While growth is generally understood as an economic ideology to be addressed by restructuring the economy, Illich saw growth as technological. Beyond a certain tipping point, technology transcends from a tool humans use to satisfy their needs, to end in itself. This “end” is fulfilled by making humans “means” – shaping them to fit the technology. This perspective shapes Illich’s criticism of computing technologies, which contrasts those of many proponents of degrowth who consider open-source and open-access to be potential new commons.

Although there is a tendency for degrowth proponents to ignore or accept immaterial technologies (like schooling or healthcare systems) as necessary or benign, Illich centred these technologies in his critique of growth. He argued that there are technologies that are inherently destructive, regardless of who uses them and how. These “manipulating tools” replace people’s “native capacities”- to travel on foot, to learn, to care for one another, to communicate and to know. The car restructures the city in its image, restricting the (formerly free) movement of pedestrians. The school shapes students to reproduce the system as it is, and prevents students from shaping the school to meet their need to learn. Each human capacity is removed from the autonomy of the individual, professionalised and standardised.

Further, people are “disembodied” as they are integrated into systems, their self-perceptions and subjectivities manipulated to fit. The hospital defines health and disciplines bodies accordingly, and people relinquish their capacity to feel their own health within their bodies and decide what it means to be “healthy”. Cybernetics replace the diversity of face-to-face interaction with abstracted communication, with people as data within a pre-defined digital system. People outsource knowledge to computer systems, and so no longer know themselves and their surroundings directly from their senses. Computing technology does not represent the revival of the commons, but further encroachment on users’ freedom.

Limits to technological growth, then, are needed in defence of “the vernacular” – people’s existing capacity to meet their own needs. These capacities can be enhanced with tools, provided they deemed appropriate upon critical reflection, and are decided upon autonomously from the mind-altering technologies which shape people in their own image.

Read more (paywall/institutional access): Tools for degrowth? Ivan Illich’s critique of technology revisited, Silja Samerski, 2018

Abstract: “Based on the works of Ivan Illich, this article reformulates growth not as the result of a certain economic imperative or ideology, but as a question of technology – namely as a historically unique relation of humans to their instruments. This sheds new light on a key question of degrowth, namely what to limit, and how and why. First, it emphasizes not the ecological, but the social harms of growth, namely the paralyzing and disembodying effects of modern technologies, be they high speed trains, smartphones or health care services… Second, it argues that degrowth, if it does not want to degenerate into an alternative strategy with which to manage scarce resources, has to seek limits to all manipulative tools, be they digital technologies or social technologies. These limits, if they are to be meaningful, cannot be defined by experts or determined by ecological indices, but have to be rooted in the common will to defend a vernacular and convivial sphere against industrial and technological encroachment. Thirdly, based on Ivan Illich’s later work on the way contemporary technologies shape bodily experience, it calls for the cultivation of a technological ascesis, that is a critical distancing from the symbolic effects of mind-boggling tools such as the computer that increasingly shape self-perception and subjectivity…”

Traditional housing for chickens in Zembe, Mozambique. By Ton Rulkens – Traditional housing 2, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Global sustainability requires large-scale reductions in rich world per capita resource use rates. Globalised, industrialised and commercialised supply paths involve high resource, energy, dollar and other costs. However, “The Simpler Way” involving small-scale integrated localised settlements and economies can enable enormous reductions in these costs. This study uses input–output analysis of one product, eggs, to illustrate how big the difference between the two paths can be.

The industrial path results in a dollar cost at the supermarket check-out that is at least twenty times that of the local path if a labour cost is included, and 100 times if one is not. The multiple for energy costs when the industrial total ends at the factory out-gate is about 166 kJ/4.3 kJ = 39/1. A complete account which added the energy costs of waste disposal and transport from the supermarket to the household, etc. might raise the cost for the industrial path to above 1.5 MJ per egg, i.e., to the region of 350 times the energy cost for the alternative path.

This study provides a concrete illustration of the large savings that can be associated with production in small scale, highly self-sufficient and cooperative local economies. It draws attention to the rarely recognised “diseconomies of scale”. In complex, multi-functional and integrated local economies the close proximity of productive activities along with informal networks of communication and production enable many functions to be carried out easily and spontaneously, eliminating the need for many intermediary functions, industries and costs.

Often outputs such as manures can immediately become valued inputs to other activities, many tasks and problems can be dealt with informally with minimal need for equipment, and many functions such as transport and warehousing can become unnecessary. Design can ensure that elements perform overlapping and multiple functions. For instance forest gardens can provide wind breaks,fruit, vegetables, grazing, honey, dyes and perfumes, leisure resources, habitat for birds that feed on garden pests, roofing shingles, chemicals such as eucalyptus and creosote, mulch, sawn timber and firewood. Familiar informal communication and sharing networks involving multi-skilled citizen performance of many functions can enable rapid action at little or no material cost.

