Digital Degrowth: Technology in the Age of Survival

Digital Degrowth

"Digital Degrowth addresses new challenges emerging from the digitalisation of every sector of our lives, impacting our sovereignty and democracy. A vital book for anyone concerned about justice and equality, and about the limitless extraction of the Earth’s resources to support the technologies of limitless greed and limitless growth."

—Vandana Shiva, environmental activist

This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to know the brutal truth of digital colonialism driven by the American Empire. Don’t get deceived by the American tech ‘left’ who is actually funded by billionaires. The true left vision of the future is digital degrowth.

—Kohei Saito, author of Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

"Digital Degrowth pulls back the curtain to reveal the starkly naked machinery of imperial wizards and corporations that lack care and compassion. Our collective battles for ‘ecosocialist degrowth’ will reflect war resistance that protects our contaminated lives and challenges corporate extraction preying upon biological, mineral, and spiritual life. This text is a must-read manual for upgrading your security zones."

—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition and editor of Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons

Synthetic and encyclopedic, Michael Kwet surveys the landscape of US monopoly power in the global technology sector, traces the capillaries containing the capital and cobalt flowing from core to periphery, periphery to core, required to fuel that power and the way of life it accompanies, and delivers a map to ending it. A must-read.

—Max Ajl, author of A People’s Green New Deal

"As resistance movements around the world evolve, the question of ‘resistance against what and who’ has gained renewed importance. Digital Degrowth forces us to look at America’s tech empire critically to inform a new wave of resistance led by today’s youth. Kwet explains the problems clearly and provides solutions that directly impact the climate change debate. It’s a must-read and call to action for activists and activist communities in all sectors of society."

—Itumeleng Moabi, Fees Must Fall activist and resistance movement archivist

"All too often scholarship identifies crises without offering resolutions. In Digital Degrowth, Kwet provides compelling solutions for organized transformation essential for a just and sustainable digital economy. A masterful scholarly contribution on the digital economy and the ecological collapse that humanity confronts in the years to come."

—Immanuel Ness, Professor of Political Science, City University of New York

Lucidly written and easy to read, Kwet provides the most important big picture analysis of the digital society to date. Given the challenges we have facing us, we need to shift our understanding of and relationship to digital technologies away from docile consumerism towards empowering people to take an active role in its development and use. Essential reading for the general public and activists alike.

—Joshua Dávila, author of Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It

Kwet’s critically important book forces us to confront the morbid symptoms characterising our contemporary conjuncture by outlining the stupidity of accelerating towards extinction unless we smarten up and confront the technophilic elite and reclaim science and technology for the people.

—Rasigan Maharajh, Institute for Economic Research on Innovation, Tshwane University of Technology

"Digital Degrowth takes an in-depth look at the unsustainable and unethical practice of digital colonialism perpetuated by Big Tech and the Western economies on the Global South. Through meticulous research, Kwet tackles an important, and hitherto ignored, topic, namely the role of Big Tech in climate change."

—Ramesh Subramanian, Gabriel Ferrucci Professor of Business Analytics and Information Systems, Quinnipiac University

In loving memory of my Yiayia and Papou,

Edward and Lillian Basel.

First published 2024 by Pluto Press

New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA and Pluto Press, Inc.

1930 Village Center Circle, 3-834, Las Vegas, NV 89134

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Michael Kwet 2024

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material in this book. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in this respect and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions.

The right of Michael Kwet to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 0 7453 4986 2   Paperback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4988 6   PDF

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Contents

Figures and Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.   Digital Colonialism

