Tools for Conviviality

Tools for Conviviality appeared in 1973, a slim volume that did for technology what Deschooling Society had done for education two years earlier: it produced a diagnostic framework so precise that it could be applied, decades later, to technologies its author could not have imagined. The book's core argument was that every tool exists on a spectrum between serving the person who uses it and enslaving the person who uses it, and that the transition follows a structural logic identifiable, measurable, and—given political will—interruptible. The book established five specifications for convivial tools: accessibility without specialized training, transparency of operation, user direction, preservation of autonomous capability, and operation within limits. These specifications were derived from empirical observation of tools that worked—the bicycle, the hand tool, the public library—contrasted with tools that had become destructive.