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Conviviality: context

CIDOC (Center For Intercultural Documentation). Cuernavaca, México (1976).

Convivial Tools are those that:

- "drive meaning and intentionality between the human being and the world"

- Allow people to control the tools and not the tools to the people

- Increase the autonomy of the individual within society: the individual is active in the creation of social life

- Are at the service of the community and not of a body of specialists

- Exist in the vernacular domain:

          a) They exist autonomously from the capitalist market, but do not correspond to traditional pre-capitalist economies

          b) belongs to the domain of the commons and its knowledge is transmitted in doing

- They are productive (real productivity) and not counterproductive (industrial productivity)

Tools for conviviality, Ivan Ilich, 1971

"The convivial society is the inverse of industrial productivity" (counter-productive), where the latter is one where:

- The meaning of productivity is restricted to a merely economic sense

- Productivity follows a ritual of progress (Abstract Progress)

- It builds radical monopolies in which what previously existed in the field of the commons (commons) is in absolute control of the industry (de-skilling) creating artificial needs.

- Crosses two thresholds of real productivity:

       a) homogenization: technology is generalized and becomes a product of more or less mass consumption.

       b) counterproductivity: technology stops contributing to the objective for which it was initially designed and is oriented towards an abstract notion of progress

- A relationship is created between industrialized and non-industrialized countries to create a modernization of poverty, based on indebtedness.

Ethical values of the convivial tools:

• Survival
• Equity
• Autonomy

Autonomous mototaxi driver, Santa Clara, Ecatepec, Mexico.

Design values of Convivial Tools:

• "Generates efficiency without degrading personal autonomy"
  -> Their knowledge is not in the hands of specialists.
   
• "Does not create masters and slaves"
  -> It is decentralized and does not depend on large infrastructures.
   
• "Expands the proportion of human action"
  -> It is transparent in its operation, repairable, simple to use.
   
• Establishes a metabolism between nature and society that is created locally
  -> It is ecological.

Rizomatica: community-led telecommunications

Convivial Computing

“ I wanted to help define, and help create, media that contributed to the development of a local community. And now I was presented with networking technology that could be a foundation for communities of interest - communities that could exist in defiance of geography. "

Lee Felsenstein

Community Memory, Berkley, California, 1973

Convivial Computing

“we had several discussions about a computer appropriate for a public access environment, how it would be built, what it would be like; and my proposition, following Illich, was that a computer could only survive if it grew a computer club around itself. What is this computer like? How will it work? here's a route into the convivial computer."

Lee Felsenstein

Tom Swift Terminal:  a convivial cybernetic device, 1975