The social critic, Ivan Illich, who died in 2002, wrote his most well-known books - 'Tools for Conviviality', 'Deschooling Society', 'Disabling Professions' and 'The Right to Useful Unemployment' - in the 1970's. If these had been written twenty years later it is difficult to imagine that he would not have seized upon the monopolisation and commodification of software and cyberspace to help illustrate his case. His ideas are more relevant today than they have ever been.

Illich coined the term 'convivial' to describe the open society of creative, autonomous and interdependent people that he advocated. This he contrasted with the increasingly dominant industrial society that he saw as dividing humanity into a small elite of 'professionals' who monopolised production and a vast mass of passive dependent consumers and powerless employees.

Computers for conviviality?
In his book 'Tools for Conviviality' (1973), Illich said that: "A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favour of another member's equal freedom" and that "Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production.. ..extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society's members, when it isolates people from each other and locks then into a man-made shell".

To Illich, one essential element to the re-emergence of a convivial society was the re-adoption of technologies with which we can actively work, that enable creativity and social interaction, in preference to technologies that disempower us and that require us to serve them. Thus he favoured telephone networks - which enable active interaction - whilst opposing televisions - which turn the many into the passive spectators of the few.

Today, Illich would almost certainly be advocating the blogosphere and e-groups as networks for the communication of news in preference to the centralised news sites and unidirectional RSS feeds of CNN and the BBC. In the blogosphere we are all reporters and share our news and thereby break free from quiescent consumption of the processed products of news monopolies.

Likewise, Illich preferred bicycles, which can serve the transport needs of all, to cars, which destroy the freedom of cyclists and pedestrians, force the transformation of our cities and lifestyles and turn us all into dependent commuters. Car transport he described as a "radical monopoly" - a mode of transport that limits the freedom of other people and that ultimately takes over completely by destroying our ability to travel by more convivial means. Likewise the formal education system, with its certificates of education and professionally certified purveyors of knowledge, has become a radical monopoly that has disabled the self-taught and rendered them unemployable. Today the omnipresence of Windows software likewise turns the users of open software into outsiders who, for example, are refused technical advice by their ISPs.

The Professionals take over
In "Disabling Professions" (1977), Illich focused upon how realms of human activity are seized upon by self-appointed "professionals" who then control and monopolise it through legislation and so render the purchase of their services unavoidable. The manual and vocational skills that parents once taught their children generation after generation have virtually disappeared in western societies as a result of the radical monopoly of professional education. For generations families have buried their dead (Illich was writing in Mexico) but now they are required to pay high fees to professional undertakers to do this. Even eating is being taken over by the "professionals" - for example members of the Women's Institute are now being prevented from selling their cakes on market stalls because they were baked in uncertified and uninspected kitchens! Where once we cooked for ourselves and our friends we now buy a ready-made pre-packaged meal from a global corporation. Activities in which we once participated - housing, education, transport - have been turned into commodities that we purchase. Even those words have ceased to be verbs describing activities and have become nouns describing products. Nowadays the word 'program' faces the same threat - at one time everyone who wanted to could program their own computer, now for most people a program is a ready-made unmodifiable product that is bought.

The 'professionals' have monopolised software creation. Those who write software for themselves or their friends and colleagues outside the institutional framework are increasingly marginalised. The same accusations as used by the "professionals" in all other arenas are churned out - 'if it was not produced by a professional how can we trust it to work?' and 'why don't you use an official recognised brand instead?'.

Illich points out that 'professionalisation' has not had the unmitigated benefits that its advocates claim. There are many things that an institutional society cannot do as well as the convivial society that it destroys. Universal schooling in institutions rarely results in the passing on of basic life skills and often fails even to impart basic numeracy and literacy after years of education. Despite, or maybe because of, the professionalisation of health and medical care, an increasing proportion (now over 50%) of all illnesses are 'iatrogenic' - ie caused by doctors or medical treatments or caught in hospitals. A brief glance at the number of bugs in Microsoft software or the number of viruses to which it is vulnerable in comparison to open source software is enough to convince anyone that the monopolisation of an activity by professionals does not necessarily raise standards.

