Programs

In his 1973 book, Tools for Conviality, Ivan Illich introduces the concept of radical monopoly. Instead of a traditional monopoly, in which there is only one seller, radical monopoly reshapes the world to require the use of a certain class of product. Illich's example is of automobiles in Los Angeles: the built environment of LA practically requires the use of cars to get around.

In our age, computing is now a radical monopoly. It is not possible to get on in the contemporary world without extensively computationalizing work, labour, recreation, sustenance, or play. Under the rubrics of security and intellectual property, to get on in overdeveloped North America, we must use recent computational devices manufactured overseas by a handful of large corporations, Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, NVidia, TSMC, Foxconn, and others less well-known. What was once understood as the "free and open web" has now largely been condensed down to, in Tom Eastman's memorable phrasing, "five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four." And that's before we even get to the farce that is so-called "artificial intelligence."

This year's programming at the Centre for Culture and Technology is dedicated to the theme of "Convivial Computing." How might computing technology be transformed into a technology that's convivial in Illich's sense of the word? For Illich, a technology is convivial when it lies between his "two watersheds": genuine technological innovation supports human—and human-scale—thriving, but does not pass a level of industrialization after which profits and techno-logic become more important than the quaint concerns of well-being and healthy interdependence.

This year, we will highlight aesthetic, technical, cultural, and social practices that carve out spaces for small-scale agency against the backdrop of the radical monopoly of networked, always-on, always-on-us computational technologies. What scenes, people, and forms of belonging become possible when we scale down our tech? What sorts of individual and collective imagination can we foster for living differently with our technology? Can computing itself—present, past, or fantasy—foster radical departures for our hyperindustrial ways of living? What kinds of analysis, inquiry, thinking, fantasizing, making, and organizing might conduce to such convivial computing? What might forgotten historical sources or underground communities teach us in the academy about how to do differently with our computers?