Talking in Circles: Ivan Illich with Henry Zhu

​For the first edition of our Essay Club, Talking in Circles, Henry Zhu will lead us through Ivan Illich’s Hair and the History of the City: a strange and beautiful essay on bodies, cities, surfaces, and the disappearance of the commons.

​Talking in Circles is Aci-d club's occasional reading group. Each session is curated by a guest around something not easily found online.

​Henry Zhu is an open-source maintainer and creative technologist, known for his work on Babel. Henry also maintains a growing online archive of Ivan Illich’s writings.

​Ivan Illich (1926–2002) was an Austrian philosopher, priest, and radical social critic. His work challenged modern systems of schooling, medicine, transportation, and development. He argued such massive, centralized institutions ultimately backfire by creating dependency, disabling personal autonomy, and destroying the natural human capacity to learn, heal, and cope.