2.   What is Degrowth?

3.   Digital Degrowth

4.   Cloud Colonialism

5.   Digital Ecocide

6.   The Big Tech Military Machine

7.   Surveil and Punish

8.   People’s Tech and a Digital Tech Deal

9.   Taking Action

Notes

Index

List of Figures and Tables

FIGURES

2.1   Continuous GDP growth is irrational

2.2   GDP and material footprint

2.3   The doughnut for justice and sustainability

3.1   Material footprint by country income brackets

3.2   Climate financing: debt, grants, and loans

3.3   National responsibility for ecological breakdown: a fair-shares assessment of resource use, 1970–2017

3.4   Millionaires by country

3.5   The grotesque wealth of Jeff Bezos

4.1   Amazon’s development project on indigenous land in Cape Town

4.2   Semiconductor market share by country

4.3   Semiconductor supply chain by country

5.1   The Green Revolution and agricultural output

5.2   Agroecological modeling

5.3   The flow of PBDE emissions

5.4   E-waste flows from North to South

5.5   E-waste at the Agbogbloshie dump in Ghana

6.1   Microsoft’s military ecosystem

7.1   Student protests in South Africa

7.2   Number of environmental defenders murdered per continent, 2015–18

7.3   Residential inequality in Johannesburg

7.4   Microsoft and Youth 360 for child prisons

7.5   Border walls built between 1968 and 2015

9.1   Global endowment assets

TABLES

1.1   100 Largest Public Corporations by Sector and Country 19

1.2   Top 943 Tech Corporations by Country

1.3   Domestic vs Foreign Revenue Among Top US and Chinese Tech Corporations

1.4   Ownership of Global Technology Startup Economy by Country

3.1   Top 50 Mining Corporations (Global)

3.2   National Overshoot for Climate Breakdown

3.3   Carbon Emissions of Big Tech

3.4   The Carbon Footprint of Consumption by Class

3.5   The Ten Richest Individuals in the World by Net Worth

4.1   Top Cloud Computing Companies by Country

4.2   The Market Inside Cloud Computing Centers

4.3   Streaming Video-on-Demand Platforms: US vs China

5.1   Revenues of Top 88 Agribusiness Corporations Worldwide

Acknowledgments

This book extends back half a decade. At the time, I had just completed my doctoral dissertation, Digital Colonialism: South Africa’s Education Transformation in the Shadow of Silicon Valley, at Rhodes University in South Africa. I began to think about how degrowth—the notion that planetary boundaries require us to abandon a way of life premised on the domination of nature and limitless growth—relates to the digital society. For me, this was a game-changer: everything about society has to be re-designed, quickly. We have a limited window of opportunity to push for radical equality, which must be achieved in this lifetime, or we’re toast.

This book’s narrative challenges the status quo at the core of our being, from big corporations and nation-states all the way down to the relationships we have with each other in our everyday lives. At present, we live in a world of bosses and subordinates, owners and the dispossessed. The bosses include members of the self-professed radical left. They accumulate and command the power and wealth in every major institution, from the corporate retail chain to the university. And they are intent on keeping it that way.

In this book, I’ve chosen to do what I’m responsible to do—tell the truth. As someone new to be being a professional intellectual, I’ve quickly seen how the professional part can all-too-easily take over people’s minds and ambitions. I learned that a small minority of intellectuals make big money, while most others are struggling to get by. There are pressures to sell out, to kiss up to bigger names, to suppress your speech and behavior. Writings become a commodity for sale in a marketplace where the more popular you are, the more perks you receive. Colleagues start chasing influence. They want citations and followers, tied to the perks, including salaries reaching several hundred thousand dollars or more. Opinions about politics become sports commentary on the lives of the poor and oppressed. Many (especially Western) professional intellectuals across the identity spectrum have lives of privilege with little or no skin in the game.

Every day, I try to stay as far away from this thinking as possible. What is written in this book is serious. We are in a real, deep emergency, and we need to tell the truth with no filter.

Swimming against the tide is no easy task. This is why I want to thank, first and foremost, my loving parents, Linda Basel Kwet and Fred Kwet, for their support over the years. We are from a middle class background. Without their gracious and ongoing financial and emotional support, I wouldn’t have been able to survive as an academic to this point. I also want to thank my friends, too numerous to list. Some of them include Sohrob Kazerounian, Jonathan Oronzo, Itumeleng Moabi, Grace Nyambosi, Sanele Khakhu, Thabo Motshweni, and my kind and loving dog, Lily Kwet. I want to give special thanks my mother, Linda Basel Kwet, for her daily conversations with me about the topic, as well as Agnes Oberauer, who reviewed the manuscript in detail with outstanding feedback. Last but not least, I want to thank the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg for supporting this work, as well as Pluto Press for bringing the book to publication.

