Repairing the community: UT Califas and convivial tools of the commons

In this essay, I take up the tension between an always-present infrastructure of repair and maintenance and the opportunities for autonomy present when commodities break by proposing we engage in what Ivan Illich theorized as a convivial reconstruction. Rather than only thinking of repair and maintenance when ‘things’ break down in a commodity intensive society, pace Illich, we need a Copernican revolution to rethink our investment in industrial mode of production and industrial tools altogether. Towards that end, Illich's approach to conviviality and the possibilities of convivial tools not only provides a useful critique of the ‘industrial mode of production’ and the ‘industrial impotence’ that it produces but provides a blueprint for autonomy and a ‘new modern toolkit’ to re-weave the social fabric. As an example, I briefly examine a Zapatista civic pedagogy as a theoretical strategy towards autonomy and present Universidad de la Tierra Califas as another example of a convivial tool.