On energetic quanta and frustration

Contradictory motion

He picks the example of the efficiency of transportation. When transportational tools become overefficient—which happens not much beyond the speed of an ordinary bicycle—we net diminishing returns.

Our present tools are engineered to deliver professional energies. Such energies come in quanta. Less than a quantum cannot be delivered. Less than four years of schooling is worse than none. It only defines the former pupil as a dropout. This is equally true in medicine, transportation, and housing, as in agriculture and in the administration of justice. Mechanical transportation is worthwhile only at certain speeds. . . . The planting of new grains is productive only if the acreage and capital of the farmer are beyond a certain size. . . .

In a society where speedy transportation is taken for granted . . . activities related to the use of speedy vehicles by many people in a society occupy an increasing percentage of the time budget of most members of that society, as the speed of the vehicles increases beyond a certain point. Beyond this point the competition of transportation activities with stationary activities becomes fierce, especially competition for the allocation of limited real estate and available energy. This competition seems to grow exponentially with the rise of speed. The time reserved for commuting displaces both work and leisure time. Hence, the speedier vehicles are, the more it becomes important to keep them filled at all times. If they are individual capsules, they tend to become disproportionately costly and scarce. If they are public vehicles, they tend to be large, and run at infrequent intervals or along only a few routes.

I recently encountered these consequences in my daily life. I live in Cambridge, MA, which is a relatively dense urban area where all space is given up to buildings and roads shared by cars, pedestrians, and cyclists. There is no spare real estate, there are no country paths or open fields (perhaps to my chagrin). Because of its density and walkability, is a very livable city, and I find myself wishing I owned a car in only two scenarios. One is when I want to travel outside the city, for example to go skiing. The other, and the subject of my frustration, is when I want to move furniture.

On Facebook Marketplace I found a beautiful, stately desk, listed for free, in Somerville, the neighboring town. It would be probably no more than a 30 or 40 minute walk, all the time on reasonably well-maintained sidewalks and completely safe places. But I cannot carry a desk in my hands; it is too heavy and too big. I might be able to wheel it on a handtruck or a small wagon, but it would be difficult. I would struggle almost constantly as I navigate damaged concrete, tight paths too narrow even to walk abreast another person, and, at this time of year, huge piles of snow, slush, and ice obstructing nearly every curb ramp. This reality makes moving things in Cambridge on foot difficult for the same reason that handicapped persons who use wheelchairs to get around will certainly suffer from the state of Cambridge’s sidewalks. But conviviality, as a lens of analysis, informs us that these realities are a result of tractable phenomena related to the industrial conception of public roads—that our tools are socially determined, and thus subject to reimagining.

Those sidewalks are small and poorly maintained because there is not sufficient economic reason to maintain them. Cars demand more attention and more resources in order to break even on their overefficiency. Were we to make the sidewalks bigger, maintain them better, we would have to allocate precious resources—space, money—away from the cars which depend on them more desperately. A bigger sidewalk, or traffic lights more generous in time to pedestrians, and then cars are slower, their drivers more anxious, and their realized efficiency may dip below the minimal necessary quanta to justify their use. We may, futilely, attempt to rectify the situation in the arena of local politics, but there as everywhere else, tools will remain subservient to the calculated logic of industrial energies, and humans will remain subservient to those tools.

My argument here is not that my dream of moving a desk on a wagon is impossible, but that the entire arrangement of our built environment is inherently antagonistic to endeavors like this—endeavors which I would argue are extremely common and reasonable. As Illich is quick to tell us, people used to travel everywhere on foot, by wagon, or, when the load or distance really demanded it, by small, tough motortrucks. This changed only in the last century. He cites by example the infrastructural developments in Mexico under President Càrdenas in the 1930s.

In exchange for an occasional ride on an upholstered seat in an air-conditioned bus, the common man has lost much of the mobility the old system gave him, without gaining any new freedom. Research done in two typical large states of Mexico—one dominated by deserts, the other by mountains and lush growth–confirms this conclusion. Less than one percent of the population in either state traveled a distance of over fifteen miles in any one hour during 1970. More appropriate pushcarts and bicycles, both motorized when needed, would have presented a technologically much more efficient solution for 99 percent of the population than the vaunted highway development. Such pushcarts could have been built and maintained by people trained on the job, and operated on roadbeds built to Inca standards, yet covered to diminish drag.

Radical Monopoly

So in Mexico, so in the rest of the world, eventually all fell into line under the tyranny of cars, and forced into a certain lifestyle depend on them. The dominance of speedy transportation is an instance of what Illich calls “radical monopoly.”

By “radical monopoly” I mean the dominance of one type of product rather than the dominance of one brand. I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition. . . .

Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city into their image—practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles.

This lens of analysis is one of Illich’s most portable contributions to the field of sociology, to the study of social tools. Instances can be found everywhere, and the framework is useful even if you disagree with his overall thesis.

