Towards Conviviality

Lately, I've been thinking about tumble dryers.

In the 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, Ivan 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 not much economic growth to be found over a cup of tea at home 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 from articles written on another site over the last few years, 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 who view so-called generalists as lesser than, 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 unending more for its own sake. 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 felt like that centre of gravity for me. With hindsight, I can see that while I enjoy writing articles for a general audience, I didn't love having to go all-in by doing it on a platform and write in a certain style and cadence that was more for algorithmic engagement of a rented audience of other writers, and less my more autonomous, genuine expression of what I wanted to communicate. Even when I compiled those articles into books, commercialising them, I was faced with the limited choice of either putting them on a platform behind a paywall and the hokey-cokey of ad spend, or selling a handful from whoever happened upon them organically. I like neither, but chose the latter.

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 either, 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 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.

I'm not an idealist (a fool for conviviality, if you will). Even if we all agreed about the critiques of Illich's arguments and decided to change overnight, it couldn't happen. We are where we are, in a world of interconnected, globalised supply chains and industries that serve billions of us. People lead busy lives and don't all have the privilege of thinking about these things much, let alone changing them. But I do think we can explore how to introduce conviviality into the cracks of our existing tools and systems to see what human-scale, post-industrial life could look like. So to that end, not being content with simply navel-gazing, I've made some changes to more convivial tools in my own life:

First, on media consumption. I've switched the smart speakers to traditional radios, and music streaming back to CD and dedicated MP3 players. No subscriptions or algorithmic playlists, but it's brought the love of the album back into my life. I've also started using PICO-8 for gaming; a fantasy console where the source is included for each game, and there is an open, thriving community of people building wonderful projects under technical 8-bit constraints.

Second, on hardware. Rather than my lovely (but heavy) black box of a laptop, I've switched to a lightweight, component-focused, UK-made Raspberry Pi 5 with a portable fold-out keyboard, and using monitors already available on campus. Not only is it super lean, but most of the software I'm using, from Zotero for research to LibreOffice, is open-source and free. The open-source movement can be a shining example of how people can and do spend hours of their lives freely contributing to things that transcend economic growth. I've also switched my smartphone to a dumbphone, but that's honestly been a mixed success, given the radical monopoly they have seemingly become when it comes to what often feels like necessary participation in things like banking, car parking, and group chats. Oh, and I'm also in the market for a Bicycle.

Third, on creative practice. I took my own music off streaming services. It's all available on Bandcamp, where people can pay what they want (including zero) for the individual files. I've also made my books free under a Creative Commons license. This blog and the accompanying website are made in plain HTML/CSS using a static site generator, with no tracking or even SEO. For full disclosure, while I do know some HTML/CSS (more than I do tumble dryers, at least), the site was built with AI-assisted code, but comments are included alongside the code to make it easier for me to understand and update. For music-making, I'm experimenting with Reaper as my digital audio workstation and Surge XT as a synthesiser. Both are open source and free (or, in Reaper's case, a flat paid licence for commercial use that comes with months, if not years, of future updates). Both also have thriving communities (whether scripts or presets), so I'm looking forward to getting stuck in to see whether and how my compositions change from such intentional constraints compared to my previous workflow. I'm also taking my numerous piano works in a more convivial direction, more broadly by transcribing them (using MuseScore, another free and open-source app natively available for Raspberry Pi) into sheet music as a project to have some of my music in offline, tangible, analogue form.

These are just examples in my own life, and right now it can feel as though the idea of conviviality is just another luxury good available to the few. But this book helped me to see that there is more than one way these things have to be. Yes, convivial tools appeal to my love of learning, simplicity, and slowing down, but the community-centred spirit of openness underpinning them is one of hope, inquisitiveness, and love.

There's more of that out there in the world waiting for us than I think we realise.