The Things We Share - by Ben Greenberg - Code and Conduct

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The Things We Share<br>A sewing machine at the library asks what technological abundance is actually for

Ben Greenberg<br>Jun 21, 2026

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A person walks into a library and leaves with a sewing machine.<br>That sentence sounds almost like the opening to a joke, or perhaps a parable. It feels slightly out of place because we are so accustomed to libraries being described in the most narrow way possible: buildings with books in them. The book part is, of course, important. A library without books would be an odd sort of library. Yet, the story making its way around Hacker News this week about Finland's libraries lending out sewing machines and other practical objects reminds us that the deeper function of a library was never merely the storage of printed pages.<br>Code and Conduct is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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A library is a public answer to a moral question.<br>What should a person be able to access simply because they are a member of a community?<br>That question is not limited to books. It applies to knowledge, tools, rooms, internet access, music equipment, children's programming, and apparently, in some places, sewing machines. It is also a question that sits uncomfortably next to much of modern technology culture, because the default posture of technology is increasingly not access, but ownership, subscription, and dependency.<br>If you need to fix a torn piece of clothing, do you need to own a sewing machine? If you want to learn digital design, do you need to pay a monthly fee forever? If you want to build with a media standard, should you have to pay just to read the rules of the format? If you want to participate in the technological world, what is the entry fee?<br>This week also brought another small but meaningful piece of news: SMPTE, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, made its standards freely accessible through its Open Standards Library. Standards are not exactly the sort of thing that dominate dinner conversation. I would not recommend opening a first date by asking someone's opinion on video interoperability, unless you are trying to end the evening early. Yet, standards are the quiet agreements that allow the modern world to function.<br>They are the protocols of cooperation.<br>When standards are hidden behind paywalls, the result is not merely inconvenience. It means that participation is filtered through the ability to pay. A student, an independent developer, a small studio, a researcher, or a person in a country with fewer institutional resources is told, implicitly, that the public language of the field is not entirely public. They may use the world that standards create, but they cannot fully inspect the grammar of that world without paying for the privilege.<br>There is a similar moral question behind the rise of open-source design tools. The existence of an open design tool does not magically solve the economics of software. People need to be paid. Projects need to be maintained. Servers cost money. Documentation does not appear from the heavens, no matter how often people behave as if it does. Yet, the open source instinct begins from an important claim: the tools of creation should not belong only to those already inside the gates.<br>These three items, a sewing machine at a library, free media standards, and open design software, are not the same story. One is civic infrastructure. One is professional governance. One is software. Yet, they rhyme.<br>They ask whether technology is meant to deepen dependence or widen agency.<br>Ivan Illich, the priest and social critic, wrote in Tools for Conviviality that people need tools that allow them to act, create, and participate, rather than tools that render them passive consumers of systems controlled by others. A convivial tool, in Illich's framing, is not merely pleasant or friendly. It is a tool that preserves human agency. It makes a person more capable without making them more captive.<br>A sewing machine borrowed from a library is almost comically literal as an example of a convivial tool. It lets a person make, repair, alter, learn, and experiment. It does not ask them to become a sewing-machine owner as the price of participation. It does not convert a temporary need into a permanent purchase. It says: here is a tool, held in common, for the sake of your capacity.<br>That framing feels increasingly radical.<br>So much of our technological life moves in the opposite direction. We do not buy software so much as rent permission to use it. We do not own media so much as license access to it until a catalog changes, a server shuts down, or a business model evolves. We do not simply use devices. We enter ecosystems. We do not merely adopt tools. We accept accounts, telemetry, upgrades, lock-in, and the subtle redefinition of ordinary human activity as a service...