The implications for sustainable development are profound. If the findings of this study are sound and generalizable the Simpler Way would enable very large reductions in resource and ecological impacts for sustainability to be achieved, but only if extremely radical changes are made in economic, political and cultural systems. With respect to Third World “development”, our results reinforce the emerging alternative view which seeks to avoid the dominant capital-intensive trickle-down approach and explores the potential of local, sufficient, cooperative, participatory, resource-cheap and frugal ways.

“We know there were civilizations that flourished in periods where they did not necessarily expand economically. Greece in the classical period would be an example. And many civilizations tried to put limits on how much money an individual could accumulate, or how much money you can lend, or interest rates. We have examples where we know society tried to limit and tame this self-perpetuating character of growth. And we know there are societies that flourished without having constant growth.”

“The easy but stupid critique to that is, “Oh, you want us to go back and be like hunter-gatherers or live like the Romans?” No, that’s not the point. We’re not saying look at how other civilizations are better, we’re saying let’s study other civilizations to get ideas about how things could potentially work differently in our society”.

Do you think we’ll get this figured out in time?

“I’m not optimistic. To think that tomorrow people will wake up and come to their senses and realize that climate change is a huge problem and economic growth is unnecessary, and take action on that? No, I don’t think this will happen. But this doesn’t make me a pessimist. History has always been dire. I don’t think I’d be better off living 100 years ago, having two world wars in front of me, or facing famines. History never stops, and constantly there’s a moment of fighting for things to be better.”

“The last 200 years, we lived in a capitalist society where growth is fundamental for the stability of the system. Maybe there is no alternative, and the only way is to have growth. If this is becoming catastrophic, what do we do? Do we bow our heads to catastrophe, to disaster, or can we think outside of that? We know that we humans are very inventive. Why can’t we think of alternatives? Why is this the only thing where we can’t think differently?”

Bitcoin is back in the spotlight these days thanks to some wild price movements and central bank meetings. The decentralized currency has recently been trading over its all-time high of $1200 on some exchanges. But the higher the price goes, the more it exacerbates bitcoin’s dark side: shocking levels of electricity consumption.

In 2015, I wrote that bitcoin had a big sustainability problem. Back then, each bitcoin transaction represented roughly enough electricity to power 1.57 American households for a day— approximately 5,000 times more energy-intensive than a credit card transaction. Since it’s been two years, it’s time for an update.

Updated calculations with optimistic assumptions show that in a best-case hypothetical, each bitcoin transaction is backed by approximately 90 percent of an American household’s daily average electricity consumption. So even though that’s still about 3,994 times as energy-intensive as a credit card transaction, things could be getting better since 2015.

Unfortunately, it’s more likely that things are getting worse. A new index has recently modeled potential energy costs per transaction as high as 94 kWh, or enough electricity to power 3.17 households for a day. To put it another way, that’s almost enough energy to fully charge the battery of a Tesla Model S P100D, the world’s quickest production car, and drive it over 300 miles.

Read more: A Single Bitcoin Transaction Takes Thousands of Times More Energy Than a Credit Card Swipe, Christopher Malmo. Thanks to Renaud d’Avout d’Auerstaedt.

The book also features debates and exchanges between Kallis and degrowth detractors. In defense of degrowth is intended as an introduction for the curious, a defense against the skeptics, and an intellectually stimulating conversation for those already convinced but willing to learn more.”

In Defense of Degrowth can be downloaded as a free e-book.

Read more: Against Sharing. Thanks to Sarah.

Building on statistical analysis of the built fabric of three major American cities [San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.], the research demonstrates that established neighborhoods with a mix of older, smaller buildings perform better than districts with larger, newer structures when tested against a range of economic, social, and environmental outcome measures.”

“Older, Smaller, Better. Measuring how the character of buildings and blocks influences urban vitality“, National Trust for Historic Preservation, May 2014. Via Lloyd Alter.

“By calculating raw material equivalents of international trade, we demonstrate that countries’ use of nondomestic resources is, on average, about threefold larger than the physical quantity of traded goods. As wealth grows, countries tend to reduce their domestic portion of materials extraction through international trade, whereas the overall mass of material consumption generally increases.”

“Our findings call into question the sole use of current resource productivity indicators in policy making and suggest the necessity of an additional focus on consumption-based accounting for natural resource use.”

Read more: The material footprint of nations, Thomas O. Wiedmann, Heinz Schandl, Manfred Lenzen, Daniel Moran, Sangwon Suh, James West, and Keiichiro Kanemoto, in PNAS 2013. Open Access. Via Klimaatblog.

Read more: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed. Thanks to Bori.

“As far as economists are concerned, this is a tragedy and a disaster. And yet, the lights are still on, everything still works. Literacy is high, and crime is low. Life expectancy is better than almost anywhere on earth – 82 years to the US’ 78. The trains run to the second. Unemployment is only 5%, and levels of inequality are enviable. So maybe Japan isn’t a failure. Maybe it’s just ahead of its time – not ‘stagnating’, but settling into the plateau of ‘enough’.” Read.