Tools for Conviviality
by Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich examines the institutions that dominate modern life, expecially the educational, medical, and transportation systems. Do advances in these areas actually 'liberate' the human spirit? Does massive compulsory education free us from ignorance? Do doctors and hospitals release us from sickness and pain? Do automobiles give us the independence to come and go at will? As technological innovations become institutionalised and grow beyond a certain scale, argues Illich, they do not liberate but rather enslave, reducing people to enforced consumers of what the institutions produce - to mere 'accessories' of bureaucracies and machines. 'Tools for Conviviality' looks at institutions that have acquired a 'radical monopoly' over our lives. Illich points to the immense damage that such institutions are doing and suggests ways by which they might be controlled, so that technological innovations, instead of becoming tools for enslavement and dullness, might become tools for creativity, joy, and conviviality.