We are compelled to share our ideas; that is how they come to life. And when we share ideas they multiply and grow, forming a powerfully reinforcing circle. You are not defined simply by what you own. You are also what you share. That should be our credo for the century to come.
It is not the brightest who succeed... Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
We-Think will not spread far nor sustain itself if it is confined to tasks for which people are prepared to volunteer. People must find a way to make their livings from these collaboratives and invest in them. We-think entrepreneurs are consequently desperately searching for viable business models that will allow them to earn some money without turning their backs on community values, while traditional companies are searching for ways to become more open and collaborative. The We-Think gift economy needs to find an accommodation with the market economy in which goods and services have to be paid for. The most exciting business models of the future will be hybrids that blend elements of the company and the community, of commerce and collaboration: open in some respects, closed in others; giving some content away and charging for some services; serving people as consumers and encouraging them, when it is relevant, to become participants.We -Think will gradually change find fundamental aspects of economic life: how we work, consume, innovate, lead and own productive endeavours.
The best way to achieve the insulational state of numbness is to be swamped by routine activities. The old-fashioned superficiality of routine blends seamlessly with the new superficiality, the surface quality of ubiquitous representation -- and this hybrid accelerates constantly, as you take on more and more. Adult busyness is constituted, as we all know, by innumberable things we "have to do." People we have to be nice to, meetings we have to go to, events we have to attend, and, above all, deadlines we have to meet. And, of course, by little interventions of chance, glitches in the flow that you have to deal with as you move from one thing you have to do to the next thing you have to do. The result is a simulation of reality convincing enough to pass for the original, for most of us, most of the time. It is only when the ultimately real descends upon us in the form of tragic accident, illness, death, or a miraculous recovery, the birth of a child -- only then does that simulation stand revealed for what it is.
In a golden period in the 1970s Illich set about dissecting the failings of modern institutions, the professionals who organise them and the systems they design, in a series of short polemics:
Deschooling Society, Limits to Medicine, Disabling Professions and Tools for Conviviality. He argued that as people become dependent on the expert knowledge of professionals they lose faith in their capacity to act. His solution was that people should spend less time as consumers, more as producers of their own well-being. And for that to be possible they need more convivial, easy-to-use tools.
Illich's most optimistic book, Tools for Conviviality, which inspired Felsenstein and others in the hacker community in the 1970s, put the challenge this way:
I believe a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to produce and consume.Convivial institutions work through conversation rather than instruction, through co-creation between users and producers, learners and teachers, rather than delivery from professionals to clients; and through mutual support among peers as much as by means of professional service.
