Experimental Conviviality: Exploring Convivial and Sustainable Practices

Abstract The paper develops a concept of conviviality as a form of friendly togetherness that includes people, technical infrastructures and nature. Therefore, Marcel Mauss’s concept of the gift, different strands of thinking about conviviality (e.g. Ivan Illich), John Dewey’ experimentalism and the political theory and movement of convivialism are firstly depicted and discussed. The goal, secondly, is to integrate these various theoretical perspectives in order a) to better grasp already existent forms of conviviality and to b) develop an analytical and normative standpoint that on the one hand helps to evaluate unsustainable, non-convivial and on the other convivial forms of living together. Thus, such an analytical and normative model of modes of conviviality points out that associative self-organisation is decisive for the theory and practice of conviviality. Exchange without remuneration (between people and between people and nature) as well as self-organised gathering can be seen as the basis of a convivial social order which is differentiated from a solely instrumental, unsustainable and monetarily defined version of prosperity and the good life.


Introduction
Roughly 30 years after the end of the Cold War and the systemic rivalry between capitalism and real-existing socialism, the global community is confronted with a number of crises: wars, new nationalisms, social inequalities and cultural divisions, as well as climate change and other ecological dangers. To be sure, we can hardly speak of the prophesied "end of history" (Fukuyama) in democracy and human rights. Given this situation, a group of mainly French academics and intellectuals released a manifesto in 2013 which speaks of a reversal and, what is more, a positive vision of living together: the Convivialist Manifesto. In 2020 the Second Convivialist Manifesto appeared with a much more international scope and some important extensions. The term convivialism is used to show that it is essential to develop a new philosophy and practical forms of peaceful coexistence. The two manifestos attempt to make clear that another world is not only possible -because we can already see many forms of conviviality -but is absolutely necessary. Is this just another tawdry critique of society and well-meaning appeal for change? What effect the call to action of some philosophers and social scientists will have, one will -and must -ask.
Since the Manifesto is mainly addressed to French society, the question has emerged in recent years as to what extent convivialism would not need to become more internationally networked and develop further. This process was initiated in early 2019. In 2020, a second convivialist manifesto was published in France, which introduces two new principles: a) Any form of human hubris must be rejected and b) the principle of common naturalness of humans and nature is essential. The Second Manifesto also reacts to current political developments (such as the rise of illiberal regimes and policies), its political proposals are more internationally oriented and were developed in an international consultation process. The two manifestos formulate decidedly normative principles for the evaluation of social and political orders. These are based on the reflexivisation and normativisation of everyday practices of conviviality.

Conviviality and the Roots of the Manifesto
The term conviviality, as it is used by the writers of the manifesto, originated in nineteenth century France. Convivialité is very common in contemporary French and has also established itself in English as a common loan word as well as more recently as a term in discussions about cohabitation in immigrant societies. Its coinage can be traced back to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and his book Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante from the year 1825. The gastrophilosopher understood conviviality as the situation, common at the table, when different people come together over a good long meal and time passes swiftly in excited conversations.
The initiative for the first manifesto goes back to a 2010 colloquium in Japan, at which the terms conviviality and convivialism were discussed with particular reference to Ivan Illich (Caillé et al, De la Convivialité). The Austrian-American philosopher and author was a radical critic of technology and growth, and in his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality introduced precisely this term. The book was well received internationally and was brought to general attention in France by André Gorz. Illich uses the term "convivial" to describe a society which places sensible barriers on the growth of its tools, be they technology-based or institutions (chapter 2). If the growth of a technology is not limited, according to Illich, we see the tendency of its benefits to reverse and lead to consequential societal problems (here, atomic energy or nowadays also big data springs to mind). Illich contends that control over societal tools should not lie in the hands of infrastructures and expert systems, but rather with the community -it is only in this way that conviviality might be reached. Yet, in order for this to happen, a radical reshaping of societal institutions along convivial criteria is needed.
The volume De la convivialité written by Caillé, Humbert, Latouche und Viveret in 2011 produces two more threads of discourse which flow into the formulation of the convivialist vision. One of them is the anti-utilitarian thinking of Alain Caillé (and Marcel Mauss), and the other is the growth and economic critique of Patrick Viveret and Serge Latouche.
