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Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)

doing to computers what he did to education (De-Schooling Society, 1971), to energy (Energy and Equity, 1974), to medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1975), and to sex roles (Vernacular Gender, 1983). Each time it has been radical analysis that changes our perception of what is really going on.

Japan is looked upon as the capital of electronics; it would be marvellous if it became for the entire world the model of a new politics of self-limitation in the field of communication, which, in my opinion, is henceforth necessary if a people wants to remain self-governing. When today, in Europe, with university students I use the term "commons" (in German Almende or Gemeinheit, in Italian gli usi civici) my listeners immediately think of the eighteenth century. As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice.

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