Work vs. Labor in the Digital AgeDraft

Last updated August 2026

After one of my late nights writing my Master's thesis, I had a bad dream. I was "undoing" a large passage of writing through the Cmd+Z keyboard shortcut to see a previous iteration of the idea I was working through. My plan was to undo until that point, see what I wrote, then "redo" (Cmd+Y) several times to get back to the present. However, in this dream, after undoing my work, I accidentally hit a key and typed a letter, removing my ability to return to my most recent writing. I dreamt of frantically checking my document's version history for what felt like hours, searching through every version for my lost passage, to no avail.

When I woke up, I laughed about how despairing I had been in my dream. I forgot that beyond the mechanical memory of my computer's version history, I had my own powerful mind. I wasted so much energy and time looking for that lost version; a better use of those dream hours would have been to attempt rewriting what I had lost. Even if it was not the same version, it would be close or perhaps better. The ideas, after all, are in my head and not in my tool.

My waking reflection illuminates a key feature—and challenge—of technology: it is an appendage meant to augment our lives and make them easier, but its use can make us dependent. While the version history function allowed me to iterate without friction, I began to rely on the medium to hold my thinking for me. When the tool did not work as I intended and I lost the safety net of the technology, I was incapacitated.

Losing this personal agency in my dream exemplifies what philosopher Ivan Illich described in 1973 as the erosion of "conviviality." In his book Tools for Conviviality, he defines conviviality as "individual freedom realized in personal interdependence" (Illich 11), a quality that technology needs to nurture human flourishing. In my dream, I spent hours on what Illich would call "labor" (32), or trying to operate an external system to reap what I wanted. What I could have done instead is what Illich defines as "independent work" (32), or responding to my situation with an effort of personal ingenuity: not relying on outside appendages or proxies, but accepting my circumstance as inspiration to create my ideas anew. For Illich, non-convivial tools atrophy our agency for independent work—to be imaginative and ingenious, the very qualities from which new technology is born.

<<This distinction between work and labor turns out to be one of Illich's most useful ideas, and it's worth sitting with directly.>>

Illich sees "fully satisfying, imaginative, and independent work" (32) as the enjoyment of making the "most of the energy and imagination each has" (10), while labor commodifies this personal energy to operate within an existing system. Take for example the work versus labor of teachers: while the work of a teacher—co-interpreting knowledge with a student—can manifest in countless ways due to variation in possible goals and methods in any teacher-student pairing, the labor of a teacher in modern schooling is as a constrained operator of a professional curriculum. In my dream about version history, trusting my own memory and imagination would be considered independent work, whereas hunting through my document history is what Illich would consider an act of institutional labor. In short, Illich seeks to empower people to persistently recognize "the legitimacy of personal conflict" (51) between work of "personal vocation" and labor of "standardized profession" (35), and question whether the labor we take on is meaningful.

<<I think about this distinction often now, in dreams and otherwise: when am I doing the work of thinking for myself, and when have I quietly outsourced it to a tool that only pretends to think for me?>>

✽