nor a call to retreat from that society into a naive simulacrum of independence from it. Despite some similar concepts, I think Illich would see the likes of Kaczynski as deeply wrong, not only because of his embrace of murderous violence. Because he represents the mistaken temptation to believe that healing our alienation lies in rejecting a certain stage of tool-development rather than the harder task of grappling with the perennially oppressive nature of social relations of which particular technologies only reflect and give temporal physical form.
Which then helps explain Illich’s strange preoccupation with alchemy and education. Using a medieval example illustrates how manipulatory tool-use is in the first instance a cultural technology embedded within social institutions, and thus predates modernity. Later in his life, he would controversially interpret Christ’s incarnation as a sort of holy revolution against this sort of commodification, instrumentalization, and institutionalization of human relationships, a path for liberation from the relations of mutual domination that have marked humanity from the very beginning.
It is an institutional problem because the structure of the rules governing our tools are what defines the very possibility of conviviality, or the lack thereof. Tool-use, being the way “an individual relates himself in action to his society” cannot escape its social context.
Some institutions are structurally convivial tools…The telephone lets anybody say what he wants to the person of his choice; he can conduct business, express love, or pick a quarrel. It is impossible for bureaucrats to define what people say to each other on the phone.
Thus healthy tool-use must be a highly intentional and communal choice. The battle for conviviality is akin to the perpetual struggle against entropy. Illich gives the prescient example of modern cars (from his 1970s vantage point) becoming increasingly impossible to maintain with simple hand tools. He would not be surprised by vehicles becoming wholly dependent on computerized updates centrally controlled by the manufacturer, or restrictive patenting and global regulatory gatekeeping of seed planting.
Most hand tools lend themselves to convivial use unless they are artificially restricted through some institutional arrangements…This institutional monopoly or manipulation usually constitutes an abuse and changes the nature of the tool as little as the nature of the knife is changed by its abuse for murder.
Again, Illich calls for a balance. Some manipulative institutions are necessary and desirable. He cites centrally-managed infrastructure like railroads or oceangoing tankers as conduits of industrial prosperity whose lack of conviviality can be tolerated—as long as the trade off is properly understood and counter-balancing space for participatory institutions is negotiated and firmly defended:
It is a mistake to believe that all large tools and all centralized production would have to be excluded…What is fundamental to a convivial society is not the total absence of manipulative institutions and addictive goods and services, but the balance between those tools which create the specific demands they are specialized to satisfy and those complementary, enabling tools which foster self-realization.
We may now see a yet clearer parallel here with tools that “create the demands they are specialized to satisfy” and certain contemporary digital technologies. These have their place, Illich seems to be saying, but we must be sure to keep them in their place.
Is it too late for that? I am undecided on how naive Illich’s vision is. As David Chapman helpfully summarizes, AI tools are already interwoven into almost all aspects of life, both online and offline. They are designed and implemented by people no one elected and who cannot be unelected, and those people themselves don’t understand the tools they have unleashed. Some revel in that very ignorance, seeing in the gaps of their understanding the shape of a long-awaited non-human “intelligence,” which mostly reveals they don’t understand human intelligence, either.2 Can such things ever be pulled in a convivial direction, away from their current role as invisible manipulators, surveillers, and propagandizers, which not only make choices for us but sit upstream of our decision-making and decide for us what choices will even be conceivable?
That I leave as an exercise for the reader. It falls to each of us to work out how to defend our autonomy, assuming we value it, in the circumstances that make up our daily lives. Which tools and social institutions of tool-use currently offer you the virtues of mastery, creativity, agency, and right relationship with yourself and others? Which degrade them?
Links.
Love this review from David Maidman on one of my favorite working painters, Felicia Forte, and how she fits into what he calls the postcontemporary revival of representational art. “All tools of depiction—anatomy, perspective, still life, landscape, lighting, color, rendering—they all go in. They are difficult skills to gain, we were once mocked for pursuing them, and they are profoundly expressive tools. The picture should be a heightened simulacrum of the real: the real made meaningful, the invisible truth revealed through the organization and adept depiction of life and matter.”
Herzog on filmmaking.
Forensic investigators conclude that Pablo Neruda’s death was most likely due to poisoning by botulinum neurotoxin.
How painters have gotten shadows wrong for centuries, and what it reveals about the workings of the brain.
Critic Jed Perl on the interplay of freedom, authority, and relevance in the arts.
I think we need to insist on a distinction between authority and authoritarianism. [T]here’s a hint of authoritarianism in Eliot’s dazzling vision of tradition and the individual artist. I’ve come to feel that Eliot sees tradition as much too singular, a unified whole that admits only the very greatest additions—which somehow get dissolved in the whole. (Can you really see Dante and Shakespeare dissolving into a single tradition?) As I see the authority of tradition, it’s a much broader and more heterogeneous phenomenon. I see it in somewhat the way Hannah Arendt defines it, not as a law that’s laid down but as a general agreement about ideas and ideals that evolves over time and that individuals choose to accept. Artistic authority, as I conceive it, is broad as well as deep and anything but monolithic. An artist can approach it and respond to it in any number of ways. It has many doors, rooms, vistas.
Jason Farago on the most extensive Vermeer exhibit in history, one not likely to ever be repeated. “Vermeer has become one of our last defibrillators of absorption and awareness. He matters now precisely for his vindication that we have not wholly decayed into data receptors; that we are still human, and if only we find the right master we can slow down time. What is a masterpiece, in 2023? A thing that returns to you—vitally, commandingly, after this clamorous world of news and notifications seemed to have wiped them out—your powers of concentration.”
The defiance of Salman Rushdie.
In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, the artist gives voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption.
—Cyprian Norwid
Here it’s snowing and wild again after a warm and sunny February. The finches started their singing too early but it was not wasted. Welcome to the party, March.
As ever,
J
Again, artists worry about image generation but the AI that more fundamentally impacts them arrived long ago in the form of recommendation algorithms. Working artists scramble heroically to keep up with the constant, opaque changes to these algorithms. If they don’t, they effectively lose access not only to a potential future audience but to the audience they have already painstakingly built under the promise of a new golden age of digital connection. On Instagram today this primarily means making reels—an entire generation of artists are being unwillingly trained by AI to become video producers. Tomorrow it will be something else. They have become the conduit and the “human resource” by which the AI, which of course they don’t own or have any influence over, reproduces itself. This type of hostage situation is what results from dependence on manipulative tools, which confers at times generous benefits conditional on de facto servitude. Social media was sold as a liberation from the exclusivity and elitism of the gallery system, which it has sometimes been. But in the gallery world, there is at least a bare minumum of competitive pressure and clarity of expectations.
For this latter they can be forgiven—for who does? That is precisely the point.