(Another example, close to my heart, is that of software. The tools involved in the creation of modern software are so complex and inhuman that they can only be used by professionals. So the need for small pieces of software is satisfied only—and insufficiently—by large corporations making software in a one-size-fits-all manner.)

The key point of radical monopoly is not what it provides, but what is excludes.

Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereby restricts personal autonomy. It constitutes a special kind of social control because it is enforced by means of the imposed consumption of a standard product that only large institutions can provide.

In our case, the wagon is the personal tool being obstructed by industrial means. The obstruction is literal in this case—the narrow sidewalks. There is also a legal obstruction; were I to take my wagon on the road I might be cited by a police officer, because it is illegal to use public space in that way. Most interestingly, there is a moral obstruction. In that same scenario of bringing my wagon to the road, I am likely to attract the violent ire of a motorist far before being caught by a police officer. Under radical monopoly we all become militant enforcers and defenders of the system, because we are each threatened by the same artificial scarcity.

Frustration

These claims about the issues with modern transportation are not the typical ones you might hear from transit advocates or cyclists. It is crucial to understand that Illich’s point is not just a critique of the inefficiency of large vehicles in an environmental sense (though he does discuss the wastefulness and pollution of cars), nor in the sense of public versus private transportation. It is better understood as a spiritual complaint.

Even if planes and buses could run as nonpolluting, nondepleting public services, their inhuman velocities would degrade man’s innate mobility and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel.

In fact, modern personnel transport is inefficient not because an individual capsule rather than a cabin is the model for the largest number of vehicles, or because these vehicles are now owned by their drivers. It is inefficient because of the obsessive identification of higher speed with better transport.

There is practical weight to this spiritual frustration: we spent too much time commuting. Even still, were we to find some way to have extremely efficient transportation that reduced commuting time below that of the old ways, I imagine that Illich would still be unhappy with the radical monopoly because of its exclusion of nonindustrial activities.

Reconstruction

Perhaps we can find ways to specialize the tools of transportation so that all human uses may be admitted, at all scales. This would likely require that roads be maintained at a much more granular level than that of the municipality, and it certainly requires that we depose the tyranny of cars. A significant chunk of Illich’s book is dedicated to his thoughts on “convivial reconstruction”—the restructuring of society to move beyond the contradictions and frustrations of existing tools. This reconstruction implicates all of society, not just transportation. The example about fast-moving vehicles is only one part of society in which this problem rears its head. Illich also laments the consequences of overefficiency in general, citing its effect on our perception of the value of time, the creation of time scarcity.

The higher we are on the pyramid, the less likely we are to give up time to simple idleness and to apparently nonproductive pursuits. The joy of listening to the neighborhood finch is easily overshadowed by stereophonic recordings of “Bird Songs of the World,” the walk through the park downgraded by preparations for a packaged bird-watching tour into the jungle.

Today we might recognize this phenomenon in the rampant dissemination of “self-care” advice on social media, packaged and aestheticized and medicalized, designed to give you the most bang for your buck in the contradictory process of slowing down and relaxing.

He makes similar arguments regarding medicine, housing, science, education, and the law. His reimagining has a massive scope, and his thoughts on the practical path to conviviality (in politics, justice, industry, etc.) are numerous and detailed. Perhaps I can write another post about that part of his book, but here my concerns are more specific.

The trade-off

While the analysis of radical monopoly is astute and I find myself often thinking about its manifestations in daily life (as in the example above, which really happened), I do feel that Illich ignores the essential logic of overefficiency because of an overattachment to the ways of old.

One can take a different perspective toward the phenomenon of overefficiency: it is simply the cost of modern life. It is not difficult to argue that we have gained much more mobility and freedom than we had preindustrially, and we get to ride on an upholstered seat in an air-conditioned bus to boot. We trade away some quaint vision of pastoral life, but we gain so much in its place! We are surely better off in a globalized world, with the unprecedented infrastructure of communication (which was to expand dramatically shortly after the publication of Tools for Conviviality) and the diversifying economy, the time and money for leisure, the opportunity to live a totally different life than your ancestors, who were all farmers for thousands of years. And besides, the rate of progress would surely indicate we will overcome the spiritual disadvantages that may ensue, which may, after all, be merely transitory—growth pains.

And as for the cost, and the simpler, non-industrial activities precluded by this system? Instead of moving my furniture by hand, I am compelled, instead, to spend a few dollars consuming an industrial-scale service that will move it for me. And this is better! It will be fast! It will be easier! Why would you want to exert all that effort moving it by hand in the first place?

I do not have a good answer for this, except that I want to. I want to be able to. It seems to me that the mark of a truly advanced civilization is one in which, for all our wonderful and futuristic technology, all our opportunities for sophisticated leisure and great accomplishments, we can still freely choose to push a cart down the road. Build a house with our hands and simple tools. Learn from a book. Take care of a loved one when they are sick. Ride a bicycle. Listen to the sounds of birds. Sit idly, and daydream.

This article is dedicated to my mom, who inspired me to write it.