Tools for Conviviality
Tools for Conviviality is a 1973 book by Ivan Illich about the proper use of technology. It was published only two years after his previous book Deschooling Society. In this new work Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen. He wrote that "[e]lite professional groups … have come to exert a 'radical monopoly' on such basic human activities as health, agriculture, home-building, and learning, leading to a 'war on subsistence' that robs peasant societies of their vital skills and know-how. The result of much economic development is very often not human flourishing but 'modernized poverty', dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-down mechanical parts." Illich proposed that we should "invert the present deep structure of tools" in order to "give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency." The idea of the 'radical monopoly' is also applied to the effects of cars on the urban form, as "speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce." Ivan Illich contributes to a radical critique of modern urbanism: "this monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys the environment for feet and bicycles.
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40% recommend58% neutral2% critical
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What Hacker News says
- Three books.
These two feel especially relevant:
Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher
Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich
and
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows - John Koenig
- This issue is evident to many smart people, and it would behove you to find a few whose conclusions were more prosocial, and sustainable.
One such perspective is Tools for Conviviality, a 1973 book by Ivan Illich.
Your ultimatum is imaginatively anemic.
- I highly recommend Tools for Conviviality, it's extremely poignant and ahead of its time.
- 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 his leftists colleagues. He might not go very deep in economics but at least he’s not a basic marxist. He might not go as deep as Jacques Ellul in his critics of technology, but at least he is very understandable, anyone can be inspired by his books. I read most of Illich writings at 19 years old and it stayed with me for years
- Tools for Conviviality is insanely relevant today.
When I was reading it I just couldn't believe it was written in 1973. So ahead of its time.
- Don't overlook books that are critical of engineering as it is often practiced and how it fits into our society:
Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum (1976). Weizenbaum wrote Eliza, the first AI chatbot, almost sixty years ago and was appalled at the reception. This book is still very pertinent, especially the Introduction, Chapter 1 On Tools, chapter 9, Incomprehensible Programs, and chapter 10, Against the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason. Chapter 4, Science and the Compulsive Programmer, is one of the first written accounts of the hacker culture.
Weizenbaum's original paper on Eliza (1966) [0] is still very pertinent to the present generation of chatbots, especially the introduction and discussion.
Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich (1973) [1]. Influenced recent work by the computer scientists Steven Kell [2],[3] and Kartik Agaram [4].
Computation and Human Experience, Phil Agre (1997) (excerpt at [5]). Agre got a PhD in AI at MIT in the 80s and 90s and became very critical of the field. I think his shorter writings [6][7] are a better introduction, especially the personal memoir at [6]: "about how I became (relatively speaking, and in a small way) a better person through philosophy."
0. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168
1. http://akkartik.name/illich.pdf
2. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/talks/kell19de-es...
3. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/talks/kell19softw...
4. http://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200607.pdf
5. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/che-intro.html
6. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/notes/00-7-12.html
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