Ivan Illich is about to make a come back, if he hasn't already. Much like McLuhan in fact.

I remember liking Illich's work, or at least the ones I had read back when. Deschooling Society, and of course the goat; Tools for Conviviality. Recently due to all the AI related conversations maybe, or extended debates around if tools are neutral or not etc, mostly with people lacking in critical theory background unfortunately, my arguments have been increasingly referencing his work. His and Sherry Turkle's work I have to say.
But why?

In the recent years, I kind of found myself semi-obsessively thinking about what it means to care, to have a relational depth with something/someone/someplace and maintain it at different scales.

It started 4 years ago to be precise.

After this one particularly bad burnout, which coincided with grief and loss of different kinds and lead to a what I can only describe as the most dysregulated nervous system state I have ever experienced in my life. In order to progress with my recovery I had to slow down drastically. This physiological speed-bump allowed me to start reading, getting curious and exercising my brain a bit more again, not immediately but over time, even studying bunch of subjects I never had the time to in the past decade or so. Blessing in disguise I suppose.
I have picked up some new habits too during this "healing" phase, which I never would have thought I would, or could. Like meditation and other contemplative practices rooted in non-western philosophies to balance the otherwise increasingly nihilistic ways of experiencing the act of living.

But back to books; some were self-help-like, some philosophical, some scientific, some academic, some fiction, lots of poetry. Suddenly finding myself devouring page after page was strange. I had not been able to finish a book for many years before this. A stark contrast to my childhood memories of hiding under the thick duvet with my handheld light to read one more chapter instead of sleeping during school nights, driving mom mad. Anyways, I think this paper, "Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence" was what made me really lock onto the idea of care, after all the priming the endless reading enabled during that forced "slow-down".

To be continued...