This website presents a collection of articles about convivial tools.

I created this site in early 2007. Over the first six months it evolved towards an encyclopedic format, increasingly aiming for completeness and careful documentation. But this ambition proved difficult to realize, and many of the articles remain insufficiently supplied with footnotes and references.

Towards the end of 2007 I created a similar website, the Convivial Tools Database, with a more informal structure. I planned to gradually move most of the information contained herein to that other website - but even that project got bogged down as my interest turned elsewhere. I’m now resigned to just leaving these two sites up as historical archives.

Convivial Tools according to Ivan Illich

The term "convivial tools" comes from Ivan Illich’s book "Tools for Conviviality," published in 1973.

Illich presented a radical critique of the existing system of industrial tools, which is oriented towards mass production for consumer society. He observed that: "As the power of machines increases, the role of persons decreases to that of mere consumers."

Illich wanted to "invert the present deep structure of tools" and to "give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency." He claimed that "people need new tools to work with rather than tools that work for them." Illich suggested that such tools would enhance a sort of "graceful playfulness" in personal relations, which he summed up by calling such tools "convivial."

Conviviality in and out of Fashion

Illich’s ideas about convivial tools influenced the generation of hardware hackers that first developed personal computers in the 1970s (see for example the article on Lee Felsenstein).

Illich developed a series of social critiques that all hinged on themes of disempowerment of the masses by highly specialized elites. Thus he advocated the need for alternatives to institutionalized schooling, the need for tools that could be controled by their users, and the need for practices of self-healing as a response to the industrialization of medical practice. These thems have gone somewhat out of style. Written in the nineteen-seventies, his books may now seem dated - in part because the some of the solutions he called for have been realised through the development of the personal computer and the internet.

However, the current state of industrial technology is still far from fulfilling the ideal that Illich described. "Convivial tools" remains the term which best expresses the vision of new tools to enhance the "independent efficiency" of their users.

Introductory Articles

Visitors to this site might begin by looking at the following articles:

• Life and works of Ivan Illich
• Ivan Illich and the digital revolution
• Lee Felsenstein and the convivial computer
• The characteristics of convivial tools

See also the Convivial Tools Database

The successor to the present site is the Convivial Tools Database.

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