The most prominent advocate of the demand for degrowth (décroissance) is the economist Serge Latouche. He calls for a society of simple prosperity (societé d'abondance frugale) and (with Viveret) for a redefinition of wealth, which should overcome the logic of economic quantification used by the gross domestic product (GDP, see Latouche, Farewell to Growth; Latouche, "Degrowth"). In his view, a convivial society must radically question the idea of economic growth and limit itself. New forms of economic activity are demanded that break the cycle of the permanent creation of more and more and principally unlimited needs. Moreover, he is interested in overcoming the "religion of the economic" and the concept of the homo oeconomicus. The irrationality of this belief is shown in the fact that there is no clear positive correlation between monetary prosperity, happiness and satisfaction.
The question as to which logic of action a convivial society could draw upon beyond the pressure to grow is primarily addressed by Alain Caillé, who can be seen as the real spiritus rector of the convivialist manifesto (cf. Pour un manifeste). For him, the most decisive question is how humans can live together free of community and conformity pressure without (in Mauss' and Caillé's words) "butchering" each other (19). Caillé sees an answer in the "paradigm of the gift", in whose development he has played a decisive role in the last 20 years and which can be traced back to the sociologist and ethnologist Marcel Mauss. In his essay The Gift, Mauss described how the exchange of gifts between groups of people makes them allies without removing their "agonality", i.e. their militant conflict. In the agonal gift, humans see each other as just that, humans, and acknowledge each other. Convivialism takes up this idea and stresses that alone the acknowledgement of a common humanity and a common sociality can be the basis for convivial global coexistence. Radical and universal equality is thus a condition of convivial coexistence, which in the manifesto leads to the demand for two income restrictions (Convivialist Manifesto 32): a minimum and a maximum. No one should fall under a minimum income and no one has the right to accumulate unlimited wealth.
Caillé is also intellectual head of the so-called M.A.U.S.S. movement ("Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales" or "Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences"). Most of the theoretical ideas developed there are based on Marcel Mauss' essay The Gift. The character of the gift -according to Mauss -is ambivalent, as the exchange of gifts moves between the poles of voluntariness and spontaneity on the one hand and social obligation on the other. Giving a gift is a deeply equivocal process which is not understood by Mauss as being economicistic in the sense of selfishness nor as moralistic in the sense of pure altruistic giving. Instead, Mauss emphasises the agonal side of giving: one cannot ignore the gift, one must react to it as a challenge which one either answers or refuses to answer (which is as well equal to a response, only a negative one). The motive to give, according to Caillé (Anthropologie du don 64-5), may span a coordinate cross made up of interest vs. empathy/friendship (aimance) as well as duty vs. spontaneity. The motivation to give a gift cannot be reduced to one of these poles. At the same time, every form of sociality is dependent on the gift. Without it, in other words, without trust and "advance payments" of which one does not know exactly whether they will be requited or not, no sociality can be formed.
With his essay, Mauss by no means wanted to deliver simple descriptions and explanations of the structures of premodern societies. His ambitions were higher, he pursued a kind of archaeology: firstly, to examine the surrounding contemporary "premodern societies"; secondly, to describe the predecessors of our modern society; and thirdly, to prove on sociological grounds that the moral and economy of the gift "still function in our own societies, in unchanging fashion and, so to speak, hidden, below the surface, and as we believe that in this we have found one of the human foundations on which our societies are built" (The Gift 4). Consequently, Mauss indeed had questions that pertained to the present as well, though he stood in the French tradition of the critique of utilitarianism and sympathised strongly with the cooperative movement and other concepts and practices of autonomous self-administration (Fournier 107-112). In doing so, he based his political interventions on the double critique of utilitarian individualism, on the one hand, and Bolshevist state-centrism on the other.