The key to countering the creeping professionalisation and institutionalisation of all sectors of life was to re-assert 'the right to useful unemployment' - which was the title of the book he wrote in 1978. I am usefully unemployed in that I work and obtain an income but have no employer that determines what I do or how or when. Prior to the industrial era virtually everyone was usefully unemployed; in a post-industrial era it may again become possible. 'Usefully unemployed' describes equally well the status of most writers of open software in contrast with the programming serfs who so often commute to vast offices to write designated bits of copyrighted, encrypted and branded programs.

Digital deschooling
'Deschooling Society' (1971) argues the case against institutionalised and professionalised 'schooling', in which 'an education' is a pre-packaged commodity to be bought and passively consumed, and advocates instead active participatory learning and co-education. Like other radical educators of the 70's, such as John Holt, he saw conventional education as promoting ignorance and the unquestioning accumulation of facts without understanding or the ability to use this knowledge. Until recently the University was an environment for active learning and the exploration of ideas, now corporate pressure has turned them all into factories for vocational schooling.

Illich's solution is for people to create their own networks to help one another learn outside the schooling system. He suggests the creation of structures and resources that help people to educate themselves, including:

* 'skills exchanges', through which people can offer to pass on their existing skills to others and, in exchange, learn new skills from them.

* 'peer-matching', through which two or more people who wish to learn a subject can get together to help one another learn it.

* directories of educational resources that include everything from small and private libraries, museums and collections to businesses in which one can work as a part-time apprentice to workshops and laboratories and gardens in which the learner can experiment.

Cyberspace: For corporations or for citizens?
It can be seen that whilst some of these suggestions, in their original form, seem dated or impracticable, the internet has enabled viable digital versions of them to appear. Instead of passively memorising chapter after chapter of school textbooks, many students now use the internet to actively seek the knowledge they need. Instead of unquestioningly accepting every 'fact' they are offered, students are faced with a sea of knowledge of varying quality - which alarms the institutional educator but which Illich would have seen as an educational challenge and an opportunity for the active learner to develop discrimination and a questioning attitude.

Specialists who were once dispersed too widely to exchange skills or learn together now find distance no obstacle. Online fora for discussion and co-education are now flourishing beyond Illich's wildest expectation when he wrote this book. Now ideas rapidly flow to and fro between astrophysicists in Latvia and their fellow academics in Polynesia or between human rights campaigners in Peru and their colleagues in New York.

Not only are directories of the world's educational resources available online but the resources themselves are increasingly available to all, for example through Project Gutenberg. Much of the world's non-copyright literature is now available to instantly download for free. Increasingly the world's art and music heritage is also becoming instantly and freely available to all.

Finally, the opportunities for actively participating in the creation of these resources are growing. Instead of pre-printed dictionaries and encyclopaedias, people are turning more and more to resources created collectively by the online community - such as wikipedia. Instead of relying on the mass media and global news agencies for news, more and more people are turning to a diversity of news exchanges such as Indymedia or Reddit or CommonDreams.

It is, however, easy to be entranced by the rapidly growing opportunities for liberation, empowerment and communication provided by the internet, whilst ignoring the countervailing trends. 90% of internet users rely upon the software of a single global corporate monopoly - software that we cannot modify in any way. 90% of us use the same search engine to find all our information. Whilst we obtain news from millions of different sources, 90% of it has been selected by three vast global news agencies. Globally our learning environment has been homogenised to an almost unimaginable degree - whether we live in Australia or Zambia most of us use the same software to access the same online resources and the same news stories and, despite the thousands of participatory alternatives now available to us, most of us in our billions are still spectators, still passively consuming the software, hardware, information and services of a few vast global institutions. Illich's vision has yet to be realised.

Robert Vint