As part of research for my podcast "Digital Agon" I decided to read Ivan Illich's Tools for Conviviality. I had read Illich's "Gender" previously and had been impressed, so when I saw he'd written a book on the right ordering of man and tools I was keen to read it.

"Digital Agon" is about the Christian struggle in the digital age. ("Agon" is the word Paul uses for "Christian struggle" in the NT). And in 2026 A.D. really that means AI and how should Christians be interacting with it. So I was hoping Illich's book would give some guidance here.

The book is only 110 pages long, but I found myself needing to stop and look things up every paragraph or so, so it was not an easy read. Illich was a polyglot and a historian and every sentence is jam-packed with information. I also found it helpful to understand Illich's theology and so studied the series of interviews he did with David Cayley towards the end of his life, where he discusses the idea, in depth, that the modern world is a kind of corruption of Christianity. https://youtu.be/KF8wZmmksjw

I found my world view greatly challenged by Illich. That may be the subject of another post someday. For now I will stick to Tools. But I recommend anyone interested to watch through the 4 hours of interviews in the YouTube link above. I suspect I will be spending months processing everything I learned from him there.

Anyway, back to Tools. Illich's core idea is that a shift happened around the time of the High Middle Ages/ Renaissance whereby tools became to be seen as a separate category from the human which could be optimized and engineered and demanded energy inputs in order to produce some outputs. This was a break from the thinking in the ancient world whereby the tool was indistinguishable from the man using it.

Illich highlights this (In the YouTube interview but not in the book) by talking about the Greek word "organon" and how it was the same word for both the hands of the man and the tools themselves. People couldn't conceive of the tool as anything other than an extension of the man. This, Illich argues, is "convivial". Convivial means that a tool can be picked up and put down at will, and that when picked up, allows a craftsman to extend their agency in the world. It also implies knowledge and skill on the part of the craftsman, which is linked to the craftsman's feeling of autonomy and freedom. He understands the tool intimately.

The opposite of convivial is when we are forced to use the tool whether we want to or not. Also, when the tools work "for" us and not "with" us. Because, when the tool does work "for" us then that creates a dependence on the tool, and erodes the autonomy and freedom of the man. Finally, if the tool is a black box to the user, this is also anti-convivial. Because the man is dependent on others to use the tool. He must learn to use it "properly" or be certified and if it breaks then he is helpless as he does not understand the tool well enough to fix it himself.

Illich argues that tools in the modern age are tending to be industrial and non-convivial. He argues that tools are not just things, but services too. He wrote books about the medical industry and about education which are famous in their own right ("Medical Nemesis" and "Deschooling Society"). He mentions these services in Tools, too. He talks about how the attempts of institutions to scale and "guarantee/insure" an output always go through three stages: the first watershed, where the tool delivers some kind of genuinely useful output. The second watershed, where the tool starts to be harmful to the users. And finally, Radical Monopoly, where alternatives to the tool are driven out of the market and use of the tool becomes the only available option. To highlight this process, he puts forward some examples, one memorable one being transportation. When the car is first invented, we can move great distances and transport heavy goods with ease, and this is of genuine benefit to people. Next, the second watershed, we have everyone driving, and this leads to crowded roads and traffic jams. The car becomes a burden. Finally, we have Radical Monopoly, as the car has reordered our societies, and we are scattered over large distances, making options like walking unfeasible.

To go back to education, the process may look like a) the introduction of schooling for the masses raises literacy rates b) central planners use the school infrastructure to try to inculcate values in the population demanding students learn and regurgitate volumes of historical and political propaganda c) a radical monopoly whereby only credentials from official institutions are considered valid "education". Self learning becomes almost without value in society, or at least, a luxury activity of the rich.

There are countless such examples. Where Illich is really strong is his diagnosis of the ills of our modern world. Once you see the pattern of first watershed, second watershed, and radical monopoly, you can't unsee it, and you begin to notice it everywhere. If you go the extra mile and study his "The Corruption of Christianity" interview series, you understand this process has deep theological significance, but I'm not going to get into that here.

