Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)

Why is Ivan Illich so underrated ? He predicted and theorized free software 10 years before it happened in Tools for Conviviality, made the most obvious and needed critic of education and hospitals alone against the Zeitgeist, studied step by step a lot of field of society to find patterns to simplify understanding. He created simple concepts that everyone should know —- counter productivity, vernacular, iaotrogenic, radical monopoly, conviviality, poverty vs. misery etc. He is much more pragmatic than all…

One of Illich's most important ideas was the "Radical Monopoly," using cars in cities as an example, where the car operates as a monopoly technology, dominating what was previously a commons. The only way to rebel against it was to walk and ride bicycles, even though your participation in cities in these modes would be less efficient, higher risk, and generally inferior to that of using a car. And yet, just in the last 25 years people inspired by Illich…

Though he approaches the subject of an attention economy from a somewhat different angle than we're used to, the author, writing in the early 1980s, comes to the conclusion--all the more relevant today than it was in his time--that "computers are doing to communication / what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets."