
Tools for Conviviality

The higher we are on the pyramid, the less likely we are to give up time to simple idleness and to apparently nonproductive pursuits.
Ivan Illich • Tools for Conviviality
In any case, periodic innovations in goods or tools foster the belief that anything new will be proven better.
Ivan Illich • Tools for Conviviality
Convivial tools rule out certain levels of power, compulsion, and programming, which are precisely those features that now tend to make all governments look more or less alike.
Ivan Illich • Tools for Conviviality
Our imaginations have been industrially deformed to conceive only what can be molded into an engineered system of social habits that fit the logic of large-scale production.
Ivan Illich • Tools for Conviviality
The conduct of the war proves that a convivial army limited to bicycle speeds is served by the opponent’s escalation of anonymous power.
Ivan Illich • Tools for Conviviality
The crisis can be solved only if we learn to invert the present deep structure of tools; if we give people tools that guarantee their right to work with high, independent efficiency, thus simultaneously eliminating the need for either slaves or masters and enhancing each person’s range of freedom. People need new tools to work with rather than tool
... See moreIvan Illich • Tools for Conviviality
A just society would be one in which liberty for one person is constrained only by the demands created by equal liberty for another. Such a society requires as a precondition an agreement excluding tools that by their very nature prevent such liberty.
Ivan Illich • Tools for Conviviality
Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through: military, police, and insurance measure
... See moreIvan Illich • Tools for Conviviality
People who have unlearned how to decide about their own rights on their own evidence become pawns in a world game operated by mega-machines.