In contrast, another principle was important to Mauss: solidarity as a form of mutual respect by means of exchanging gifts, which itself is based on social ties and reciprocal indebtedness. For him, the crux of the matter lay in the fact that modern social ties increasingly follow the model of exchange, the market and the contract: "It is our western societies who have recently made man an 'economic animal'. But we are not yet all creatures of this genus. [...] Homo oeconomicus is not behind us, but lies ahead [...]" (Mauss 76). In contrast to the later theoretical approaches of modernisation and differentiation, Mauss presumed that, even in modern market societies, the practical logic of the gift cannot be completely erased and that it forms a "rock" of morality.
Caillé developed more and more from a social theoretician of the gift to a reformed political protagonist of the M.A.U.S.S. movement, to a champion of a "third way" beyond the absolutisation of state and market. Since the 1990s, he has voiced his views in political debates, in particular because he is convinced of the relevance of the gift discourse for addressing practical sociopolitical problems, such as for example how they are discussed in the debate about universal basic income, the shortening of the workday, the strengthening of civil society or in the context of globalisation criticism. He sees for example in alternative, civically organised economic forms the possibility to link non-capitalist modes of transferring goods with the traits of respect and bonding inherent to the gift. Here, he is not interested in replacing the capitalist economic form but rather supplementing it with alternative forms of exchange. For Caillé, a voluntary association lies in two or more individuals pooling their material resources, their knowledge and their activity for a common end which is not primarily geared toward profit-making (Caillé, "Gift and Association"). In this way, the area of civil society is connected with the possibility to transfer forms of the primary sociality of the gift to the public sphere (cf. Adloff, "Civil Society"). After all, the political sphere is also dependent on gift relations.
In this way Caillé and the other authors of the manifesto contribute to a specific line of political thinking in France. The French democracy theorists Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis in their analysis of Soviet-style totalitarianism moved toward theories on libertarian democracy, or the autonomous society. Starting in the 1940s, they worked (alongside Jean-François Lyotard) in the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie on a critique of Stalinist totalitarianism and Marxist theory (cf. Rödel) and in doing so came to the idea of an autonomous, self-generating civil society able to emancipate itself from the subjugation of a single powerholder. Both authors have in common the critique of a state-centred political understanding which views civil society as a depoliticised sphere. Power should remain in civil society and not merge in the independent institutions of the state. Democratic processes and institutions rule how civil society can exercise power over itself on the basis of conflicts. Furthermore, in Lefort's understanding, the place of power must "remain empty" in democracy. Sovereigns used to literally embody political power. A democracy however must not try to occupy the former place of the sovereigns with new symbolic instances such as "the people", "class" or "nation" as we then face the threat of an antidemocratic fiction of totality. The surmounting of social and political antagonisms -as totalitarian societies claimed for themselves -de facto means the totalitarian elimination of democracy.
Nor does the political idea of the manifesto presume a state-centred concept of politics; instead, the idea of civic self-organisation shifts into focus here. This can be linked to the so-called political difference between the political (le politique) and politics (la politique) which has been discussed intensely in recent years (cf. Marchardt): The political is for Claude Lefort, Alain Caillé and the other authors clearly not to be reduced to the instituted sphere of politics (the right to vote, state institutions, etc.) (cf. Caillé, Anti-utilitarisme).
In this context, Cornelius Castoriadis' concept of a societal imaginary takes on significant meaning. Castoriadis' blueprint of a theory of the imaginary states that society is based on processes of institutionalisation, which also always arise out of new cultural creations. This is due to the fact that society, in its conceptions, always refers to visions of the future, ideas which Castoriadis terms the "imaginary". These new creations of meaning reach far beyond existing societal forms and symbolisations. Imaginary meanings give responses to questions like "Who are we as a community, what do we want, what are we missing?" Societies constitute themselves by delivering in their actions factual, and thus frequently only implicit answers to these questions. The imaginary of modern contemporary societies for Castoriadis consists in considering oneself entirely rational. Yet the aims connected with this -growth, rationalisation and world domination -are arbitrary, unsustainable and pseudo-rational; they take on almost threatening forms when one considers for instance how independent unbridled technology has become. Here, the instituted (i.e. technology) has become independent vis-à-vis instituting society.
