Convivial Implementation

Against Neo-Luddites, pt. 4

What are we after?

There is nothing more worthwhile than to pray to God and to converse with him… Our soul should be directed to God, not merely when we suddenly think of prayer, but even when we are concerned with something else… If we are generous in giving time to prayer, we will experience its benefits throughout our life.

(St. John Chrysostom)

Relationship with God.

Conviviality with God. This conviviality is experienced and practiced not in some supernatural way always, but in the natural ways of our day-to-day experience. In the relationships we have with others - their liveliness and friendliness.

… conviviality resides not in the nature of a particular technology but in the job assignment, in the context, in the expression we construct for the technology. A tool’s convivality is mutable.

(Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants)

Kelly is referencing Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, which we have talked about on this blog before. But he gives an excellent breakdown of some aspects of convivial tools:

• Cooperation (promotes collaboration)

• Transparency (clear origins and ownership)

• Decentralization (distributed ownership, production, and control)

• Flexibility (I would better call it Extensibility)

• Redundancy (not being the only option)

• Efficiency (minimizing impact on ecosystems)

We’ll be going into more detail about each of these principles in the future.