2025-10-25 from the editor of ~insom
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I finished "Tools for Conviviality". I should probably pick
up "Small is Beautiful" next. My gut reaction was to
disagree with a lot of it -- because it requires rethinking
like ... the world.
(Some of my summarization of the book, below, is probably
wrong! It wasn't a close academic reading, I was just
curious about the book that inspired Community Memory among
other things)
Without stoking the thoughts that lead to depression it's
hard not to think that we've just built things wrong,
especially if you follow Illich's line of thinking.
He was against rapid transport (the train, the airplane, the
individual automobile) -- arguing that while global
productivity was improved by these things and individual
people can point to things that they like about them (which
is why they were adopted, after all) they have increased
alienation and forced people to be more mobile (because they
_can_ therefore they _should_ and eventually therefore they
_have to_).
This got me thinking about how many small towns are hollowed
out -- you can easily travel to a bigger city for work,
eventually leading to people moving away and taking their
spending money with them -- eventually meaning more and more
people need to move to cities. But cities are expensive and
now you have many more people competing for the same
resources.
In the late 20th and early 21st century this effect happens
on the scale of whole countries. Canada and Ireland (two
countries I have experience with) experienced massive drain
in the late 20th century -- which slowed due to a
combination of those source countries eventually becoming
more pleasant to live in _but also_ the major destination
countries (the USA and UK respectively) becoming less
hospitable to immigrants and their own native-born people
alike.
I'm a life-long fan of the European Union and what it starts
for. I still am, I think, but I've begun to question if the
free flow of money, services, goods and people has actually
been a good thing. Are Irish people better off as 1/27th of
the EU? We have access to a larger market to sell to and to
purchase from.
We can live and work abroad (I moved to the UK when I was 19
and I just ... showed up and filled in a form for an
National Insurance number and that was -- I lived and worked
there for 13 years). I've personally benefitted. But is it
good? When Ireland was more isolated it had more local
industry.
When the generations before me were building the Republic,
electrifying and bringing telephones and TV to the whole
country, they created local expertise. The Irish Electricity
Supply Board consulted (and consults) for other nations
building their grids, including other formerly colonized
countries.
Now, I don't want to make it sound like the ESB was
recreating everything from first principles with a lathe and
some coils of wire -- the ESB's generation facilities have
long been dependant on German engineering companies like
Siemens, and our telephone systems were Ericsson and Alcatel
(but manufactured in Ireland!).
I'm not saying none of this would exist if we had free trade
from the start. But I'm not _not_ saying that. In the 50's
and 60's, Ireland was worried about becoming dependant on
foreign sources of fuel, so they built power generation
fueled by peat; one of our few natural resources. (This is
bad, of course, as stripping Ireland's bogs to burn the peat
is hardly sustainable.)
(I went and looked it up -- about 50% of Ireland's
electricity is from natural gas, and about 50% of that gas
was from a local gas-field -- but that's now depleted and
it's expected 90% of natural gas will be imported by 2030)
Where was I? Idk, man.
I've taken approximately 50 flights in my life, including a
few over the Atlantic; most importantly when I emigrated to
Canada. But do I think that easy access to cheap flights has
been good (for the climate, for improving average levels of
happiness, for the development of individual countries, for
the economic outlook of declining rural places and
less-developed countries)? Probably not.
Global commerce would be worse and more expensive and slower
if we were stuck in the age of sea-shipping, but I think the
important things that can't be made locally would still get
imported and perhaps the less important things that are easy
now but were hard back them would still be made locally.
(And like: do I want to work in a factory? No. But also I
don't want to work in a Tim's drive-thru or in a Best Buy or
a call-center -- the entry level jobs that have replaced
factory work)
