Introduction
A question I have been asking myself for several years now is this: how can the internet, a medium which thrives on materialistic reductionism, context collapse, attention harvesting, and censorship, be reformed so that its power can be leveraged in support of human flourishing instead? In this talk, I hope to present a way to think about engaging with digital communication technologies in a way that safeguards our freedom from the tendency of both governments and corporations in a digital environment to intermediate, manipulate, and extract value from our communication.
My thesis here is quite narrow: there are a few particular digital tools which can be applied in Ivan Illich's terms of "conviviality" to reform the internet in service of human flourishing.
Before I explain what that means though, there are a few general points I think it would be helpful to address.
Let me start by defining my end goal of "human flourishing". This can mean many things to many people, but my inspiration comes from the English folk hero Ned Ludd, who (according to legend) smashed two knitting frames in a fit of passion in 1779. The term "Luddite" is often used as a derogatory term for simple technophobes, but the reality is that the Luddites were not against technology as such, but instead advocated for the use of technology in such a way as to reinforce what Craig Calhoun calls the "moral economy", "a system built around community bonds, local economics and human-scale systems". (Kingsnorth, 280) Human flourishing is the balance of freedom and responsibility in a context of relational belonging.
I also want to give a brief summary of Marshall McLuhan's "media ecology" to frame my argument. It's common to think of tools as moral to the extent that they are used for a particular purpose. But tools are not simply a blank canvas for human intention; rather, tools are designed for a particular purpose, and do not exist in isolation. When a new tool is created, certain values are embedded into its shape, which in turn interact with the pre-existing technological millieu. This complex combination of different tools and the people using them creates an environment in which the use of a given tool is mediated by another.
When evaluating the use of a given tool, we have to keep in mind not the instrumental use of the tool to achive certain ends only, but also the formal way in which that tool - in combination with every other relevant tool or intention - formally shapes us. The ultimate end of a given tool is not the achievement of a particular task, but the modification of the technological environment in which we exist, and which inevitably affects our ability to understand the world, act in it, and assign value.
The adoption of a certain type of tool therefore always creates a certain type of person as a result. This relationship is not always straightforward, and so can be hard to see. But it should be obvious that modern technology has had its part in creating modern man - a materialist, who cares only about quantifiable goods, who is unable to discern the value of good work done well, and who is unable to preserve traditional values and beliefs.
But this is not a one-sided transformation: technique may itself be deployed in a way that cultivates a different kind of person. This is incredibly difficult because of technique's ability to absorb and translate any criticism leveled against it into its own terms - whether as satire, or entertainment - but even Jacques Ellul admits, "if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinanants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinants will be transformed into inevitabilities."
So, what can we do to recover the moral economy in the face of technological progress? Amid the doomerism I have found one ray of hope: Ivan Illich's book Tools for Conviviality. In it, he defines conviviality as "the opposite of industrial productivity", and as "individual freedom realized in personal interdependence". (Illich, 11)
For Illich, the "moral economy" is not merely an ideal irretrievably lost to the past, but one which can be recovered in part through judicious application of technology. He states, "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". (Illich, 22)
With this definition in mind, we can look again at our technological society and see many places where conviviality remains the norm: in mechanics' shops, farmers' markets, forestry, woodworking, fabrication, even certain types of information technology. We can also discern that the use of convivial tools produces a different kind of person from the office worker, burger flipper, or denizen of the assembly line - they tend to be more resourceful, more resilient, more comfortable with risk and better able to manage it, and most relevantly, masters of their tools rather than mastered by them.
The logic of the machine
Before we can propose an agenda of reform by identifying convivial tools in a digital context, it would be good to know first where we stand as regards the problem of our industrial and digital environment.
Jacques Ellul is the authority on this question, and so I will simply borrow his definition of "technique": it "is the translation into action of man's concern to master things by means of reason, to account for what is subconscious, make quantitative what is qualitative, make clear and precise the outlines of nature, take hold of chaos and put order into it".
Technique is a holistic, self-perpetuating paradigm that seeks to collapse all meaning into bare efficiency. Technique is everything central planning wishes it were. It is the governing spirit of an apparently decentralized economy, which converts independent actors to its own values so that they can participate in its quest to optimize away friction in industrial processes for maximum output.
This orientation toward efficiency naturally results in two characteristics that combined describe much of the dysfunction of our time: scale and centralization.
Scale is the growth of an enterprise (or a government) to expand both vertically and horizontally. "Vertical integration" allows for maximally efficient mapping of inputs to outputs, while horizontal growth allows for the suppression of competition and the creation of synergies between differerent types of products. The result of scale is centralization, in which every process is controlled either directly or indirectly by some few powerful actors.
But scale has its own problems. Changing the scale at which an activity occurs results in a qualitative difference in what is actually happening, which introduces complex consequences, fragility, and bureaucratic waste. Illich explains:
To each social environment there corresponds a set of natural scales. This is true for the primary group, for the production unit, for the city, the state, and the organization of men on the globe. To each of these social environments there correspond certain characteristic distances, periods, populations, energy sources, and energy sinks. In each of these dimensions tools that require time periods or spaces or energies much beyond the order of corresponding natural scales are dysfunctional. He continues:
There is a form of malfunction in which growth does not yet tend toward the destruction of life, yet renders a tool antagonistic to its specific aims. Tools, in other words, have an optimal, a tolerable, and a negative range. Changing the scale at which a tool operates can cause it to cross from one of these ranges into another, first negating its benefits, then reversing them.
Illich uses the example of the automobile, which at its "optimal" scale simply gave people the ability to travel farther, in less time. But as infrastructure was built up around the car, we arrived at the "tolerable" scale - a point at which people came to be obligated to travel in order to reach the same kind of destination they once could achieve on foot or at home.
As society crystallized around this scale, people ended up spending more time spent traveling, at a greater cost. Worst of all, we cannot now return to localism, because neither the local community nor the local economy exist any longer. This is the "negative" range.
The result is what Illich calls "radical monopoly". Radical monopoly is a monopoly not just of an industry by a single brand, but of a way of life by a single industry. Illich elaborates:
Radical monopoly exists where a major tool rules out natural competence. Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereby restricts personal autonomy. It constitutes a special kind of social control because it is enforced by means of the imposed consumption of a standard product that only large institutions can provide. Illich cites many other examples of radical monopoly in his book, including medicine, education, undertakers, and law. To that list, I would add the internet.
As an extension of industrial technology, digital technology shares its orientation towards efficiency, but more so. Liberated from the constraints of the physical world, digital technology need not concern itself with material science or structural engineering. Its strength is instead in proliferating, broadening, and amplifying channels for information transfer.
Because it is untethered from all but the most abstract physical limitations, the marginal cost of software naturally approaches zero. This makes for a unique competitive landscape in which the only way to win is to charge nothing. And because inventory costs nothing (at least, in comparison with the scale of the enterprise), internet businesses can scale up indefinitely.
This makes monopoly easier to achieve, and more important to survival than ever before. The problem is the revenue model - if the product is given away for free, how can the business make money?
This problem is frequently solved by lowering prices in order to achieve monopoly, then raising prices once the market has no alternative to turn to. This was the playbook of Uber and AirBnB, companies which create a market, inject themselves into its private transactions, then siphon off revenue in exchange for provided efficiency.
In some cases though, businesses don't have a way to charge fees for their service directly, so they resort instead to extracting value in terms of what Nicholas Carr calls the "hyperreality" - an informational abstraction over reality that displaces reality itself. In it, people are monetized by being reduced to "profiles": abstracted, quantified versions of real people, which are valuable to the extent that they produce two important commodities: engagement, and data.
In this "information economy", the traditional vendor/customer relationship is transformed into one in which software vendors take on the role of brokers who mediate parties in economic transactions or social interactions. This gives them the ability to harvest users' attention and data for whatever use the data brokers' customers might have.
