Last Friday's TGIF was a special one, it marked the start of two weeks of vacation🕺
Time to finally dive into a gift I recently bought for myself: Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich. The book was first published in 1973, the year I was born.
You Are Not Immune To Nostalgia
Towards the end of the last century I discovered the early Internet and hand-coded one of the first websites for a youth movement in Flanders, Belgium. It didn't take long before I knew that this was the world where I wanted to build my professional career.
The Internet opened up an entirely new world where people could find each other and where anyone could publish something of their own thanks to open standards. Those standards were co-created by Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau.
Robert Cailliau was the driving force behind CERN's decision to release the work of himself and Tim Berners-Lee into the public domain on April 30, 1993. The term "open source" didn't even exist yet. Public domain literally meant: "belongs to no one".
A few months ago, I came across this article by Henry Desroches
"the internet is bad"
"it wasn’t always like this"
"you are not immune to nostalgia"
Yep. He had me from the start 😅
More importantly, that article led me to Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich.
That early Internet of the nineties was what Ivan Illich would have called a convivial tool.
In his book he distinguishes between two kinds of tools: (1) tools that empower people, tools anyone can use, modify and share and (2) tools that make people dependent, where experts and companies set the rules.
Illich used the term "Conviviality" to describe a society in which people remain in control of technology, rather than technology controlling people.
The Internet I fell in love with embodied exactly that idea. Anyone could publish. Anyone could connect. The protocols were open, and innovation emerged from that freedom. The Internet was a shared tool.
Today, it feels fundamentally different.
A handful of technology companies increasingly decide what we read, what we discover and what we buy. Our identities, our social relationships and our data are locked inside closed platforms. The Internet no longer feels like it belongs to us, we've become commercial assets inside ecosystems designed primarily to serve big tech companies and tech bros' interests/wallets.
The Other Way Around
Ivan Illich wasn't writing about the Internet at all. In 1973, the Web didn't even exist. Yet his analysis is so universal that it still feels remarkably relevant more than fifty years later.
Instead of designing and using tools to build a society, our society changes to adapt to the demands of our tools.
Illich wasn't opposed to technology. He opposed technology that undermines human autonomy: systems that become so large and complex that people have to adapt themselves to the technology instead of the other way around.
Last year I discovered Bluesky and, through it, the AT Protocol, which has already proven itself at scale by supporting more than 45 million users. Sharing much of the same vision as Tim Berners-Lee's Solid initiative, it currently focuses on public data, while its 2026 roadmap includes support for permissioned (private) data.
It has been a long time since I've been genuinely excited about new technology 👀
AT Protocol is about much more than social media. It is a fundamental addition to the Internet that reconnects with the principles on which the Web was originally built.
Just as Robert Cailliau helped make the Web a public good in 1993, work is now underway to standardize AT Protocol through the IETF as an open Internet standard.
The protocol is the foundation, but the real innovation happens on top of it: by all of us, across the AT Protocol ecosystem, in what is becoming known as The Atmosphere.
The Atmosphere creates an Internet where your account gives you access to many applications. Where you decide which apps can access your network and your data, where you can switch applications at any time without losing your identity, your network or your content.
Just as the late 1990s created an opportunity for a new Internet economy, I hope we may be standing at the beginning of another one, this time with people, not platforms, at its center.
The real challenge will be turning that hope into reality.
So, this isn't just another book for me ...
Fifty years ago, in the year I was born, Ivan Illich asked a fundamental question:
Do we build technology that empowers people, or technology to which people must adapt?
That question is more relevant today than ever.
The Internet I fell in love with 30 years ago, together with everything happening today around The Atmosphere, makes this feel like a true full-circle moment. So I'm delighted to have found an original 1973 edition 😊
The book smells a little musty after more than fifty years, but Illich's analysis is fresher than ever. So far, I've only encountered him through the quotes and references that keep resurfacing. I'm looking forward to finally discovering the full argument behind them.