In a golden period in the 1970s Illich set about dissecting the failings of modern institutions, the professionals who organise them and the systems they design, in a series of short polemics:
Deschooling Society, Limits to Medicine, Disabling Professions and Tools for Conviviality. He argued that as people become dependent on the expert knowledge of professionals they lose faith in their capacity to act. His solution was that people should spend less time as consumers, more as producers of their own well-being. And for that to be possible they need more convivial, easy-to-use tools.
Illich's most optimistic book, Tools for Conviviality, which inspired Felsenstein and others in the hacker community in the 1970s, put the challenge this way:
I believe a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows us to produce and consume.Convivial institutions work through conversation rather than instruction, through co-creation between users and producers, learners and teachers, rather than delivery from professionals to clients; and through mutual support among peers as much as by means of professional service.
Illich, Ivan, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
quoted in
Leadbeater, Charles, We-Think(London: Profile, 2008) p.44
