Number 5 - Spring 2023
Table of contents
Essays
- On Walking Away from Christianity: A Reply to Carl Mitcham by David Cayley
Thematic Articles: 50 Years after Tools for Conviviality
- Tools for Conviviality: Argument, Insight, Influence by Carl Mitcham
- Imagination Lost: Crossing the Third Watershed by Neto Leão
- Imitation Games: When Who You Are Is Reduced to What You Do by Nicola Labanca
- Swiped Right into the System by Samar Farage
- A Theory of Technique by Philippe Mesly
- Renewing La Convivialité, a Half Century Later by Giovanna Morelli
- The Language of Public Goods by Henry Zhu
- Jet by Guest Artist Ernesto Bonato
Reviews
- To Be (Cyborg) or Not by Sajay Samuel
- The Eclipse of Tools by Diego Ferraris
Translations
- Un colpo d’occhio disciplinato sugli arnesi by Attilio Del Vinco
The fifth issue of Conspiratio is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Illich’s Tools for Conviviality. This issue is given to a dissection and elaboration of Illich’s arguments concerning tools. The cover of each printed issue was individually crafted by the artist Ernesto Bonato, whose reflections on the brush as the preeminent artistic tool is one of the articles.
Buy the paper vesionSOLD OUT!
Editorial note
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Tools for Conviviality. In that pamphlet, Illich theorized that technology goes through two phases or, in his word, watersheds.1)The first watershed is crossed when an instrument becomes effective in realizing the purpose for which it is designed. Thomas Edison said he failed thousands of times before inventing a light bulb that worked. Illich’s enduring contribution remains his specification of the perverse effects when instruments cross a second watershed. Beyond a certain scale, tools turn counterproductive, means become ends, the cure becomes worse than the disease.