CONCEPT
Conviviality
Illich's term for the quality of tools, institutions, and relationships that enlarge the range of each person's autonomous competence, control, and initiative—the property that distinguishes the bicycle from the car.
Conviviality is the quality Illich used to evaluate tools, institutions, and the relationships they structure. A convivial tool enlarges the range of each person's competence, control, and initiative without creating dependency, without requiring specialized infrastructure, and without diminishing the user's capacity to perform the underlying activity without the tool. The word was chosen deliberately against its softer English connotations of sociability and cheer. For Illich, convivial named a rigorous, demanding, political property—the property that distinguished tools that served human autonomy from tools that captured it. Conviviality required that a tool be accessible to anyone who wanted to use it, that its operations be transparent, that it could be directed to the user's own purposes, that its use preserve rather than degrade the user's autonomous capacity, and that it operate within acknowledged limits rather than expanding without boundary.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The bicycle was Illich's paradigmatic convivial tool and the car its paradigmatic opposite. Both extended human mobility. The bicycle extended it