To consider another -convivial -society thus means, in line with Castoriadis' thought, to consider new forms of the societal imaginary, to imagine and to create new societal blueprints. In this sense, the current neoliberal imaginary can almost be viewed as the mirror image of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism eliminated civil liberties and the political in the name of a total society. Neoliberalism eliminates solidarities and social ties in the name of civil liberties and market decisions. In the view of the convivialists, collective alternatives must be striven for. For that, a battle of opinion must be fought for hegemony, entirely à la Gramsci's understanding. Indeed, the theses and topics of the convivialists are geared toward becoming practical, i.e., being heard and finding resonance in civil society. The convivialist perspective thus politically, affectively and symbolically aims at the big picture and not at overly detailed problem-solving, at individual policies. To develop from this idea a systematic social and political theory in the stricter sense is, however, still pending.

Conviviality in Practice
Yet the manifesto also contains indications that lived and shared practices are of great importance for the development of conviviality. It is a lived morality and habitualised practices of evaluation that are in mind when the manifesto speaks of common decency for example. This expression of George Orwell, which the political philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa reintroduced into the debate, refers to the idea that humans are not primarily rational egoists, but rather show a psychological and cultural disposition toward generosity and solidarity on which the normative structures of politics and society can be founded upon. At the same time, Michéa invokes the paradigm of the gift à la Caillé and the other M.A.U.S.S. authors in order to demonstrate that people show specific virtues or dispositions toward generosity and loyalty. Socialism should be anchored in these basic virtues (according to Michéa and Orwell). To disregard or overlook them was always the trademark of traditional powerholders, Michéa contends.
However, much follows from this accentuation, this positive anthropological conception of humans. Modern liberalism, according to Michéa, is built on the opposite conception of humans. A war of all against all is famously hindered in liberalism by channelling private sins into the economic realm; otherwise one is subjugated to the impersonal mechanism of law. Questions of morals and values, for their part, are banished from the public arena. Seeing as such a society robs itself of all normative structures, it destroys the conditions for developing a sense of community and citizenship. Michéa thus appeals for the establishment of the socialist primacy of decency before that of justice. This also includes recognition of the fact that one should take seriously the lower classes in their insistence on decency, tradition, morals and order and understand these tendencies as potentially socialist and anti-economic virtues. Both totalitarianism and liberalism only ascribes egotistical calculation to the common man. This is because both are based on the same negative image of humans. While liberalism takes people "as they are", totalitarianism wants to create new humans. Yet, this negative image can become a self-fulfilling prophecy inasmuch as (neo)liberalism has now been training egoism for decades and has created a context in which egoism is recommended and is a generally accepted pattern of behaviour.
The great strength of the manifesto, in my view, lies in the fact that the above philosophies are not being handed down to Northern societies from the outside by the theoreticians of convivialism; they are already omnipresent, they simply need to be strengthened. Practically speaking, conviviality is in fact already being lived in a variety of social constellations: most notably in the context of family and friendships, in which the logic of the gift and not that of utilitarian calculation still counts. Outside of it, we see conviviality in hundreds of thousands of civic associative projects worldwide: in volunteering, the third sector, in the solidarity-based economy, in cooperatives and communes, in moral consumption, in NGOs, in peer-to-peer networks, Wikipedia, social movements, fair trade, the commons movement and many more (Caillé, Pour un manifeste 98-101). People are not only interested in themselves, they are also interested in others, they can stand up for others spontaneously and empathetically.
The cultural anthropologist David Graeber says that people are actually already living "communism" in their everyday manifestation of esteem, offering of aid and their non-calculated generosity. Even modern (capitalist) societies are built on a foundation of "communist relations" that is the fundament of human coexistence (Graeber). Relationships among family, friends and colleagues, spontaneous cooperations, friendly gestures and conversations -for Graeber, all of these are examples of an everyday communist morality that cannot be adequately grasped by utilitarian or normativist social theories. Whenever we are not keeping a tally of the exchange that took place, we are dealing with forms of giving, trust, community spirit, commitment, and love that are decoupled from the principle of do ut des.
