Definition
Convivial technology is technology that is easily accessible, manageable, adaptable, and sustainable and that encourages autonomy. It allows collaboration, requires no heavy infrastructure, and uses very few natural resources. It is a form of self-production and self-use. Users of convivial technologies can master, change, and repair them without recourse to experts. Institutionalized forms of convivial technologies include repair cafés, urban gardening, community supported agriculture, local exchange systems, and eco-communities.
The author who first proposed the notion, Ivan Illich (1973: 20), spoke of convivial “tools”, rather than technology. By “tool”, the author meant instruments that transmit users’ intentions (like a hammer, for instance), but also included institutions like education, justice, and healthcare. The purpose of qualifying tools as “convivial” was to establish a methodology that would allow evaluation of the characteristics of the instruments regarding their tendency to maintain that dynamic and whether they would tend to turn means to ends. The issue at hand is that certain tools reinforce a tendency to become ends in themselves (like smartphones), fostering ever-growing usage, and making people dependent upon the tools, as opposed to being interdependent toward other people. In this case, society’s tooling could be described as industrial or manipulative, as opposed to convivial.
History
Illich first presented the idea of conviviality within a generalizing theory of a process he had been criticizing in the early 1970s. Namely, this was a process of transmission of technology and reconfiguration of geopolitical domination that took place after World War II, under the name of development. Through this process, the notions of “developed” and “under-developed” economies or societies were first advanced. Such a process foresaw the subsequent environmental debates that took place around the United Nations and prompted other similar responses, such as the appropriate technology movement (see Grassroots Innovation).
Technology became omnipresent, and went through exponential growth, shaping our lifestyles, and demanding many resources. How can we reconcile it with the need to reduce our ecological footprint and minimize resource consumption? In the world of “technoculture”, can we make technology more consumer-friendly, by reappropriating it in forms more suited to our planetary limits and human needs?
In the 1970s, Illich helped to set up a center in Mexico that would become an intellectual hotspot against the said conception of development in the Latin American region, called Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC). The debates developed into favoring technical characteristics that empowered users, similar to the right-to-repair movement, and favoring certain personal postures, such as voluntary simplicity. The Degrowth movement would then mobilize the concept and related debates in the 21st century.
Different Perspectives
Some authors evaluate the conviviality of certain technologies differently, particularly regarding digital technologies (see Information and Communication Technology). For instance, Marco Deriu (see Further Reading) pointed out that some people considered computers to be convivial tools, and showed similarly enthusiastic attitudes toward the internet. These stances emphasize freedom from technocrats in the sense that, with online forums and other means of exchange, people could now learn and develop their initiatives free from the control of teachers and other regulatory authorities, and participate in self-established communities of interest and learning.
However, other scholars see the issue differently from Deriu, including Illich himself in his late works. This second position would sooner see digital technologies as manipulative on the basis that in their programming, they limit the range of possible usages, and reduce the users to operators at best, and to subsystems at worst. In his late work, Illich emphasized the embodied character of interpersonal relations he was trying to defend with the idea of conviviality, in which people face each other, as opposed to simply communicating through cybernetic means.
Application
For the tooling of society to maintain a convivial character, three criteria are to be respected, as summarized by Samerski (2018). Firstly, how to use tools must be intuitive enough that preparatory certification provided by specialists is not necessary. Secondly, it must be up to the user if and when they would like to use them – if technocratic elites or societal structures render use obligatory, the tool ceases to be convivial. Finally, the tool must serve the purposes of the user and not the other way around.
We may consider conviviality to be a relevant criterion for assessing the sustainability of lifestyles enacted in different societies. Specifically, the Matrix of Convivial Technology (MCT) developed by Andrea Vetter can be used to assess the conviviality of a technology. In the MCT, convivial technologies are socio-technical solutions defined around five core dimensions: relatedness, accessibility, adaptability, bio-interaction, and appropriateness. “Relatedness” refers to what technology brings about between people. “Accessibility” refers to who can produce or use it, where and how. “Adaptability” relates to how independent and linkable it is. “Bio-interaction” refers to the role of the materials used in ecological cycles. Finally, “appropriateness” refers to the relation between input and output considering the context. These five dimensions are correlated to four stages of a life cycle: materials, production, use, and infrastructure.
A common example is to contrast bicycles with cars as a means of transportation (Table 25.1). The car needs not only an industrialized fuel – be it electricity or gasoline – but also a wide set of institutional arrangements, including the issuing and enforcing of driver’s licenses, speed checks on roads and highways, engineers, mechanics, and so on. The bicycle does need the industry to produce, but on top of running on human energy, it can be handled successfully by amateurs in their everyday use, repair, and customization for different needs.
However, bicycles can have their conviviality “taken away” from them, if we propel them by electricity, or depending on the design of the policy for public transportation. If bicycles are proposed within a system that is connected to monitoring devices, be they fixed around the city or carried around by users in their pockets, as in the form of smartphones, the technology “bicycle” fails to meet some criteria of conviviality. Firstly, it becomes less accessible, as it now needs batteries, chips, and satellites for the system to work properly, and is probably behind a subscription-based paywall. Secondly, the possibilities for tinkering with the bicycle are now behind contractual regulations: one can no longer fix or customize the bicycle without breaching contracts. Finally, many features that collect behavioral data now serve the purposes of third parties that can profit from such data, as opposed to the purposes of the user.
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In the age of exponential development of artificial intelligence through machine learning, could we imagine a “convivial AI”? Using the MCT to assess its conviviality, Marion Meyers identifies some key limiting factors to the conviviality of AI: (a) the high complexity of the devices and the technical opacity; (b) the environmental impacts throughout the supply chain and the use of Rare Earth Elements in electronics; (c) the size of the infrastructure needed (big data centers, huge energy consumption).
Finally, the 2024 European directive on the “right to repair” is an important step toward convivial technologies, as manufacturers cannot resort to contractual clauses or techniques restricting independent repairers’ access to second-hand or 3D-printed parts (see also Ecodesign and Extended Producer Responsibility). The directive also provides access to repair courses, technical information, and participatory repair spaces.
Further Reading
Deriu, M. (2014). Conviviality. In Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era, pp. 79–82. Routledge. Available at: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203796146–20/conviviality-marco-deriu (accessed: 13 December 2022).
Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. New York: Harper & Row.
Meyers, M. (2023). A degrowth perspective on artificial intelligence – Analysing the appropriateness of machine learning in a degrowth context. Master thesis, ETH Zurich. Available at: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/handle/20.500.11850/622669 (accessed: 3 January 2025).
Samerski, S. (2018). Tools for degrowth? Ivan Illich’s critique of technology revisited. Journal of Cleaner Production, 197, 1637–1646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.10.039.
Vetter, A. (2018). The matrix of convivial technology – Assessing technologies for degrowth. Journal of Cleaner Production, 197, Technology and Degrowth, 1778–1786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.02.195.