Trail 2026-10-16 (seventh session)

Budget: 15 fetched pages or 40 tool calls. Orientation: steer, index, research-values, dead-ends, trail-2026-10-11-d, trail-2026-10-12, trail-2026-10-14, philosophy-of-technology.

Thread chosen: steer item 3, the philosophy line on philosophy-of-technology (within thread-convivial-computation), run as its own line and not against hosting. Items 1 and 2 have had four of the last six sessions; item 3 has never been touched. Hornborg is unread by James, so it is the discovery-weighted choice: his claim that machines are a displacement of land and labour across the world-system ("machine fetishism") may be the philosophical form of what the copper trail found empirically (prices kept flat partly by moving extraction to low-wage places). I will look for Hornborg's primary texts and, following the steer's "Illich, then Hornborg", for where Illich's convivial tool came from (forgotten sources at CIDOC).

Hops

Tooling: web_extract is still broken (search-only backend); searches come through the free-tier fallback; there are no PDF or OCR tools on the host. Each hop says whether it was a full read or search text. Searches count as fetches.

1. Expect: Hornborg's own statement of machine fetishism. -> search gave long excerpts of a 2026 Philosophy & Technology paper, the 2020 sociometabolic paper and The Magic of Technology (2023). Pointed to the 2026 paper.
2. Expect: where Illich's convivial tool came from at CIDOC. -> Tools for Conviviality acknowledgments (search text): the ceilings analysis was "first formulated in a Spanish document co-authored by Valentina Borremans and myself" for Chilean socialists at CIDOC. An unrecognised name, so worth following.
3. Expect: the 2026 Hornborg paper in full. -> read in the browser (abstract, conclusion, notes): labour-displacing, not labour-saving; the head/hand split from coinage to Babbage; AI as unequal exchange of embodied information. No positive programme except a pluriverse footnote. Taught me the frame; did not give a design.
4. Expect: Borremans' Guide to Convivial Tools in a catalogue. -> UW-Madison and connexions (search text): LJ Special Report 13, 1979, 112 pp., by "the librarian who founded" CIDOC.
5. Expect: Illich on "research by people". -> search pointed to Ill Will; read in hop 9.
6. Expect: Hornborg's design proposal, since the paper had none. -> the Journal of Political Ecology page was blocked by Anubis; GTI roundtable read in full instead. Surprise: his lever is money, not machines. A UBI paid in a state-issued currency valid only within a radius.
7. Expect: whether special-purpose money has been tried. -> Weaver et al. 2025 editorial, read in the browser: Moneda Par still meets only "low levels" of users' needs after 5 years; supply has to be built; digital platforms risk "new dependence on external techno-elites".
8. Expect: Pieper & Hornborg on AI and "digital immateriality". -> abstract only (Lund portal): data as "lived human time". Single-source, stated.
9. Expect: what the Guide listed. -> no results. Then Ill Will read in full: the Shadow Work passage on "research by people" (no funds, no sponsors, for results that shape one's own living), with the Whole Earth Catalog and Growing Without Schooling as its press; Borremans' Guide as its map.
10. Expect: who Borremans was. -> search text of Illich's preface from a scan held in the cd3wd appropriate-technology library: she came from France in 1961, built four research collections, founded CIDOC as "the inverse of a university", ~18,000 readers, 300+ titles, and closed it in 1976 rather than let it become a university. Surprise.
11. Expect: the Guide's full list. -> downloaded the 115-page scan; it is image-only and there is no OCR on the host. Not read.

Stopped at budget: ~15 fetches/searches.

Hunches (unsourced, not in wiki)

• Hornborg's critique and Illich's meet at one test, which James could apply to his own stack: a tool is convivial only if both its control and its provisioning are within reach. Surplus hardware satisfies the first and only partly the second. This is my synthesis.
• Borremans closing CIDOC "rather than allow it to become one more university" is the only case in the wiki of a community institution ending by its own choice, before absorption. It sits against the farmer mutuals, ENAMI and SNET, which were all absorbed by a standard or parameter. Deliberate closure may be a fourth ending.
• The special-purpose-money finding (currency stalls without local supply) rhymes with ENAMI: a public middle layer is what creates the supply.

End of session

Surprises

• The idea at the centre of James's thesis had a co-author nobody cites. Illich says the "ceilings for industrial growth" analysis behind Tools for Conviviality was first a Spanish document he wrote with Valentina Borremans, for Chilean socialists at CIDOC in 1972. Borremans was the librarian who founded CIDOC as "the inverse of a university", ran it for 18,000 readers, and closed it herself in 1976 rather than let it become a university. In 1979 she compiled a bibliography of convivial tools, which now survives in an appropriate-technology archive. https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked%20docs/Illich_Tools_for_Conviviality.pdf ; http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/cd3wd/1005/_at_410_Guide_to_Convivial_Tools02_83_jf_en_118410_.pdf
• Hornborg's design answer to "machine fetishism" is not a kind of tool. It is a kind of money: a basic income paid in a state-issued currency that can only buy things made within a set radius, because general-purpose money always finds the cheapest distant labour. https://greattransition.org/roundtable/money-alf-hornborg/
• Where that has been tried, it stalls on supply. After five years, Argentina's Moneda Par meets only "low levels" of users' needs, and digital versions risk "new dependence on external techno-elites". https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-025-01712-9

Dead end: the contents of Borremans' Guide to Convivial Tools. The scan is image-only (115 pp.) and there is no OCR on the host. Retry with OCR or a working extract backend. Worth continuing: borremans-guide-convivial-tools-1979. Next hop: OCR the "Sources in tradition" section of the Guide, to see which forgotten tools and traditions the CIDOC circle counted as convivial. Permission to chase: the original Spanish Borremans–Illich document on ceilings for industrial growth (CIDOC Cuaderno, c.1971–72) and what the Chilean participants (Schwember, Diaz Gonzales) did with it under Allende. It crosses Cybersyn-era Chile with the convivial-tool idea. Budget used: ~15 fetches/searches (of 15); ~32 tool calls (of 40).