People are rebelling against injustice across the world. I hope this book can add some clarity to the struggle and inspire even more rebellion. Now is the time.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are not just in a climate emergency. We are in the foothills of the sixth mass extinction, and [environmental defenders] are some of the few people standing in the way. They don’t just deserve protection for basic moral reasons. The future of our species, and our planet, depends upon it.

—Vandana Shiva

If you [intellectuals and activists] show more peerage with wealthy conservatives and progressives than you do with the working class, stand down. If you accumulate hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars and nobody even knows… then stand down… You have to have limits on your accumulation… do not discipline the radicals. And that’s what I mean by stand down.

—Joy James

Introduction

The famous biologist, Ernst Mayr, once had a debate with the legendary physicist, Carl Sagan, about why humans have not discovered life in outer space. After all, there are likely trillions of other planets. How could it be that we haven’t encountered other living beings?1

Of course, to communicate with extraterrestrial life, we need to be able to send signals to each other that can be perceived and understood. This, in turn, requires what we call higher intelligence. Mayr, a towering figure in biology central to the biological species concept, argued that lower intelligence life forms, such as bacteria, survive for long periods and proliferate. Species with higher intelligence are smaller in number and seem to die off faster. Just one—Homo sapiens—has the ability to communicate with life on other stars. Perhaps higher intelligence is a lethal mutation, as Noam Chomsky put it, reflecting on the debate.2

With the environmental crisis heating up, humanity needs to decide quickly whether it’s better to be smart or stupid. Right now, it looks like we are choosing to be stupid. If we don’t drive ourselves to extinction, we’re on the fast track to a permanent nightmare.

For starters, we are overheating the planet, which is now 1.2ºC above the pre-industrial level, and growing. Studies show that global heating has already produced more numerous and intense extreme weather events—hurricanes, monsoons, floods, wildfires, and droughts—because of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. If we keep pushing the global temperature up, we will trigger irreversible tipping points—catastrophic events, like the melting of the glacial ice sheets, the mass die-off of coral reefs, and the conversion of the Amazon rainforest into a savanna. These events cannot be undone once they’re set in motion. Like falling dominoes, tipping points set off cascading effects that spiral out of control. Some environmental scientists believe that we’ve already triggered several tipping points. Even if that’s true, it’s absolutely essential to keep from triggering more.

In addition to overheating the planet, we are destroying the biodiversity and habitats that sustain the web of life. Humans are killing off species at approximately 1,000 times the typical background rate in evolutionary history, and we are dramatically reducing the population size of many other species, putting them at existential risk. Scholars call this the Sixth Mass Extinction. We are overfarming the soils and transforming arable land into desert. We are clearing tropical rain forests for livestock grazing, primarily to feed wealthier consumers, because they find beef tasty. We are ruining the oceans, polluting them with plastics while depleting the stocks of fish. Our good friends, the South African penguins, are facing extinction, thanks to human economic expansion.

We need to take a look in the mirror and ask ourselves, are we going to be smart, or are we going to be stupid? What kinds of changes are needed to avert a permanent catastrophe? Can we build a global society that respects Mother Nature, and that is also fair and just? And what does any of this have to do with digital technology? This book addresses these questions.

DIGITAL DEGROWTH

If we’re going to be smart, then we need to understand what is causing this unfolding disaster—before it’s too late. That requires us to take a deep look at human society. As we’ll see throughout this book, digital technology is central to the state of the environment. It not only alters how we conduct our day-to-day lives, it also drives the global economy. The digital economy is not only overheating the planet and destroying biodiversity, it increases inequality within and between countries, stimulates consumerism, enhances surveillance and technologies of violence, boosts the power of militaries, and strengthens propaganda. All of this undermines the environment.

Before we launch into the digital connection, let’s start with the basics. The global economy is organized through capitalism, a system that is predicated on limitless growth that is destroying the planet. As we will see, the solution to this is degrowth—the re-engineering of society to produce a good life for everyone within planetary boundaries.

