Part of an occasional series: ideas from outside the usual solarpunk reading list.
Ivan Illich, in the 1970s, gave us a sharp diagnosis of when a tool stops serving people and starts running them. What he didn’t leave behind was a way to actually sit down with a group and work through whether a specific technology — a cargo bike, a composting toilet, a piece of software — is convivial or not, in practice, on the ground. Andrea Vetter, a cultural anthropologist who spent four years embedded with grassroots-technology groups in and around Berlin, built exactly that tool.
Picking up where Illich left off
Vetter’s 2017 paper is explicit about both its debt to Illich and its departure from him. She keeps his core insight — that conviviality means interdependence, freedom realized through relationship rather than in spite of it — as her starting point. But where Illich wrote broad social theory covering tools, schools, and bureaucracies all at once, focused mainly on how things get used, Vetter narrows her lens to technology specifically and centers production — how a thing gets built, by whom, with what access to materials and knowledge. Crucially, she doesn’t build her framework from the armchair. She spent 2012 to 2016 doing hands-on fieldwork: open-source cargo-bike builders, composting-toilet crews serving 70,000 people at a festival, biochar workshops, a hand-built wind turbine at a climate protest camp.
She’s also working a different intellectual lineage in parallel — the French anti-utilitarian convivialist tradition (Alain Caillé, drawing on Marcel Mauss’s work on gift economies), formalized in a 2014 Convivialist Manifesto. It’s a separate root system from Illich’s, but one that arrives at compatible conclusions, which is part of why her synthesis feels sturdier than either tradition alone.
The tool: twenty boxes, five questions, no final score
The Matrix of Convivial Technology is a grid: five dimensions crossed with four stages of a technology’s life (materials, production, use, infrastructure). Twenty cells. Each cell holds a handful of word-pairs pulling in opposite directions — say, „elitist” versus „open to anyone” — and a group marks where a specific technology actually sits between those poles.
The crucial design choice: there’s no final number. You don’t add the twenty scores together and get a verdict. The whole point is to surface tradeoffs a group hasn’t consciously weighed against each other yet, and to let people accept that a design is weaker on one axis in exchange for strength on another — instead of pretending any real technology is optimal on every dimension at once.
The five questions
Relatedness asks what a technology does to the relationships between people, and between people and the more-than-human world. Vetter’s composting-toilet builders wanted to physically confront where their own waste goes and see themselves as part of an ecological cycle — she found a real gap between people intellectually endorsing this and their bodies actually being comfortable using one, which is a useful, honest observation about how far conviction alone gets you.
Accessibility asks who can actually build or use the thing, and where. Not just materials — documentation and skill count too. She found this the fragile point in practice: one cargo-bike collective lost an entire build’s documentation when the third-party platform hosting it folded before the promised open-sourcing ever happened. She also reports a hard number worth sitting with: a cited Open Source Hardware community survey found 94 percent male participation, and she names „technological literacy” as an access barrier that falls unevenly along gender lines, not a neutral starting condition.
Adaptability asks how independent a technology is, and how easily it links to other things — not independence as a virtue in itself, but the capacity to choose. This is where Illich’s radical monopoly shows up directly — his term for the point where one dominant way of meeting a need crowds out every viable alternative, so that using it stops being optional for participating in society at all (his own classic case: once cities are built around cars, walking or biking somewhere is no longer a real choice, just a disadvantage). In Vetter’s grid, that’s the negative extreme of the Adaptability axis: adaptability collapsed to zero.
Bio-interaction asks how a technology touches living systems — and pushes past „do less harm” toward „leave things better.” Her reference point is Terra Preta do Índio, the roughly thousand-year-old anthropogenic black soil of the Amazon, still fertile today — a concrete example of what human activity that actively improves a biological system, rather than merely avoiding degrading it, can look like.
Appropriateness asks whether the relationship between what goes in and what comes out actually fits the context. Her sharpest example here isn’t a clean answer but a live disagreement inside her own research groups: one collective insists on fresh, standardized steel specifically because it can be endlessly remelted without losing quality; another builds exclusively from already-discarded bike frames, using genuine waste but producing something that likely can’t itself be recycled again later. Neither is simply „more convivial.” Vetter’s point: appropriateness has to be negotiated by the people actually involved, not read off a fixed rule.
Why it works better as a conversation than a survey
Vetter tested the tool three separate ways — group self-assessment among technology developers, political education with engineering students and at public festivals, and as her own research instrument — and the pattern that emerges is consistent: it works as group discussion, not as an expert audit handed down to decision-makers. She contrasts this directly with standard Life-Cycle Assessment, which is thorough but expensive, specialist-run, and produces results for people in charge rather than something usable by the people actually building the thing. A three-hour workshop, run by the group itself, is the whole design target.
One finding surprised her: applying the matrix to an ordinary smartphone, in a classroom, worked better than she expected. Instead of collapsing into a simple „good tech, bad tech” argument, the twenty-cell structure pushed students to compare specific tradeoffs point by point, and it surfaced the normally invisible social and environmental cost that comes bundled with an object nobody usually stops to interrogate.
What she’s honest about not having solved
Vetter doesn’t oversell this as a neutral instrument. She’s explicit that using the matrix on real technology actively imports degrowth values into the conversation — it isn’t value-free technology assessment dressed up as a game. She also names, without resolving, a real tension in the open-source world she studied: whether open-sourcing a design ultimately undermines commercialization or just makes it easier, citing several researchers who land on different sides of that question. And she flags, briefly but seriously, the ethical hazard of applying open-source logic to biology itself — open-sourcing DNA as „code of life” could enable harmful developments as readily as beneficial ones, a problem she names rather than dismisses.
She’s also candid about a structural precondition her own fieldwork depended on: building convivial technology, for the people she studied, was mostly viable for students, people with subsidies, or people patching together income from several part-time projects. It currently requires a kind of economic slack that isn’t universally available — worth remembering before treating grassroots technology production as something anyone can simply choose to do.
Why this matters beyond one paper
What Vetter offers that a purely theoretical framework like Illich’s doesn’t: something a group can actually run in an afternoon, on a real decision it’s facing, without needing an outside expert. That’s a genuinely different kind of contribution — not a sharper argument, but a usable instrument.
Did we get something wrong?
This piece is drawn from our own reading notes, not a translation of the paper. If something above misrepresents the argument, or just sounds off, tell us — publicly or privately, whichever you’d rather.
Want the fuller picture?
This is a survey, not the whole paper. The deep-dive version is here: deep dive PDF.
What should we read next?
This is one piece in a loose series drawn from our own research reading. If there’s a thinker, a paper, or a tradition you think belongs in a series like this, we want to hear it.