Empirically speaking, this form of conviviality is currently under investigation in the area of multiculturalism. Present studies (e.g. Laurier and Philo; Wessendorf) are interested in how for example people in multi-ethnic districts structure and organise their cohabitation each and every day. It has been demonstrated here that there are a variety of practices of respectful dealings between people who have their origin precisely in the dispositions described by Caillé, Graeber and Michéa: "Conviviality is established in different routine practices of giving and taking, talking and sharing, exchanging news and goods and so on […]. The banal interactions across social and ethnic boundaries give a sense of togetherness" (Nowicka and Vertovec 346). Tensions and conflicts are not disregarded here, on the contrary: They occur permanently and must be negotiated and translated. In contrast to the concept of classical cosmopolitanism, it is not the elites who are the centre of analysis, but daily interactions, mainly in urban spaces, "where local residents engage in practices and discourses of living together, engaging with, confronting and embracing differences" (Heil 319). Conviviality represents in this sense a form of minimal sociality and minimal consensus that functions as a competence of intracultural, daily negotiation (cf. Adloff, Gifts of Cooperation 93-101). It is not a coincidence that in these discussions conceptual support is found in the Castilian term convivencia, which characterises the coexistence of Jews, Muslims and Christians in Spain in the Middle Ages (Costa).

Analytics and Normativity: A Model of (Mediated) Conviviality
The way convivial exchanges are organised par excellence is free association, in which the principle of non-remuneration, of reciprocal giving and taking come into effect (cf. Adloff, Gifts of Cooperation; Adloff, Politik der Gabe). Associative, civic self-organisation is decisive for the theory and practice of conviviality. Free exchange without remuneration, self-organised gathering can be seen as the basis of a convivial social order which is differentiated from a solely material and quantitative-monetarily defined version of an unsustainable prosperity and the good life. For Caillé and other convivialists, the following is crucial: One must not (as the traditional versions of socialism did) solely count on state institutions; political changes do not merely happen through parties and states. Even liberalism with its emphasis on markets overlooks the possibilities of societal self-organisation.
Convivial associations show an experimental moment and revolve around the question of how we want to live with one another -the quality of social relations and coexistence in the greater sense, or the question of how we want to organise society politically, are the central consideration. Here, social relations are not only seen as a means to an end, but above all also, from an anti-utilitarian point of view, as an end in themselves (Caillé, Anti-utilitarisme). Following concepts of civility and "civic action" (cf. Lichterman and Eliasoph), convivial practices are understood as not being limited to one sector (for instance civil society), but can be found in societal fields which aim to intentionally shape social change and social organisation, and at the same time to organise themselves primarily democratically and to imagine a current as well as a future desired "us": "Participants are coordinating action to improve some aspect of common life in society, as they imagine society" (809).
These practices differ in their aspects of self-organisation, reflexive forming and flexibility from practices in more rigid settings like organisational hierarchies and highly competitive market relations. Convivial practices at the same time primarily differ from the logic of functional differentiation, which identifies logics of action for societal functional systems that are very specific and selective in meaning (cf. Beckert). They moreover try to create modes of living that are not based on exclusivity and the externalisation of costs, but rather are socially and ecologically sustainable and generalisable (cf. Brand and Wissen,. Convivial ways of life are thus not primarily interest-based or oriented toward self-interest; they show a certain aversion both to hierarchies as well as market-based forms of socialisation. Conviviality is based on forms of self-organisation that can range from minimal standards of civility to forms of solidarity that hinge on relations of giving and respect towards human and non-human actors (cf. Adloff, Politik der Gabe 244-254).
To summarise this point and elevate it to the level of an analytical and normative model of conviviality, one must differentiate between various dimensions of conviviality which one can understand as a sort of graduated model on the way to a comprehensive, possibly never reachable conviviality. Conviviality requires minimal civil standards of nonviolence and tolerance of difference (a). Conviviality means forms of interaction in which people encounter people, and not mutual stereotyping; reifications and denigrative attributions of others are avoided (b). Conviviality stresses equality and self-organisation and calls for non-hierarchical and democratic forms of organisation (c). In convivial relations, one strives to not live at the expense of others (be it other people or non-humans), i.e. the externalisation of negative consequences of actions should be avoided (d).
