I don’t like writing book reviews. Instead, I prefer to think aloud about a handful of interesting questions that a book raises. This essay was inspired by Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan Illich.
Americans don’t so much mind a monopoly anymore. It’s worth wondering if we ever did. We have strong antitrust laws, developed in a backlash against monopolistic transgressions by industries in the late 19th century. That said, can you name a major company that was gutted by the Sherman Act, the auspiciously-named Clayton Act, or the Federal Trade Commission Act? I’m willing to believe it’s happened, but I can’t. If Amazon doesn’t monopolize e-commerce or cloud hosting; Google, search; Facebook/Instagram, social media, I’m not sure what it would take to trip the mine.
Those are all fun to whine about, but I want to discuss a different kind of monopoly, perhaps more problematic for no other reason than we hardly acknowledge its existence.
Ivan Illich called my attention to it under the term “radical monopoly.” If you’ll allow me to Frankenstein his words together with hopefully a less monstrous result, I’ll let him explain. Ellipses indicate a gross offense of cut-and-paste on my part.
“By radical monopoly I mean a kind of dominance that goes far beyond what the concept of monopoly usually implies… By radical monopoly, I mean the dominance of one type of product rather than the dominance of one brand… Radical monopoly exists where a major tool rules out natural competence. Radical monopoly imposes compulsory consumption and thereby restricts personal autonomy.”
He offers the example of traffic.
“That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive more Chevies than Fords, constitutes radical monopoly… Cars can monopolize traffic. They can shape a city into their image—practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles…They drive wedges of highways into populated areas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remoteness between people that was manufactured for their own sake. This monopoly over land turns space into car fodder.”
We can think of a radical monopoly as existing an order of magnitude higher than the ordinary branded kind. If the notion of motor traffic as a harmful monopoly incenses you, or if it’s hard to imagine a viable alternative, then you have a fine example of why a radical monopoly is problematic. We struggle to even recognize it, and when we do, its deep roots in our lives tend to elicit a shrug and a going-about-our-day.
The point is that obligatory products and services reshape their environments, and those who live in them. You can’t get everything you need on main street in most towns anymore, because motor traffic comes with an expectation that we can travel great distances because we own a car and gas is cheap. The former is almost always true. Only weirdos don’t own cars, because the stubborn determination it takes to meet all your needs without one is beyond most people. What was first a possibility became a convenience, then a necessity.
Upgrade to the Latest Monopoly
Old man rant in 3…2…1…
I don’t own a smartphone. I did. It worked well as a phone, until the forced operating system updates rendered it an expensive brick and I decided to switch to a less-expensive brick that handled calls and texts and otherwise left me alone. I’m not evangelizing for that transition. It has a lot of hassles, beyond what I’ll soon describe. Won’t work for a lot of people, and I truly don’t care what others do. What has to begun to trouble me, though, is the growing sense of a radical monopoly I hadn’t noticed before.
Smartphones are convenient for folks who like them. But at some point, friends, businesses, and even government bodies began to assume that every soul not under 24-hour care had one. It has led to awkward conversations such as this:
Me: Can I take a look a menu?
Poor Guy Who Isn’t Paid Enough to Deal With Me: Sure, just scan this QR code right here.
Me: Can’t. Do you have a paper one?
PGWIPEDWM: Um…sorry, we just use QR codes now because it saves your life and we raise menu prices every week, which makes printing a hassle.
Me: Then recite it for me. Line-by-line.
I expect a certain number of these hassles. Lately, however, I’ve noticed them multiplying, as we near total smartphone saturation. Many websites, including ones I’m required to use for work, require two-factor authentication. (I often fantasize about the inventor of this security measure sitting in his special place in Hell, racing to type in an expiring code to perform every trivial task for all eternity). Dumb phones don’t do this. They also don’t store tickets that have to be purchased through Ticketmaster, which also cannot be shown as screenshots, which means that not only is a smartphone required to attend certain events, but also a data plan or wifi connection—another level of radical monopoly. I’ve had to show PCR test results to enter places on my wife’s phone. I’ve encountered vendors who won’t take card or cash, only Venmo. People who are less-married than myself might bemoan that dating without an app is difficult. It’s not that you can’t still try. But if most people use apps, maybe fewer people are frequenting the situations that people used to rely on for courtship.
