To Hell With Good Intentions, Silicon Valley Edition

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and the moral life. The newsletter takes its name from the work of the late 20th-century social critic, Ivan Illich. He features prominently in my writing, and in this essay I’m revisiting a talk he gave in the late 1960s and reapplying it to the current drive to deploy AI for good. I trust the provocation will be useful, especially to those among you who might professionally identify with this imperative. In truth, I think there’s something in this for all of us, regardless of whether we work in tech or not. May it find its audience.

As it always has, this newsletter operates on a patronage model. The writing is public and supported by those who value it and have the means to become paying subscribers.

On April 20th, 1968, at a small Catholic seminary just outside of Chicago, students gathered for a meeting of the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP). These students were there in preparation to spend their summer as volunteers on service projects in Mexico.

A few weeks earlier in March, a letter had gone out to the participants exclaiming, “Welcome aboard! You’re in for an exciting and profitable trip!” They were assured that the speakers for the gathering would be “top notch,” including a professor from Notre Dame and a representative of the National Council of Churches. But the letter also noted that there would be a “controversial” speaker, “Monsignor Ivan Illich of the Center of Intercultural Documentation [CIDOC] in Mexico.”

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any amount of time, you probably know that Ivan Illich has influenced my own thinking and writing. He is best known for a series of books that came out during the 1970s, which offered radical critiques of industrial age technologies and institutions: Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, and Limits of Medicine.

For the purposes of what follows, all you need to know is that Illich was already known for his trenchant criticism of western-led development projects in Latin America. The UN had declared the 1960s the first Development Decade. It was also the decade the Peace Corps was launched. And, not to be left behind, the Roman Catholic Church had also embarked on a series of similarly intentioned projects in Latin America. This was the broader context for ...