"The Corruption of Christianity" was recorded some 20 years after Tools was written, and although much of the diagnosis remains unchanged, Illich's ideas for what we should do in the face of our increasingly non-convivial world are radically different to those put forward in Tools. I believe this is indicative that Illich's ideas for "solutions" and action to take are the weakest part of the book.

In Tools, Illich is hopeful that political action and action through the courts may be enough to steer the world back in a convivial direction. He expects the crisis to come from overpopulation and environmental catastrophe as well as people's losing faith in institutions. Interestingly (for Bitcoiners, perhaps) he makes mention of "paper money" in relation to this. He calls for people to use political action and legal means to demand limits to be placed on tools in order that, as societies, we optimize for conviviality, and not for raw industrial outputs. He talks about the need to "demythologize science" as part of this, which will resonate with those who despair at how science has been elevated to the status of religion for many. He also talks about the need to reclaim language. He highlights how our language has moved from verbs to nouns in domains where tools have become non-convivial. For example, "education" instead of "learning". Or "transportation" instead of "going places". Or "health" instead of "healing". Illich has a genius level grasp of language, and it's his noticing of this kind of linguistic drift which is one of the strongest points in the book.

It's hard to put Illich on the political spectrum. Part of the time you think you are reading some radical 70s leftism, part of the time a reactionary medievalist. He is certainly no Marxist, and writes how he sees both capitalism and Marxism as two sides of the same coin. The issue, is that both focus on the wrong thing--i.e. who controls the tools, and not whether the tools should be used in the first place. Indeed, I don't think I have ever heard Illich's argument that limits should be placed on tools before, from either the right or the left. Except that is, in more recent times, where it has come up in AI.

There have been alarmist papers written recently--AI 2027 comes to mind--that argue that we must intentionally put the brakes on AI research in order to put the guardrails in place to manage ASI, or else we may face catastrophe. These arguments seem remarkably similar to Illich's in Tools. And for the same reason I dismiss Illich's proposed solutions (and apparently, so did he in later life) I also dismiss the AI decelerationists. I.e. they are naive, and don't understand base human incentives.

Illich was, I believe, a good man. He had a good heart. It can be heard especially in the interviews he gave. He loved life, loved humanity, saw life as a gift. He wanted the best for people. And he was wise enough to understand that people would not be happy with more things and more industrial output. He saw that for people to be happy and fulfilled, they must live convivially. In this, I believe Illich was correct. Heck, the AI decelerationists are probably correct. But mankind has never acted fundamentally in its own self-interest, not since the Fall.

Game theory, the prisoner's dilemma, the Thucydides Trap, greed, power grabs, thirst for power, thirst for sex, for life, for more. Thirst for revenge. These are what drive human behavior. We are never "slowing down". I think Illich understood this later in his life, and was far more grounded in his advice in "The Corruption of Christianity", which was something along the lines of, focus on friendship, and small acts of renunciation.

Anyway, my takeaway from this book is that AI and digital systems are inherently non-convivial. But also, I came to think of conviviality as a matter of degree and not as binary, such that inherently non-convivial tools can be used in a convivial manner--or more of a convivial manner--and that, we should at the very minimum be aiming towards this. In concrete terms, I believe open source and open weights are more convivial than closed APIs, so I would like as much as possible to order my use of AI around that principle. Also, as part of "small acts of renunciation", perhaps heading to the library and looking things up once in a while as an alternative to asking Kimi, would be convivial. Although, given the principle of "radical monopoly", we can probably expect our local library to become a public ChatGPT terminal at some point.

In conclusion, I would highly encourage anyone to pick up this and other books by Illich.

Some quotes from the book:

On ConvivialityOn Conviviality

“I choose the term ‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment.”

“Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon.”

“Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.”

“A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others.”

On the Need for LimitsOn the Need for Limits

“Cars create distance. Speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce. They drive wedges of highways into populated areas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remoteness between people that was manufactured for their sake.”

“We must come to admit that only within limits can machines take the place of slaves; beyond these limits they lead to a new kind of serfdom.”

On Industrial SocietyOn Industrial Society

“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”