The vision of the college originates in Ivan Illich’s **‘tools for conviviality’**. All my life I’ve ben a tool-oriented designer (primarily of work practice, and design practice, rather than digital or physical tools directly).
Illich’s vision is highly politicised. It pivots on an opposition, between professionalised and mandatory (frequently state-enforced) forms of knowing, expertise and material or cultural infrastructure on one hand, and ‘vernacular’ forms on the other.
The FLOSS commitment of DigLife has an intrinsic orientation towards ‘vernacular’ capability. But at the same time, I’m not entirely convinced that versions of ‘professionalist’ and even corporate politics of infrastructure-making are entirely absent from movements like DigLife, SEEDS/Hypha, hashchain developments, open data, and FLOSS itself.
I'm not here thinking about classic techbros, who hack away at tech and career, picking up crumbs from Silicon Valley oligarchs' tables. I'm thoinking of genuinely bright and creative people who love the tech.
Why do I have this uncertainly? I’ve spent plenty of time in tech corporations and corporate and design environments - chemical industry (an engineer), telecoms (an organisation developer), silicon manufacturing (a field ethnographer), national systems of innovation (leading a multi-country policy research programme), corporate labs (British Telecom, Xerox PARC). From this I’m very familiar with the aesthetic of ‘incredibly smart guys’ developing tools and infrastructures that ‘will bring change’ or ‘do it right’ - and having a great, exciting time of it . . and settling for mere 'disruptive innovation' . . without being part of the change, or putting the (social, environmental, economic) change right up front, above exciting tech lifestyle and bleeding-edge creative buzz.
I feel this always has to be checked out in any radical movement of tech people. There's a long history, through Fordism and post-Fordism, of tech people lobbying for more fun, status and money, by arguing that their own work is vital for the wellbeing and advancement (= tech advancement) of society. It began with Burnham's 'managerialism' in the early C20, continued thro a Left movement for 'social relations of science' between the two World Wars, and got its payback in the emergence of Big Science and the military-industrial complex after WWII, as Fordism resolved into post-Fordism. The radicals were largely bought off, and the radicalism became new-wave mainstream, rather than surviving as oppositional or alternative 'new' economy and society. See also The intention of tools
The up-front commitment of the college, and the work that’s carrying forward from Robin, is to the empowerment of **civil society** - ‘the mutual sector’. And to the **direct production** of commons and commons stewardship.
This is complicated historical stuff! I can see that DigLife is into this, in one way or another. So I hope we may have things in our respective projects that we can affiliate around. Following the FLOSS mantra - “Rough consensus, and code that runs”? But focused on formacion, not code!