Published Sep 27, 2026 | 10:00 AM ⚊ Updated Sep 27, 2026 | 10:18 AM
In his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich drew a crucial distinction between convivial tools and industrial tools.
Synopsis: The tools we thought would free us have become our masters. The fishermen of Kerala, the farmers of Punjab, and the gig workers of our cities each show us what happens when we lose the convivial tools. They are trapped in systems where tools that promised liberation have become chains.
In 2026, a Goldman Sachs report suggests that generative AI threatens up to 12% of non-agricultural jobs in India and tech sector layoffs surpass the total for all of 2025. We are confronted with a profound question: Are our technologies liberating us, or are they creating new forms of dependence?
The answer, if we look closely, is already before us—in the fishing villages of Kerala, in the farmlands of Punjab, and in the gig economy of our cities.
In his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich drew a crucial distinction between two kinds of tools.
Convivial tools are those that any person can use, adapt, understand, and repair. They amplify human agency and creativity. They foster community and self-reliance. The bicycle, the hand tool, the community library—these are convivial tools. They do not require experts to operate; they do not create dependency.
Industrial tools, by contrast, replace human competence with technical demand. They are complex, opaque, and controlled by distant experts. They lock users into cycles of dependency on spare parts, proprietary knowledge, and capital. “Industrial tools,” Illich wrote, “replace competence with demand.”
“The major threat to human dignity,” he warned, “is not the machine but the institutionalisation of the machine.” When tools become institutionalised—when their design, repair, and use are controlled by distant authorities—they cease to serve human ends and instead serve the system that produces them.
I witnessed this process firsthand.
In the 1970s, Kerala’s fishing communities used kattumarams—log rafts with lateen sails that moved with the wind’s wisdom. The kattumarams and sails were convivial tools: they could be repaired, understood, and operated by the fisherman himself. It demanded no spare parts, no foreign exchange, no expert.
As an experiment in 1975, when I first introduced Japanese outboard motors (OBMs) to be fitted on their kattumarams to replace sails, the fishermen tried them briefly, then rejected them with laughter. “The sea speaks to the sail, not to this motor,” one explained, patting his weather-beaten raft.
However, by the 1990s, everything had changed. With the liberalisation of the economy, Japanese OBM companies entered the fray in a big way. Many fishers replaced their kattumarams with plywood beach landing crafts initially using sails. This increased competition between fishers, declining inshore stocks, and the pressure to keep up forced the fishermen towards wholesale adoption of OBMs. They started with 5 HP engines. Over the decades, the horsepower crept upward— reaching 45 HP and beyond.
But here is the tragedy: they fish, but not much further than before. The sea became an open-access realm increasingly. The engines have become the tools spurring an Olympic race to harvest the same quantity of fish as before. The 45 HP engine does not catch more fish; it simply allows the fisherman to keep pace with his neighbour who invests more in new craft and larger nets. The energy is wasted; the cost is borne by the fisherman; the profit flows to the Japanese manufacturers of engines and spare parts.
“Earlier, the Japanese only set the price of our catch,” fisherman Pathrose told me back then. “Now they decide if we can fish at all.”
The OBMs need constant repairs; spare parts cost half a day’s earnings; fuel prices rise with distant wars. What was sold as liberation had become invisible chains.
The fishermen’s story is a microcosm of India’s technological journey.
Agriculture: The Green Revolution promised prosperity but delivered dependency. Farmers of Punjab are locked into expensive machinery, patented seeds, and chemical inputs. The costs escalate; the yields stagnate; the debt accumulates. Each new “improvement” creates a new dependency.
The Digital Economy: Gig workers—ride-hailing drivers, food delivery agents, e-commerce workers—are controlled by opaque algorithms. They have no autonomy, no security, no real control over their tools or their labour. The platform is the ultimate industrial tool: complex and proprietary. They are designed to create dependence. The more workers rely on it, the less power they have.
Artificial Intelligence: The current AI wave promises efficiency but threatens displacement. The concern is not just job loss—it is the erosion of human agency. Algorithms increasingly make decisions that affect our lives, from hiring to healthcare to criminal justice. These are decisions made by systems that few understand, and fewer can challenge. Illich would ask: Who writes the rules that govern our lives? When judgement is ceded to invisible code, where does human responsibility end and algorithmic authority begin? The fisherman knew what was enslaving him—the spare parts, the fuel, the repairs. The gig worker may not even know who wrote the algorithm. This is the deeper enslavement: we have lost the capacity to see the chains.
Illich was not a technophobe. He did not oppose tools; he opposed tools that enslave. He believed in technologies that amplify human agency rather than replace it.
The bicycle, beach landing crafts using sails, the power handloom, community seed banks, the community library—these are convivial tools. They can be understood, repaired, and used by ordinary people. They foster community rather than competition. They serve human ends rather than institutional ones. These are not relics; they are alternatives.
The fishermen of Kerala, the farmers of Punjab, and the gig workers of our cities each show us what happens when we lose these alternatives. They are trapped in systems where tools that promised liberation have become chains. Their experience forces us to ask Illich’s questions: Who controls the tools we use, and who profits from them? Who is excluded when tools become too complex, too expensive, too opaque? What do we lose when we gain efficiency—skills, autonomy, community, the capacity to do things for ourselves? And what kind of people are we becoming: passive and dependent, or active and self-reliant?
Most fundamentally, Illich asked us to imagine differently. The logic of industrial tools has become so pervasive that we assume technology must always become faster, more powerful, more complex. We assume progress means ever more sophisticated tools controlled by ever fewer experts. Illich asked us to question that assumption. He asked us to imagine a world where tools serve human purposes rather than institutional ones—where a bicycle is more valuable than a car, a hand tool more valuable than an automated machine, a community library more valuable than a digital platform.
The tools we thought would free us have become our masters. Illich gave us no simple answers. But he gave us the most important tool of all: the questions themselves. Questions that refuse to accept the logic of progress as inevitable. Questions that open the door to a different way of living. Who controls the off-switch? Who controls the design, the supply chain, the meaning? Can we imagine otherwise? These are the questions we must answer if we are to build a future worth living in.
Also read the earlier articles in the Ivan Illich series:
Ivan Illich and India’s unfinished questions
When schooling destroys learning
When healing becomes harm: Ivan Illich’s ‘Medical Nemesis’