When confronted with the level of access digital platforms have into our lives, it's easy to dismiss the threat because we "have nothing to hide". But it is not the data of an individual that is really valuable, it is the data attributable to a "profile" - a demographic, which can then be targeted with advertisements, social experiments, and political propaganda. This is a tragedy of the commons, in which the complacency of the individual about digital privacy fuels the machine of surveillance captialism.
The data broker business model is anti-convivial. It introduces into economic transactions or social interactions a misaligned third party which intermediates "personal interdependence", subordinating it to industrial productivity. These tools cannot be used for private purposes. And of course, it only gets worse at scale.
In this talk I'm mostly focusing on businesses, but the same can be said of governments as well, either in partnership with businesses, or on their own. Central bank digital currencies are in vogue among developed countries as an effective way to surveil citizens for the purpose of coercing them to behave in a certain way. Corporations' incentive structures not only affect legislation through lobbying, but can also form a bridge for authoritarian policies to cross borders: if a transnational corporation complies in one area, it reduces the barriers in place for compliance in another.
It is clear to me that digital communication technology has exceeded its "optimal" scale by colonizing the internet, and establishing a radical monopoly over communication as a whole. The shape of digital communication as it stands today no longer serves the interests of the people who use it. Rather, just as in an industrial economy people are reduced to "consumers", in a digital economy people are reduced to "sessions", "views", and "clicks". To the extent that we inhabit this digital environment, we are quantified, digested, abstracted, and instrumentalized as fungible grist for ends of the machine.
This was not always the case, and there remain pockets of fun and freedom on the internet that have held out against the advance of surveillance capitalism simply by virtue of being small. With the advent of LLMs, however, even these are quickly disappearing, as their contents are scraped, digested, and used to fuel the chatbots. This, combined with the proliferation of AI-generated "slop" content has caused many people to retreat to "private" digital spaces, known as the "cozyweb". By and large, these places are not immune to the intermediation of the ubiquitous "platform", but they do at least serve as a refuge for people wishing to communicate with a particular, scale-bounded selection of real people.
This revealed preference for privacy, familiarity, and natural scales should be encouraging: people recognize the dysfunctionality of the "open" internet, and want to scale down their online presence. However, while this impulse is healthy, the average internet user isn't equipped to follow this impulse very far.
Digital conviviality
Whether you are equally pessimistic about the purported benefits of the internet doesn't really matter. The reality is that every one of us already lives in its digital environment to some extent. For all of us, it is imperative that we find a way to be "in" the internet, but not "of" it.
This is where digital tools for conviviality come in. Whereas most tools are oriented at making new activities possible or existing activities more efficient, we need a different kind of tool: the kind that says "no". The danger of the digital environment is that it will abridge distances and dissolve distinctions. The tools needed to carve out a habitable space within such a hostile environment will differ greatly from the tools we are used to thinking of as useful.
Here are a few of the attributes of digital communication as it exists that I would like to be able to say "no" to:
- The ability for platforms to intermediate my private communication
- The ability for platforms to "lock in" my usage - thereby monopolizing my attention
- The tendency of digital communication to optimize for my engagement over value provided to me
- The tendency of digital communication to de-contextualize communication, transforming it into "content"
Here are the corresponding "yes"es which digital convivial tools should allow us to say:
- I want my private communication to be only between me and the people it is intended for
- I want to switch platforms without losing my data or the relationships it facilitates (known as credible exit)
- I want to receive real value in exchange for money, not content in exchange for attention and data
- I want my digital communications to enrich, not detract from, real relationships
There are a myriad of tools which support some combination of these values in practical, directed ways: adblockers and privacy browsers reclaim our attention; VPNs protect our privacy against service providers and ISPs; bitcoin's digital scarcity can defend us against capricious monetary policy; various proxy services can obscure our physical addresses, credit card numbers, and more; certain services exist which retroactively clean up our digital footprint.