Capitalists arrange economic activity by investing resources into enterprises that grow. The more growth, the more wealth and return on investment. Capitalism also produces high degrees of inequality. Those in favor of capitalism argue that inequality can be justified because total growth makes everyone wealthier, even if some people are richer than others.

Yet as we will see in Chapter 2, the scientific literature is clear that we cannot continue growing the global economy without overshooting planetary boundaries. If we keep using more and more resources, we’re likely to overheat the planet and collapse the environment. You can’t burn the walls of your house to keep yourself warm. Capitalism is just one of several societies humanity has created, and it has to be drawn to a close.

A growing consensus around degrowth is developing as the evidence piles up. Scores of studies and reports are demonstrating that worldwide economic growth is no longer viable. In 2023, a survey of nearly 800 climate policy researchers from around the world found that 73% of respondents deem worldwide economic growth to be incompatible with environmental sustainability.3

But capping economic growth leaves us with a moral problem. How do we alleviate global poverty if we stop growing the global economy? Over half the world’s people live under a meager poverty line of $7.40 per day—the amount needed to achieve normal life expectancy. What do those of us with a decent standard of living say to the billions living under the poverty line, or those living in shacks? You’re stuck with this life forever?

As we’ll see in later chapters, there is enough to go around for everyone, but only if we spread it equally. There are 8 billion people alive today, and the global economy produces a little over $100 trillion per year. Under perfect equality, that leaves about $80,000 of income for a family of four. However, according to environmental scientists, we likely need to reduce the present level of material consumption, which would leave us with even less. If we want all 8 billion people to enjoy a decent standard of living that stays within planetary boundaries, we need to get rid of inequality between and within countries. The environment and human equality are fundamentally linked, and we need to stop treating people and nature like objects for self-gratification.

Thus, we need to reconstruct our societies so that they are designed to produce economic, political, and social equality. That means temporary growth in consumption for the global poor and a reduction in standards of living for those above the fair and sustainable limit, accompanied by a change in lifestyle based on less consumption, fewer working hours, and a more pleasant, socially harmonious society.

To get rid of inequality, we have to identify and contend with the actors responsible for global inequality and planetary destruction.

This book demonstrates that the United States of America holds the greatest degree of responsibility for the present crisis. It has burned more carbon and consumed more of the Earth’s finite resources to build its wealth than any other country on the planet. And it obtains its riches in large part through the violent exploitation of the world’s people. The US houses just 4% of the world’s population, but holds 31% of the world’s wealth and 45% of the world’s financial assets. This concentration of wealth and power needs to be dramatically reversed fast if humanity is to build a just and sustainable transition. And there is no fixing the environment without seriously re-engineering the digital economy and society.

Indeed, if we look closely, American tech giants are at the center of this disparity. Of the top 100 global corporations, over 31% are transnational tech corporations—about twice that of the second-largest sector. Sixty percent of those tech firms are American, just 10% are Chinese.

This book is the first and only to assess, in detail, who owns the global digital economy and its connection to environmental costs. In doing so, it sets the record straight, establishing that one country alone—the United States—completely dominates the global digital economy. The popular belief that China has close parity with the Americans is pure fantasy.

Of the top 1,000 or so digital technology corporations, the United States accounts for 55% of the companies, 77% of the market cap (akin to wealth), and 59% of the revenue. China, by contrast, has just 6% of the companies and market cap, and 11% of the revenue. The Global North has 89% of the companies, 94% of the market cap, and 88% of the revenue.

In fact, the Big Tech giants have more accumulated wealth than the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of most countries. It would take a country like South Africa—with a labor force of 22 million people—almost three decades to produce the wealth of the top five American tech giants, which employ less than a million workers.

Added to this, Americans have the world’s largest share of billionaires and millionaires, thanks in large part to the tech sector. People like Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Elon Musk (Tesla, Twitter/X, SpaceX) top the charts of the world’s richest people. This extends down to the non-celebrity set of smaller billionaires and millionaires, and even the average white-collar tech engineers with salaries of $250,000 to $300,000 per year.

