What is conviviality?

Ivan Illich was an Austrian-born philosopher and priest who spent much of his life asking what happens when the things we build to help us start running our lives instead. In 1973 he published Tools for Conviviality, a short book about exactly that. He chose “convivial” for tools that people can pick up, use freely, and bend to their own purposes, and he set it against tools that arrange us around themselves.

The idea in plain terms

A convivial tool leaves you more able to do what you want with your own time, attention and company. A hammer is convivial, and so is a bicycle, because anyone can use them, repair them and put them to uses their makers never imagined. The opposite is a tool that only works inside a system you can't see or leave, that decides what you may do with it, and that gets harder to live without the longer you use it.

Illich saw that tools tend to go bad in a few predictable ways. They grow past the point where they help. They turn into the only way to do a job, so nobody can do without them. They make people passive, concentrate power in a few hands, wear out their purpose, and promise more than they deliver. Those six failures became the six questions on How we score.

Why it fits software

Most of what we use online is built to hold us: accounts that are hard to leave, files in formats only one company reads, feeds designed around what keeps us scrolling. Software doesn't have to work that way. A small tool that does one job, keeps your files on your own device and lets you walk away with them is convivial in exactly Illich's sense, and the same goes for a large open-source project with the same habits.

Cheap AI-assisted building has made this more interesting, because more people can now make a small tool for themselves and their friends. That is how tools were supposed to feel all along, and it's a good reason to keep a directory of the ones worth knowing about.

What conviviality is not

It doesn't mean free, open source or small, though those often help. It doesn't mean anti-technology either: Illich argued for tools that serve people, and he was fine with sophisticated ones. A big company can build a fairly convivial tool, and a charming indie app can still lock you in. That's why each review scores the actual tool, with the six questions, and doesn't assume anything from who made it.

Read the book

This is our own short reading and not a substitute for Illich's. The book is still in copyright, so we paraphrase it and don't host or link to copies. You can find it in a library near you, buy it from an independent bookshop through Bookshop.org, or order it from a local bookshop. When you're done, browse the directory and start with the tools stamped Convivial.