But I want to focus in particular on two techniques which are fundamental in supporting digital conviviality: open source software, and asymmetric encryption. These tools fit Illich's definition of "conviviality" in that they can be used voluntarily for private ends, but they also go beyond mere conviviality in that they have the potential to subvert the architecture of the corporate internet into one more systematically conducive to individual freedom.
Open source software
Open source software is software (or software protocols - standards that allow multiple programs to talk to each other) that is legally available for anyone to read, use, and modify. All internet standards are necessarily open in some sense, which is why the internet is described as an "open" protocol. Other examples include linux, Blender, VLC, and Firefox.
Openness is a double-edged sword. As Paul Kingsnorth puts it, "'Openness' is both the aim and the core value of the age of globalism". He elaborates:
Open is good, closed is bad. Why? Because closed things can't be harvested, exploited, or transformed in the image of the new world which the machine is building. 'Open' things, on the other hand; well, they're easy prey. This pattern applies to software as well. A tactic used by large software companies to destroy open source competition is known as "embrace, extend, extinguish", in which a large company adopts a project, dedicates massive resources to developing it, then breaks compatibility, leaving their version of the project as the only viable option for users.
At the same time, big companies execute this kind of attack for a reason. Even though openness results in vulnerability, it also empowers its users in ways that proprietary software doesn't. The ability to understand, fix, modify, and compose software projects is a super power - we need look no further than companies like Zapier that exist solely to help people glue different software services together.
Openness is also how God made the world. Most people are used to thinking of technology in terms of power that can be used to achieve political ends. And yet God "makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). Digital tools can be misused, just like the affordances God himself put into creation. But open-source software creates an opportunity for individuals to learn responsibility and competency, in turn transforming its users one interaction at a time into the kind of people who have mastery over their tools, rather than being mastered by them.
Convivial tools as a whole are in fact "open" by definition. Imagine if when your car battery died you had to buy a whole new car, either because you weren't legally allowed to open the hood, or because the car was designed in such a way as to obscure how it actually worked. Every tool usable by a non-expert shares this in common โ it is intelligible. Software is no different.
The idea of open source frequently leads to the idea that you have to read and understand the source code of every program you run in order to do it "right". But this verification can be mediated in a number of ways: reputation is hard to build and easy to destroy; software vendors might choose to align their business model with their users to gain trust; technical friends can be relied on to give reasonable recommendations. It's also possible through the magic of LLMs for non-technical users to create, modify, and evaluate open source software themselves (although I can't claim that LLMs are themselves convivial tools).
Choosing to use open source software (and supporting the developers who build it) is an investment in tools that empower their users rather than extracting value from them. In terms of the four values I mentioned earlier, open source software provides assurance that user privacy is respected; it will never lock you in to a proprietary data format or platform; and it is paid for on a voluntary basis, which means any revenue the developer makes is directly correlated with value received.
To give a concrete example, I own a jailbroken Google Pixel phone, which I bought on eBay instead of buying through my phone carrier. This allows me to run an Android fork called GrapheneOS instead of stock android, which sandboxes all the Google processes and offers ad- and surveillance-free alternatives for many of them, as well as allowing me to remove all the bloatware. I use several alternative app stores like Obtainium, F-Droid, and ZapStore, which promote free and open source apps published directly by the developer, rather than apps that use advertising or surveillance-type business models published with Google's blessing.
Doing this sounds daunting, and it does take some doing, but in the context of the progressive degredation of corporate solutions, the end result is refreshingly clean. And anyway, ease of use can't be our primary goal if we wish to become competent and responsible tool users.
Asymmetric cryptography
Running open source software isn't always possible though. No matter how principled someone is about using open source software on their own devices, they'll still be compelled to use resources provided by unaligned third parties if they want to take advantage of digital communication networks.
This is where my favorite digital tool for conviviality comes in: asymmetric cryptography.
