Autonomy
An annotated collection of 3 books & essays on autonomy, spanning 1962 to 2023. Featuring works by Anthony Burgess, Ivan Illich, Jorge Manrubia — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
A Clockwork Orange
Burgess wrote this novel as a direct assault on behaviourist psychology—specifically the Skinnerian premise that human conduct can be engineered through systematic conditioning, a premise that haunts every persuasive des…
Tools for Conviviality
Illich's argument is that tools — broadly defined, including institutions, technologies and systems — should extend human autonomy rather than reduce it, and that most industrial tools have crossed the threshold where th…
The Radiating Programmer
Manrubia describes a type of engineer who works in the open — sharing context as they go, not in reports but in the texture of how they think aloud. The essay is short and deceptively simple: it names a behaviour that sm…