Jason Hickel is one of the leading voices in the degrowth/postgrowth movement, and recently laid out his thoughts on the relationship between degrowth and technology. He raises a number of important arguments to take forward into our own arguments around digital degrowth:

#1. Degrowth is not anti-technology! Degrowth embraces the idea of necessary technology development

Despite the negative implications of the term, Hickel reminds us that ‘degrowth’ is not an anti-technology argument. Proponents of degrowth are not pushing to drastically reduce (or completely eradicate) all forms of technology use via some sort of ‘back to nature’ agenda. Neither is degrowth thinking preoccupied solely with social and economic change, and somehow tuned-out from conversations about technology altogether.

Instead, Hickel makes a strong case for degrowth as profoundly interested in the part that technology can play in addressing ecological and societal crises. The key caveat is that degrowth emphasises that new technological developments cannot perpetuate the ecological and social harms already associated with contemporary technology innovation. Moreover, any new technology development must go hand-in-hand with the wider decoupling of society from capitalist growth. In this sense, technology can be an important element – but not a driving force – of future transitions to degrowth:

“In fact, degrowth scholarship embraces technological change and efficiency improvements, to the extent (crucially) that these are empirically feasible, ecologically coherent, and socially just. But it also recognizes that this alone will not be enough: economic and social transformations are also necessary, including a transition out of capitalism”.

#2. Green-growth technologies are not a solution

In this sense, degrowth tackles issues of technology in a very different way to mainstream thinking around technology and the environment – particularly arguments for developing ‘green-growth’ technologies (such as BECCS) as a means of mitigating the worse problems of excessive carbon consumption and climate collapse.

Hickel reminds us of the major flaws underpinning the idea of green-growth technology – not least the unproven and speculative nature of these proposals. From a degrowth perspective, these are self-serving industry manoeuvres to protect the continued development of new extractive and harmful technologies. Put simply, there is no guarantee that technologies such as BECCS will ever achieve their stated goals of reducing carbon emissions. Even if some of these green technology developments do prove to work, it is highly unlikely that they can reduce carbon emissions anywhere near the levels required to make a noticeable difference to global climate collapse.

Moreover, in focusing on the reduction of carbon emissions, Hickel reminds us that these green technology result in all manner of other environmental harms – such as land grabs, increased deforestation, soil depletion, water depletion, biodiversity loss, and other ecosystem damages. Finally, in the event that these technologies fail to achieve their imagined future reductions (for either technical or political reasons), then we will find ourselves trapped in an even worse predicament than before – as Hickel puts it, “locked into a high-temperature trajectory from which it will be impossible to escape”.

In addition to these significant red flags, Hickel also calls out the profoundly colonialist connotations of developing green growth solutions in order to safeguard the continued use of technologies in Global North regions. He argues that the majority of resource impositions of green growth technologies involve “extraordinary levels of material extraction” from Global South regions, while diverting efforts away from supporting increased levels of technology innovation in these regions. In other words, green growth technology is based around the colonialist idea that technology growth in rich countries should be maintained at the expense of the Global South.

#3. Degrowth pushes for the decoupling of technology production from capitalism

All told, Hickel dismisses green growth as rooted in magical thinking that already exorbitantly high level of technology consumption in the Global North can somehow continue to grow even more. This is surely not the basis for a progressively-minded response to our current predicament!

In contrast, degrowth pushes for decoupling technology development from imperatives of capitalist growth. This first implies the reduction of all technology that is clearly destructive and/or ‘less necessary’ to the wellbeing of people and the planet. This includes cutting back forms of production that are clearly environmentally harmful – such as private jets, industrial beef, commercial air travel, SUVs, military weapons, cruise ships and so on. This also includes cutting back forms of production that exist mostly to further capital accumulation and elite consumption – such as advertising, fast fashion, and dramatically reducing the purchasing power of the rich.

At the same time, degrowth thinking pushes for refocusing technology development toward forms of technology use that can support transition out of capitalism. This most immediately involves emphasising technologies that support the principle of ‘wellbeing for all’ as opposed to the mindless accumulation of capital. Examples here include the development of technologies that can support degrowth policy goals such as wealth redistribution, reductions in working time, and the scaling-back of less-necessary forms of production. Technologies can also be deployed in support of the establishment of universal public services and the mass redeployment of people toward state-sponsored environmental work.

Finally, degrowth is certainly supportive of developing technologies that might address the ecological crisis without leading to increases in aggregate growth. In this sense, degrowth is certainly supportive of technologies such as solar panels, insulation, battery technology, recycling, and so on. Yet unlike current ‘green growth’ technology proposals, any of these desirable advances in technological efficiency must be also focused on improving levels of sufficiency and equity. In this sense, the pursuit of transition to electric vehicles might be a feasible degrowth action if accompanied by efforts to scale back the private ownership of cars and expand improved forms of public transport.

#4. Degrowth will actually encourage different and expanded forms of technological progress

All told, it can be strongly argued that degrowth might well prove to be more technologically expansive and innovative than current forms of capitalist technology production. Indeed, Hickel points out that the pursuit of profit and capitalist growth imperatives actually work to stymy genuine technological progress. For example, it is simply not profitable to pursue various forms of technology innovation that might support social progress. There is relatively little money to be made from working to innovate in areas such as public transport, medicine for poor regions, or repairable devices. As a result, the capitalist logic currently pushes some of the world’s smartest minds to be employed in the development of advertising algorithms and online clickbait. So much for the blue skies ambitions and out-of-the-box thinking of the commercial sector!

Instead, Hickel argues that technology development would benefit from being freed from the strictures of commercial imperative and corporate interest, and instead having forms of public/democratic ownership imposed over technology financing, funding and innovation. Increased public investment and democratic oversight would ensure that technology development is organised explicitly around social and ecological objectives. This could stimulate, for example, the innovation of technologies that meet the needs of currently underserved populations and that genuinely work in the interests of the public good. This could also encourage the innovative rediscovery of old techniques and tools for the twenty-first century. As Hickel puts it:

“Our understanding of what counts as technology should not be limited to complex machinery. Sometimes simpler technologies are more effective, more efficient, and more democratic: bicycles, for instance, are an incredibly powerful technology for helping to decarbonize urban transport, and agroecological methods are vital to restoring soil fertility”.

CONCLUSIONS

All told, Hickel makes a strong case for degrowth as a pathway to achieving the forms of technological support most suitable for the social and environmental challenges of the mid twenty-first century. Degrowth is not anti-technology, but is certainly opposed to technology that is harmful and excessive. In this sense, degrowth offers a roadmap to rethinking the nature of what we understand by technological progress and innovation in our current era:

“the public debate about degrowth founders on a false dichotomy. The real conflict is not between technology and anti-technology. It is about how technology is imagined and the conditions under which it is deployed. Degrowth research makes a strong claim to having a more scientific (and more just) approach to technological visions”

In making these all arguments, Hickel takes an understandably broad view of technology – from heat pumps to trains. From this point onwards, the key focus of the present book will be to reflect on how these principles might be applied to the specific domain of digital technologies … a far more thorny question than it might first appear!

REFERENCE

Hickel, J. (2023). On technology and degrowth. Monthly Review, 75(3) July/August, https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/mr/article/view/6222