Even in terms of computing, this technique is relatively new. Discovered in 1976 by Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman, it revolutionized the field of cryptography, which until then was exclusively "symmetric" - that is, the same key (a secret number used to convert a message to enciphered text and back) was used to both encode and decode a message.
This is how every cipher has worked for thousands of years - from the Caesar Cipher to the Nazis' Enigma machine. Asymmetric cryptography made it possible for the first time to send an encrypted message to someone without first communicating the key, even if the attacker was listening to the entire exchange.
If the endpoints of a communication channel are secure, encryption makes it possible to use untrusted infrastructure to create a secure bridge between individuals, regardless of how secure the intervening networks are. Because those networks are unlikely to be under the control of the people using them, encryption can be thought of as converting anti-convivial systems into convivial ones.
Asymmetric cryptography also makes possible a concept known as "digital signatures". In contrast to encryption, which reduces the amount of information shared by users, digital signatures instead add additional information to communications - namely, proof that a given message came from a particular person.
This doesn't sound very useful, but it is actually vital for supporting individuals' rights to "credible exit". If a service that stores information is also relied upon to authenticate it (in other words to prove that it was published by a particular person), that information is not portable. As a result, people that rely on access to that information are stuck on that platform.
But if we know the cryptographic identity of the person who published a particular piece of information, we can rely on its digital signature to validate its authorship, regardless of how we get ahold of it.
This matters, because it is social platforms' hold on user-generated content (tweets, emails, blog posts, podcasts, music), which gives them the ability to exploit their users' attention and data without accountability. But if I can use third-party software to either publish or access that content, the platform is demoted from a party with a stake in my activity to a mere hosting service which can be discarded in favor of another.
Unfortunately, in practice asymmetric cryptography has generally been used to protect communications between corporations and governments rather than between individuals. This is a result of its history as a way to secure financial transactions on the internet, which normalized its capture by a hierarchical bureaucracy of certificate issuers.
Even in cases where encryption is commonly used to secure communications between individuals, it usually comes with some important caveats. Any system controlled by a third party can be changed at any time to introduce backdoors, and in practice many "end to end encrypted" systems, like those provided by X, WhatsApp, and Telegram are not designed to protect the user from the service provider itself.
There are two main reasons for this. First, it's simply not in the interest of tech platforms to fully relinquish control over their users' content, in large part due to legal risk. Second, users themselves are accustomed to convenience, and the hardness of cryptography implies a significant trade-off in this area.
There are systems that attempt to give users the benefits of raw encryption, mostly notably PGP by Phil Zimmerman, but they have never reached widespread adoption for these same reasons. In the last few years though, as applied cryptography has matured through the growth (and speculative crash) of numerous cryptocurrencies, encryption and the alternative networking architectures that facilitate its use have been getting more attention.
Digital signatures are also finally getting the attention they deserve as protocols like scuttlebutt, nostr, and many others encourage users to take direct control of their cryptographic identities rather than delegating their management to service providers. In the long run, this technology has the potential to rewire the internet itself so that platforms are forced to be accountable to and aligned with their users.
Conclusion
These are only a few examples of digital tools for conviviality, and there remains significant uncertainty regarding their adoption and potential subversion, particularly by governments hoping to implement authoritarian policies using the internet as a hook. For example, digital signatures rely on cryptographic identities, which is not so far off from the dystopian possibilities of social credit scores. These risks have to be taken seriously if we are to adopt these tools, especially where large scale adoption makes them impossible to opt out of.
Convivial tools are a bottom-up approach to incrementally regaining control over and responsibility for our own lives and communities. They are not a panacea, or a comprehensive system, or a revolution, and that is exactly the point. They make small-scale resistance against the machine just slightly more feasible. But they exist within a dynamic equilibrium, in which reform and capture, centralization and decentralization are in a constant struggle.
To close, I'd like to leave you with a quote from the 1993 Cypherpunk Manifesto, which embodies many of the ideals I've been advocating for here.
We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor's younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.
We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.
We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.