On a subtler level, even things like group messages scrape clean their environment. They’re difficult-to-impossible, depending on the dumb phone model, which means us Paw Paws are excluded from those social groups. All societies find ways to exclude weirdos to varying degrees, but usually it stems from cultural taboos, rather than refusal or inability to participate in a part of the consumer economy.
That’s a crucial factor. Many aspects of culture have the same function. People who don’t attend the right church, or those who refuse to participate in hospitality customs, might be shunned. The difference is that cultures arise over long periods of time from shared experiences that have survived the test of time. They aren’t Utopian. All have things to like and dislike. But that broad human context has the capacity to carry with it great beauty and wisdom, especially in the older examples. A culture is a kind of monopoly, but on a still-higher order of magnitude than a radical monopoly. In that sense, some kind of behavioral monopoly is inescapable. But it arises from families, religions, sustenance, play, love, music, and many other things. A radical monopoly, on the other hand, centers around a consumer item, and is shaped as much by the profit margin and available markets as by evolutionary forces that have to take into account all aspects of life.
Radical monopolies are a feature of consumer economies. They’ve been a shifting feature of the landscape for a long time. To the extent that we notice at all, we tend to see the ones that change during our lifetimes. When I first started hemming and hawing over smartphones, I failed to notice that even dumb phones function the same way. The “cell phone” category forced a lot of people off of land lines. Land lines forced out other methods of communicating, whether people chose them or not.
A Brief Survey
Here’s a partial list of potential radical monopolies, and the ways they reshape us. The more something strikes you as “just the way it is,” the more likely it is to qualify. There are always other choices, or there once were.
- Banking – It’s hard to imagine not depositing pay in a bank. Some offices won’t send you a paper check—they insist on direct deposit. But you can’t cash any check without a bank. Depositing your money in a bank is essentially providing an at-call loan to an institution that makes its money by loaning out your money, and hopefully getting it back. There have been enough bank runs in this nation’s brief history to bust that myth. Without a bank account, you can’t buy anything from someone who won’t take cash. Homes are off-limits, and rent can rarely be paid in cash. Cars can only change hands for cash in private sales. We become dependent for basic life functions on institutions that profit off of usury to and from us. They change the ways we exchange all goods and services. Sometimes, we prefer that. Other times, we’re funneled into channels we would prefer to avoid.
- Credit – You can include in this credit scores. I don’t see any problem with someone who wanted to live their entire life free of debt. But if you want to buy a home, rent an apartment, or any number of other things, you need a credit score. That means a person who has no need for a loan has to take out small loans almost every day and pay them off at the end of the month—a credit card. Or to engage in some other practice that leaves a trail of them paying off debt. We see credit scores as something like a virtue, whereas a debt-free life leaves you off the grid in the shady world of cash transactions.
- Salary and wage jobs – Entrepreneurs and others engaged in non-traditional labor arrangements have a hard time navigating the aforementioned home loans, taxes, and other things. They are limited for not punching in at a corporate job, and thus herded towards that behavior. The entire university system, with its rising costs, in founded on supplying these opportunities.
- Home repair – You can’t build you own home even if you know how, or repair certain things without a license, forcing you to outsource work at a high cost. Thus developing home maintenance skills is discouraged for non-professionals.
- Fashion – While this can be cultural, in our case, many trends are driven by marketing campaigns rather than organic tastes, and refusal to join the radical monopoly can result in shunning from certain spheres.
- IDs – The government is entitled to take a census of its people every ten years, but nowhere in the constitution is it allowed to issue mandatory ID cards. In truth, you can get by without one, as long as you have no desire to drive, fly, or use any government services that require a birth certificate, etc. Otherwise, these documents hold a radical monopoly on certifying your selfhood, and we have to make efforts to maintain them. Non-governmental businesses even require you to show them for a number of purposes, most obviously, purchasing alcohol and tobacco.
- News – The obsession with official channels has the effect of rejecting personal experience. It doesn’t matter what you saw, if one of a handful of networks didn’t certify it. This is much more significant than we realize. Our entire context for our world—recent history and likely futures, included—is derived from stories of what happened. When those stories are tightly controlled by fewer entities, we’re forced to share the same past and shuffle to the same future, regardless of what we know and can imagine.