This model of convivial cooperation is akin to John Dewey's concepts of self-fulfillment, of the public and democracy: For Dewey, we can all benefit-as individuals and as a collective-if we cooperate. Individual and collective creativity are mutually dependent for him. Individual self-realization for Dewey is only conceivable within the framework of democratic participation. A short look at Dewey's The Public and Its Problems helps to explore the significance of these thoughts. In his theory of democracy, Dewey does not proceed from the state, but from social actors and their actions. If the coaction of two or more actors does not affect third parties, this interaction is to be seen as private. If, however, uninvolved third parties are also affected by the interaction, from their perspective the need exists to influence the action, perhaps to stop it completely. In this case, the concept of the public emerges for Dewey: it consists of citizens who come to the conclusion, from a commonly experienced concern, that the questionable interactions of third parties must be controlled. Thus, it is a matter of the communication of all of those affected by the specific consequences of actions with the aim of perceiving, interpreting, and evaluating this, and to take it into consideration in the preparation of future actions. From this collective interpretation of consequences and self-government, the state eventually arises as a secondary form of association, with whose help the semipublic strives to solve overarching problems of social action coordination. For Dewey, the core of democracy is not the political debate as such-as it is later for Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas-but the communicative and practical problem-solving, practice-oriented collective impact assessment, in a word: cooperation, which is the lived practice of conviviality. That also involves cooperation with non-human actors and entities (nature and technology) as well as cooperation with coming generations of people. This is the princle of sustainability, which primarily comprises the norm not to realize the present's needs at the expense of future generations (as the Brundtland Report already pointed out in 1987).
However, the concept of conviviality should not be limited to the social realm of interactions between humans. Illich already included technologies in his analysis of conviviality. And convivialism, too, is not per se hostile to technology, but critical of non-convivial large-scale technical systems. These need to be reformed.
If one perceives culture and nature as diametrically opposed, one falls into the trap of rejecting every technique as instrumental and instead relying on a world mimesis that does completely without technique. Cultural criticism of technology usually laments the loss of human autonomy in the face of ever more extensive technical systems. According to current criticism (e.g., from the degrowth field, delivered by Niko Paech or Serge Latouche), technical means take on a life of their own and become an end in themselves. In this way humans become alienated from his manufactured means, for they gain power over him. In this view, it remains unclear whether technology always is inherently fateful or under which circumstances technology becomes problematic. From my point of view, this requires a concept of technology that firstly emphasizes that humans are always related to nature through technical tools and media, and secondly that the instrumental character of technology does not per se place us in a domination relationship with nature and with ourselves (Oberthür and Schulz).
Every contact with nature is conveyed by means of media, tools and techniques, so that one can say that humans practically establish their relationship with nature by means of technology -be it by means of the hammer, the plough, the cookware and the residential buildings or by means of GPS, smart phones and airplanes. Technical means are not in themselves synonymous with an instrumental world view and an instrumental understanding of nature. Technology is embedded in concrete socio-economic modes of production and culturally shaped practices. Our technology is first and foremost a capitalistically preformed technology that is calibrated for growth-promoting innovations and rationalizations. This understanding of technology is aiming at the control of nature and far from an alliance with non-human nature. However, alliance techniques could be called convivial.
Andrea Vetter and Benjamin Best put the rather general considerations of Illich into concrete terms by establishing criteria for a democratically controlled convivial technique. These are five levels: a) relationship quality, b) accessibility, c) adaptability, d) bio-interaction and e) resource intensity. Thus, these crucial questions have to be posed: To a): What kind of interaction does a technology promote? Is the use free, mandatory or hierarchically structured? To b): Is the technology open to all people, what knowledge is needed to produce and use the technology, is the knowledge open, secret or patented? On c): Can devices only be fitted into supraregional infrastructures or can they be used locally, can they be modularly expanded, can technology only be used in one way or in a variety of ways? To d): What risks does a technology entail, does it promote the lives of humans, plants and animals or not, can it be fed back into the ecological cycle? And to e): What resources are consumed by a device, are they renewable, and how durable is the technology?
The problem can be formulated in an even more abstract way. Large-scale technology such as transport, energy and communication systems, referred to by Peter Haff as technosphere, show such a high degree of autonomy that they largely elude human intentionality and influence. Peter Haff distinguishes between entities in stratum I (entities that are much smaller than human actors), stratum II (things that are directly accessible to humans via interaction) and stratum III (very large entities). Convivial would therefore be interactions on stratum II and those that allow translation between the three orders of magnitude without complete human loss of control.
