Upsetting the Offset - Transnational Institute

Upsetting the Offset
how to build and pedal powered electricity generators and other low-carbon
technologies. Their pedal powered and bike-mounted sound systems and
cinema projectors, as well as their portable workshop, have also become a part
of the infrastructure that enables more conventional protest events like Climate
Camps.
Cycles of Conviviality
Groups like Bicycology, or Carlsson’s ‘outlaw’ bicyclists, show that the bicycle
can be what Ivan Illich called a ‘tool for conviviality’. Illich defined conviviality
as a term
to designate the opposite of industrial productivity… to mean anutonomous and
creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their
environment. 22
Illich contrasts the industrial system of production, which produces
homogeneity and allows personal expression only through consumption, with
‘conviviality’, which combines human interdependence and individual freedom.
For Illich, industrial machinery is much more than just a ‘tool’. Precisely because
it measures the value of a tool in quantitative terms – how fast, how many, how
cheaply – industrial capitalism can only recognize a tool as a means to the
efficient achievement of ends. Illich’s ‘convivial’ approach to evaluating tools, in
contrast, emphasizes the kinds of relations they make possible and the kinds of
human beings and social relations that they presuppose. Mass industrial society
necessitates disciplined, docile subjects and has developed a complex system of
compulsory schooling in order to produce these subjects 23 , who, in turn, are
able to fit unproblematically into an efficient tool of production: the
manufactory, bureaucracy or business corporation. In order to maximize utility,
individual, or collective autonomous, expression and desire must be
subordinated to the broader goals of a pre-determined system.
As automobility is the exemplar of industrial production, requiring
disciplined producers to man the factories and disciplined consumers to
purchase and drive cars, so bicycology is opposed to this industrial system,
inculcating individual independence from impersonal systems of production and
transport by actively producing interpersonal forms of free association, with
direct intercourse with the environment. As part of a broader network of social
and technical relations, the bicycle can become a tool for conviviality but this
potential is not essential to the technology itself. It depends upon a much
broader set of social relations to actualize it.
Conclusion: From Technical Fix to Conviviality
What this chapter has hopefully demonstrated is that technologies are never
straightforwardly technical. Attempts to solve the problem of climate change
with innovations like carbon capture and storage, off-setting, hybrid and
hydrogen-powered automobiles, or even bicycles, will not change the
fundamentally social dynamics that have created the current climate crisis. This
crisis is the product of a broader technical and social system in which the
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