Towards Conviviality

There are times when I read something that resonates with me so deeply that I see it everywhere around me afterwards. Having read Ivan Illich's 1973 book Tools for Conviviality is one of those times.

In the book, Illich describes how the structure of an industrial economy affects the extent to which our tools serve us, with many tools going through two watersheds; one when it solves a problem, and another when it industrialises and scales to the extent that it exacerbates the very problem it was designed to address. A tool passing the second watershed prioritises the pursuit of efficiency, speed, scale, and economic growth at the expense of all else, resulting in a form of counterproductivity. Convivial tools, on the other hand, reach for that first watershed but continue to prioritise autonomy, accessibility, and adaptability. Illich's critique is not anti-technology or science by any stretch, or anti-manufacturing even, but arguably anti-industry and most definitely anti-economic-growth-for-its-own-sake.

Take cars. The car is a machine that allows us to transcend society's reliance on horses, decoupling speed and carrying capacity from the labour of biological bodies. Speed. Time saved. Efficiency. When society scales its production to facilitate a car industry, it exacerbates the problem it was designed to solve. Our spaces are dominated by tarmac roads, concrete car parks, street signs, and motorways. Our conversations are dominated by incidents, traffic laws and status symbols. Urban planning becomes the servant of the car rather than the people who drive it. The car enables a sprawling city. The sprawling city necessitates a car. It creates the commute. Our time is dominated by sitting in traffic, staring at billboards and listening to advertisements on the radio. The most insidious part of all is what Illich called the radical monopoly; we have increasingly little choice about whether to participate in this. If we want to work, buy groceries, visit a hospital, or give our children an education, we are increasingly required to conform to the world of cars. This means participating in the financing, insurance, taxation, servicing, licensing, and fueling of cars. And the job that requires paying for it all. Expertise as fundamental as our personal travel from place to place is outsourced to engineers, manufacturers, salesmen, instructors, examiners, mechanics, and traffic police. Ecology is used as a well-meaning but futile affectation to perpetuate the paradigm; discourse becomes about the greener way to design and fuel cars, without a thought for whether the transportation industry and all its cascading implications are themselves a source of the problem. However fuel efficient it may be, is our lived experience any better if we still spend our lives sitting in traffic? A more convivial alternative, Illich argues, is a Bicycle. Its efficacy is limited by how fast our bodies can pedal. Its fuel to run is essentially the calories we eat. It can operate across a variety of terrains, and the components are widely available, easily self-repairable, and well understood.

Illich extends his arguments beyond tools in the traditional sense to social systems as well. Education is framed no longer as a tool for learning, but as an industrialised tool that seeks to stratify individuals based on their ability to adhere to a rote curriculum. Even healthcare is mentioned as having passed the second watershed, from a system that communicates transformative preventive information, such as handwashing, to a system of outsourced autonomy and medicating by default. These arguments are not anti-expertise per se, but critical of our collective outsourcing to experts. Which I took to mean that we had somehow crossed the line between having a division of labour and simply making markets out of our own ignorance. It was an exhilarating read (if a little flirtatious with a small state, fiercely local, libertarian subtext that at times made me uncomfortable), but it highlighted for me how deeply entrenched some of these attributes are in our lives, and how difficult they can be to unlearn.

I was reminded of a time a few years ago when our old tumble dryer broke. This seems like a bizarre thing to own as I sit here writing this on the hottest June day on record in the UK, but I digress. My dad had offered to help me fix it, and I respectfully agreed, even though I didn't see the point. At the time, I was privileged to be working in a well paying job, so thought it made sense to just buy a new one, and plus I didn't have a clue where to start, so (as I'm ashamed to admit now) that made more sense to me than us or someone else spending hours only to realise it needed replacing anyway. And sure enough, we spent a few hours trying to no avail. But that morning has stayed with me for a few reasons. I got to spend a few hours of quality time chatting with my dad over a cup of tea. I learned about the inner workings of tumble dryers. It felt empowering to slow down and try to think something through. The more efficient thing to do in our society for that situation would be to pay someone to fix it while I continued working. Or buy a new one entirely, which would be great for the economic growth of the manufacturer, the retailer, the delivery driver, and me. But I'd be no closer to understanding tumble dryers. There's no economic growth to be found over a cup of tea with my dad. Trying anyway revealed what I can now call a more convivial outlook on life; one that I've had to relearn in these recent years, and one that my wonderful dad has always had a default intuition for.

Since leaving finance at the end of 2023, I've been in a fortunate position where I have had time to think. Many of the chapters in the books I released hint at some Illichian instincts I didn't have the vocabulary for at the time. In Bits & Pieces, I wrote about how my journey as a freelance composer led me to reflect on the value of transferable skills, mostly because I found the artificial boundaries of job roles baffling. I was the accountant in the room full of creatives, and the creative in the room full of accountants. My love of seeing the connections between those worlds, but less so for the siloed experts, has often been mistaken for imposter syndrome in both rooms. It wasn't. In Brain Dawdling, I reflected on the value of meandering and trying to understand the mechanics of different domains through the lens of life lessons. In Unfill, I documented my journey with minimalism and food. This is where I critique the notions of productivity, efficiency, and busyness as prescriptions for what I consider a life well lived. But as I write about there, minimalism was never about the aesthetics of the lifestyle for me; it was the underlying psychology of rejecting the notion of more. All of these books have a common centre of gravity; they describe technical systems and their impact on my understanding of the human condition. I think this is why Tools for Conviviality resonated so deeply with me. Even my experiences co-founding and developing games at Propulsion Games involved this tension. At my behest, we never once paid for advertising because I didn't want to participate in the endless cycle of growing by paying for attention. Except for a few weeks of experimenting, we didn't participate in social media regularly because the emphasis felt less about connecting with people who would value what we were making and more about forced participation in the endless treadmill of content creation to attract wishlists and appease algorithms that we had no real control over. This may very well have played into our limited audience reach at the end of the day (because it couldn't have been the games themselves, right? Right?), but it felt more genuinely us. Tools for Conviviality is the centre of gravity for me. Uncomfortably so in some respects.