Convivial techniques can be identified on the basis of these criteria. Nuclear power is therefore certainly not one of them, not even modern cars whose electronics can no longer be repaired by anyone him-or herself, which exceed all acceptable emission standards and dominate urban life to an excessive degree. Hubris is furthermore reflected in the current view that the Anthropocene offers a new opportunity to manage the Earth system as a whole in a positive sense. This reproduces the narrative of modernity that humankind could control nature and now even repair or readjust it -for example through geoengineering. This narrative can be found in the Earth system sciences (for example in Paul Crutzen or Will Steffen) or among the ecomodernists around the Breakthrough Institute (cf. Bonneuil, Philipps).
In contrast, the Fairphone is rather a convivial technological device than the iPhone. Further examples would include forms of open design, such as open-source construction plans for agricultural machinery or houses. The commons movement is a good example for creating convivial techniques. Commons are characterized by four principles (Habermann): They can be used, but they are not owned. Commons can therefore not be sold. Second, users of commons share their knowledge, their competences and their skills with each other. Thirdly, they all contribute to a common good, they do not exchange individual contributions. Thus, not one quantifiable value is exchanged for another. So here we are dealing with gifts par excellence. In addition, the fourth principle is the voluntary nature and free access to the necessary resources.
Wikipedia is a good example of digital commons. It is based solely on voluntary unpaid work, is accessible to all, and if a few rules are followed, anyone can contribute to Wikipedia's knowledge base. Wikipedia proves that commons are capable of building the best online encyclopedia and that decentralized and discursive cooperation on a voluntary basis is possible. In Wikipedia, gift practices and a socio-technical system (the Wiki technology) are intertwined in a convivial way. In contrast, platforms such as Facebook or Google, which also offer their services free of charge to everyone, but in return carry out an indirect and unequal exchange. They collect user data and sell it to advertisers (Big Data), which has led to ethical discussions about data protection issues and targeted advertising manipulation. The gift here is technologically and systematically interwoven with the commodity and enables immense profits. The classic concept of exploitation does not get us very far in the analysis of this phenomenon (cf. Elder-Vass). We rather observe a technologically driven asymmetry in the control of data which allows for abusing the control over user data.
The fact that the socio-economic conditions of capitalism run counter to the principles of convivial technology is of great importance here. For more than 100 years now, the mastery of nature through technology has been legitimized by the growing productivity of the economy, the technical innovations that go hand in hand with it and the expansion of the consumer society. Since the nineteenth century, there has been an interdependence between science and technology, which has contributed enormously to the acceleration of technical-economic rationalization. Technology and science have become (through the scientification of technology) the most important productive force. It is no longer the ordinary labour force but scientific and technological progress that has become an independent source of surplus value (Habermas). The innovation dynamics of the capitalist economic order are based on the constant search for new capital investment opportunities, integrating obsolescence into appliances increases consumption, resources continue to be wasted excessively and patents secure manufacturing rights.
In contrast, one should aim for a new attitude towards nature and, connected with this, a new understanding of technology. According to Herbert Marcuse, for instance, nature should no longer be regarded as an object of technical control, but rather as a possible interaction partner. A new interaction model would attribute subjectivity and forms of agency to nature and we would interact with animals and plants instead of instrumentally processing them. Convivial technology and science can only emerge under the conditions of such a radical change in mentality and socio-economic conditions. To put it in a nutshell: Only a post-utilitarian and post-capitalist society can make technical conviviality possible.
In such a model of conviviality, the social sciences would be left with the task of empirically identifying various forms of conviviality and asking what the preconditions of these forms are. Yet it would be just as important to analyse what stands in the way of different forms of conviviality among humans and between humans and non-humans. The convivialist manifesto in particular points to a ubiquitous utilitarian culture which undermines forms of conviviality. This may be an important dimension, yet one will still be able to identify many more causes -if they are sought empirically and analytically -as to why human proclivity to and ability of conviviality is hindered again and again by all kinds of institutional orders.