Chaosophy - autonomous learning

It almost appears as though the difference between social technical
machines and desiring-machines were primarily a question of
size, or one of adaptation, desiring-machines being small machines,
or large machines suited to small groups. It is by no means a
problem of gadgets. The current technological trend, which replaces
the thermodynamic priority with a certain priority of information,
is logically accompanied by a reduction in the size of machines. In
another very joyful text, Ivan Illich shows the following: that heavy
machines imply capitalist or despotic relations of production,
involving the dependence, the exploitation, and the powerlessness
of men reduced to the condition of consumers or servants. The
collective ownership of the means ofproduction does not alter anything
in this state of affairs, and merely sustains a Stalinist despotic organization.
Accordingly, Illich puts forward the alternative of everyone's
right to make use of the means of production, in a "convivial society,"
which is to say, a desiring and no Oedipal society. This would
mean the most extensive utilization of machines by the greatest
possible number of people, the proliferation of small machines and
the adaptation of the large machines to small units, the exclusive
sale of machinic components which would have to be assembled by
the users-producers themselves, and the destruction of the specialization
of knowledge and of the professional monopoly. It is quite
obvious that things as different as the monopoly or the specialization
of most areas of medical knowledge, the complicated nature of the
automobile engine, and the monstrous size of machines do not
comply with any technological necessity, but solely with economic
and political imperatives whose aim is to concentrate power or
control in the hands of a ruling class. It is not a dream of a return
to nature when one points out the extreme machinic uselessness of
automobiles in cities, their archaic character in spite of the gadgets
attached to them for show, and the potentially modern character of
the bicycle, in our cities as well as in the Vietnam War. And it is not