"In the latter part of his intellectual pilgrimage, Ivan Illich, whose work has deeply shaped my own thinking, concluded that his earlier work was inadequate because he had not yet grasped that somewhere in the mid-20th century we had passed from the age of tools to the age of systems. While to my knowledge Illich never worked out this distinction at length, the difference seems to lie in the fact that we can stand over a tool, as it were, but we cannot stand outside of a system. The system is an environment rather than a singular artifact. And what is at issue is not simply what we are able to do or not to do, nor even what can be done to us. What is most urgently at issue is our perception.
Although still using the language of tools, in 1988 Illich explained, 'I would like to get together a certain number of people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them, to look at how tools shape our mind, how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them.'
Near the end of his life, in the mid-1990s, Illich argued that 'existence in a society that has become a system finds the senses useless precisely because of the very instruments designed for their extension. One is prevented from touching and embracing reality.' It was this 'radical subversion of sensation,' Illich added, 'that humiliates and then replaces perception.' Illich went so far as to claim that 'we submit ourselves to fantastic degradations of image and sound consumption in order to anesthetize the pain resulting from having lost reality.'
You may not be inclined to take as dire a view of our situation as Illich did nearly thirty years ago, but I believe that his prescription is the right one. Just as McLuhan believed that his role as teacher in response to our technological environment was to train new perception, so Illich believed that what was called for was a new asceticism, although, as he put it in a proposal for a research project exploring the history of perception, 'The asceticism which can be practiced at the end of the 20th century is something profoundly different from any previously known.'
'It appears to me that we cannot neglect the disciplined recovery, an asceticism, of a sensual praxis in a society of technogenic mirages,' Illich argued. 'This reclaiming of the senses,' Illich went on to elaborate, 'this promptitude to obey experience [...] seems to me to be the fundamental condition for renouncing that technique which sets up a definitive obstacle to friendship.'
I have always been particularly struck by the line Illich draws from the disciplined training of our perception to friendship. This link is born out by how our digital media environments have constituted not only an epistemic threat but also a threat to our social fabric.
It appears to me, then, that we would do well to take up Illich's unfinished project. At the very least we should dispense with the idea that AI is just a tool we need to learn to use wisely."
- L.M. Sacasas, from "Your AI Is Not a Tool." The Convivial Society Substack, 22 June 2026.