- Video games – How many kids now will choose to go outside and play when a video game is available? Social high performers become selected for button-mashing skills instead of athleticism, exploration, imagination, etc. These capacities are left underdeveloped because kids can be ostracized for non-participation in the same way they used to get bullied for being terrible at sports.
- User interfaces – Canonical styles of user interfaces reshape our attention, direct our action, and associate certain outcomes with certain stimuli. These trends are notoriously exploited by marketing companies, casinos, and others. The prevalence of user interfaces also selects for people who are good at…using user interfaces, a skill unto itself. There are many potential ways of structuring signs in the world, and of interacting with them. Ours are deeply-grooved habits, many of them accidents leftover from the early days of computing.
- Search engines – These change the way we research. I don’t mean to suggest that search engines, or any of the other items on this list, aren’t supremely useful in many regards. Only that they eliminate other modes, and thus choice. You can’t find a card catalog in many libraries. There are potentially many other ways, including ones we haven’t thought of, to index and research information. As it stands, though, you won’t get anywhere without using a search engine. They get to decide how you search (keywords, categories), what comes up first and last, what is worth investigating, and how. Websites optimize themselves for SEO, which means they could potentially have other interesting structures if search happened differently.
- On-demand media – You can resell a CD or a book, but not an MP3 or a digital download. We’ve traded ownership for a revocable “temporary license to experience.” We’re now conditioned to expect what we want right away, instead of waiting until Tuesday at 6:30 pm. How does that affect patience? Few people listen to an album beginning to end, opting for a mixed playlist instead. Bands have to find other ways to make money, because Spotify pays micro-pennies. The musical acts we see are selected for the kind of people who are willing to find a way to make it work in this system (admittedly, there are some trends that excite me in this respect). I’d like to reiterate that not everything is negative. We’re talking about opinions, here. It will always be a mix of pros and cons that differ from person to person. The point is merely to notice how these radical monopolies eliminate some choices, while forcing others on us.
- Social media – The things you have to do to become and remain influential have shifted. Long blusterous writing gives way to shortened tweets, which give way to images, and goofy video clips. Some people will prefer that this is more inclusive, with more voices and more forms than articles and letters to the editor. Others may lament the superficiality of thinking that seems to accompany some of it.
The reader will no doubt be able to come with more examples of things that are forced upon people at the penalty of becoming persona non grata.
What’s There to Do?
You’ll also notice how different radical monopolies wax and wane over time, fading and being replaced by similar ones, or leaving a void for those of a different class altogether. For example, land lines gave way to cell phones, which necessitated smartphones. We can spot a waxing or waning monopoly—and prepare for the problems or opportunities that arise—by asking ourselves whether we face increasing pressure to participate, or a relaxation of an old habit along with budding alternatives.
If radical monopolies are an inescapable feature of our culture, what use is it to complain about them? That’s a valid question. I think I’m driven by this recurring instinct to understand what forces are at work in everything from the individual to the world. I don’t know what it solves to point out a radical monopoly, but I do subscribe to the old saying that awareness is the universal solvent. By seeing things in different lights, different shapes, it suddenly feels possible to differentiate it from the unexamined background and to choose something else.
Finally, it’s worth noting that a radical monopoly isn’t a prison sentence. Many people swear they would love to ditch social media, a smartphone, their bank, driving, a corporate gig, etc., if only it were possible to still share photos of their nieces and nephews while venmoing money from the car on the way to work. In other words, what we claim we can’t avoid is simply a choice. It’s reasonable to choose participation in these monopolies if they bring more benefit than trouble. I play along in a number of them, myself.
But at the end of the day, we structure our lives according to our own wills. If something isn’t working for us, we have no one else to blame—least of all some shadowy cabal that plots a world of QR codes and two-factor identities. Radical monopolies thrive because enough people choose them. We can’t change the structure of cities as determined by the need for automobile infrastructure, but lacking omnipotence is a far cry for being powerless. It’s often possible to carve another way, provided we accept a few limitations, go the long way around, and don’t mind being a weirdo.
Finding another way to live, and living well, is the best antidote to a radical monopoly that we feel has captured too much of our free territory. After all, the natural enemy of any monopoly is simply competition.