A Quiet Home

Huts on a mountain pasture by Franz Steinfeld (Austrian, 1787 - 1868) via artvee

Via Robin Rendle’s post Coming home…

Websites have always been tiny mutinies, perfectly designed for rebellion!

Yes, yes they have…

…I then read Mandy Brown’s excellent Coming home, and I must start with the same quote Robin included in his post:

A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.

I did enjoy this small aside, too, as it was me just last week:

I am the fool who opens their damn terminal every time they want to publish; in recent weeks, I have spent a not insignificant number of hours writing some absolutely criminal CSS…the choice to do so suits my own proclivities: a desire to tinker not only with the words but with the strata underneath them.

But before that, she lands on the thing many of us cultivating these independent digital gardens find:

It’s allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given. Not every seed I’ve planted has thrived, of course. But after all these years, some are quite hardy, while others have made some very rich compost…I find myself often amazed by what emerges: not only the seeds I planted but a great many I never anticipated, connections and stories I didn’t see until I was right on top of them, until they were tangled at my feet.

Mandy then explains why she must depose of social media, putting beautiful words¹ around things I think many of us feel deep within. We still feel them, because we still consume social media, despite very smart people like Mike Caulfield warning us about its effects in 2015², who I’d already quoted in the 2016 post I linked to above.

But for some reason, I was reminded of a talk I’d discovered some time ago³ and intended to post about but never did: Silence is a Commons by Ivan Illich. I discovered it here. Illich’s remarks were made at the “Asahi Symposium Science and Man - The computer-managed Society,” Tokyo, Japan, March 21, 1982. When considering the time these words were spoken, and in light of the technologies that have come since, Illich sounds like a prophet.

Clearly you foresee that machines which ape people are tending to encroach on every aspect of people’s lives, and that such machines force people to behave like machines. The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to “communicate” with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.

The machine-like behaviour of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.

Illich describes how common grasslands became “enclosed”, fundamentally changing our societies:

The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order: Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. Enclosure marked a radical change in the attitudes of society towards the environment.

Enclosure has denied the people the right to that kind of environment on which - throughout all of history - the moral economy of survival had been based. Enclosure, once accepted, redefines community. Enclosure underlines the local autonomy of community.

Fundamentally, most citizens’ movements represent a rebellion against this environmentally induced redefinition of people as consumers.

He extends his example to roads (a topic close to my heart), and finally to the loudspeaker that was delivered to his grandparents’ island home of Brač, Croatia.

On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change.

Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete.

…the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.

Then, the conclusion that brings us full circle:

We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.

Such a transformation of the environment from a commons to a productive resource constitutes the most fundamental form of environmental degradation. This degradation has a long history, which coincides with the history of capitalism but can in no way just be reduced to it.

Websites aren’t just tiny mutinies, they are tiny functional anarchies.

After publishing this post, I thought about Monty Python. There are too many Illich quotes appropriate for this meme, but I picked one. Originally posted here.