This book has been in my to-read pile for a while. I think my friend Barath told me about it. It is compact, but dense, and quite polemical. In it Illich calls out that we’ve become enslaved by our tools and that this is ruining our lives, society, and the environment. “Tool” is defined broadly and includes obvious things like hand tools, power tools and cars, but also institutions like hospitals and schools. He introduces two useful concepts: radical monopoly and conviviality.
Radical monopoly is defined differently than the kind we’re familiar with, as:
the dominance of one type of product rather than the dominance of one brand
Put differently, radical monopoly is
when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition.
A good example of a radical monopoly is cars. In much of the English-speaking world, cars and their requisite infrastructure exert a radical monopoly when it comes to how we move about. The wide, high-speed roads that connect places and the way speed dialates our sense of distance all render using a bicycle or your feet for transportation hopelessly impractical.
Conviviality can be used two ways. We can talk about convivial tools,
which are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.
We can also talk about a convivial society, which is
the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s equal freedom.
Illich urges us to reorient our social systems in a way that would yield a convivial society. Such a society is vastly preferable to the kind of bureaucratic facism Illich predicts would be required to successfully manage the collection of radical monopolies that comprise modern life.
Throughout the book he describes a methodology for how to determine when a tool is at risk of becoming a radical monopoly. He does not, however, prescribe a particular set of tools, nor a particular way any given tool ought to be employed. Each society must answer these questions politically and ideally with an egalitarian process, in order for the resulting system to stand any chance of surviving.
This was a very thought-provoking read! Illich’s point of view is definitely a challenging one, and I can imaging many urbanists/technologists/progressives will find elements of it perplexing or even grating. I think there’s a lot of compelling stuff in here, though. I’m excited to read the works that are downstream of this. It was published in the 1970s, so I have to imagine these ideas have been riffed on and expanded quite a bit since then. I left out a lot of details because I like to keep these reviews brief, but you won’t regret spending an afternoon with this hundred-pager.