Illich isn’t an easy read, but when you get into it, his “second watershed” is basically “jumping the shark,” when an institution - like medicine, or education, or many others, has outgrown its positive contributions to society and started to hurt as much or more than it helps.
Can you identify when the industry you work in crossed Illich’s first and second watersheds?
https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked docs/Illich_Tools_for_Conviviality.pdf
Infosec, everyone got in bed with the advertisers without remembering spyware.
The professionalization of the environmental movement in the 80s and 90s. Once you file off the radical politics and start talking about the triple bottom line, it stops being serious. In the words of Chico Mendes, environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.
Interesting. I, briefly, worked for a man who was in the investor group that was developing Bimini in the Bahamas. They appropriately bribed all the right officials, got all the required permissions, and proceeded to destroy the local underwater ecology in the process of building a bunch of new luxury condos and, incredulously unbelieveably to me, they had plans for a golf course in phase 2 of a 4 phase development plan. They got phase 1 built, killed the local fishing, and the opposition attracted the support of Jean-Michel Cousteau (the son of Jacques Cousteau) and his son, Fabien Cousteau… phase 2 was finally modified to eliminate the golf course.
If you’re worried about the investors losing money, don’t be. They just didn’t make as much profit as they were planning to.