CONCEPT
Learning Webs
Illich's 1971 proposal for peer-to-peer networks connecting learners with teachers, tools, and resources without institutional credentialing—structurally prefigured by the internet and substantially realized, for better and worse, by AI tools that connect users with knowledge on their own terms.
Learning webs were the alternative Illich proposed, in Deschooling Society, to institutional education. The web was peer-to-peer: connecting people who wanted to learn with people who could teach, and both with the tools and resources the learning required, without the mediation of a credentialing institution. It was demand-driven: organized around what the learner wanted to know, not what the institution wanted to teach. It was open: anyone could participate, regardless of prior credentials. It was tool-rich: built around access to the instruments of practice rather than the abstractions of curriculum. When Illich proposed learning webs in 1971, the technological infrastructure that would make them practical at scale did not yet exist. The proposal was dismissed as utopian. It was, rather, prescient.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The internet substantially realized Illich's design. YouTube tutorials, Stack Overflow, open courseware, online communities of practice—these are learning webs in nearly the precise sense Illich