Any thoughts on convivial tools? I’m noding it today for Anagora node club.
"a kind of tool that is shared in common, and which expands personal creative freedom and communal interdependence"
My initial thoughts: sounds good.
The most notable critique I have come across so far is Bookchin (via Evgeny Morozov): "It didn’t make sense to speak of “convivial tools,” he argued, without taking a close look at the political and social structures in which they were embedded"
@neil Ivan Illich coined the phrase ‘tools for convivilaity’ in the 70s, in a book the same name. He didn’t mean tools in the current software sense: discrete apps that perform defined tech functions. He meant something more like ‘institutions’ – public or popular healthcare, public or popular education, civic decision making, etc etc. Such practices are typically carried out thro some alliance of the State and professionalised elites. His critique thus has a similar basis to Bookchin’s