On entropy and responsibility in the thought of Ivan Illich

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of entropy in Ivan Illich's overall thinking while delivering a dialogue with other authors. Our goals are twofold. First, we aim to point out how Illich's early work is relevant for critically thinking about entropy in its relationship to forms of social organisation and technology usage. Secondly, we point to how Illich's later works consider a planetary responsibility. By gathering matter, energy and information, technology is an ambiguous force of both hominisation and alienation, world-building and world destruction. For an early Illich, liberation from such new heteronomy was possible. The late Illich, however, adverts against the dangers of collective responsibility. The attempt to "save life" is a necrophiliac manipulation, dependent on a planetary extension of Promethean power. Instead, humankind must nurture the return of Epimetheus: a powerless relationship with the future that places hope as the constitutive force of the social fabric