Through the process of digital colonialism, the Americans have taken control of the global digital society. American tech supremacy supercharges the ecologically unequal exchange and division of labor created through classic colonialism over the past few centuries. Rich tech giants in the Global North monopolize the means of computation and knowledge while the poor countries perform the menial labor, like digging in the dirt for metal, picking coffee beans, labeling data to train artificial intelligence models, or cleansing social media networks of disturbing content.

Through the ownership and control of the digital economy, Americans utilize tech for the economic, political, and social domination of sovereign nations. US corporations dominate the world’s social media networks, search engines, semiconductors, cloud computing systems, operating systems, business networking, office productivity software, and more.

Anyone who challenges the American Empire faces the prospect of economic sanctions, armed intervention, and authoritarian repression by the US and its allies across the world. Environmental defenders on the front lines—mostly in the Global South—are disproportionately subjected to dystopian digital surveillance, most of which has been engineered by the West. The same can be said for other marginalized groups, alongside anyone seriously challenging US power, irrespective of their identity.

Added to this, the digital economy is contributing mightily to environmental breakdown. The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector emits 2–5% of global carbon emissions, depending on the estimate, and its physical infrastructure for devices and batteries requires mining operations that destroy local habitats and poison surrounding environments. Industrial agriculture is extraordinarily carbon-intensive and ecologically destructive, yet tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon (as well as agribusiness behemoths like Bayer-Monsanto and John Deere) are digitalizing agriculture. Fast fashion is spreading like wildfire, while e-waste from the rich countries is dumped on the global poor. Through all of this, Global South laborers are exploited inside the factory sweatshops, mines, and farms. They are left to endure the devastation of extreme weather alongside chronic health problems from pollution and toxic waste.

Instead of helping the South, the US plunders it, doing everything it can to maintain the disparity between the rich and the poor so that it can sustain its global power and benefit from cheap labor and raw materials. As a result, each year, a net transfer of raw materials flows from the South to the North. Instead of trying to create world peace and sanity, the US is maintaining its 750+ foreign military bases, now with a ring of bases encircling China. (By comparison, China has one military base on foreign soil, in the African country of Djibouti.) Instead of trying to save the environment and build a decent life for everyone, the US is extracting record amounts of fossil fuels and plowing ahead with its system of limitless economic growth, devouring everything in its path—all to feed its super-rich and appease its middle class.

As we’ll see in the pages that follow, it’s no exaggeration to say that the United States is the greatest threat to life in human history. And yet, very few people walking the planet see the situation clearly. If we’re going to survive, or at least have a decent future ahead of us, the people of the world are going to have to demand global equality. That makes the US ruling class and its tech empire public enemy #1.

Those who dominate other people think of themselves as good and those they dominate as bad. Indigenous Americans and Africans were called savages by those enslaving them and committing genocide against them. But who was the savage in this relationship—the enslaver or the enslaved, colonizer or colonized? Most Americans still think of themselves as the good guys who bring democracy and human rights to the rest of the world, while they bomb them, arm dictators friendly to US corporations, and exploit their labor for pennies. In this sense, the US is still civilizing the savages. I hope that Americans—of which I am one—will see the facts presented in the coming chapters and open their mind to a different story. Time is running out, but we can still save the day by fighting for equality.

SEEING THE BIG PICTURE

In his introduction to This is Biology, Mayr noted how many of his fellow biologists take a narrow approach to the study of biology. Regrettably, Mayr wrote:

… many biologists themselves have an obsolete notion of the life sciences. Modern biologists tend to be extreme specialists … they are often uninformed about developments outside their field of expertise. Rarely do biologists have the time to stand back from the advances of their own specialty and look at the life sciences as a whole. Geneticists, embryologists, taxonomists, and ecologists all consider themselves to be biologists, but most of them have little appreciation of what these various specialties have in common and how they differ fundamentally from the physical sciences. To shed some light on these issues is a major purpose of this book.4

The goal of this book is very similar. It brings together aspects of society which are often studied in silos, such as software development, degrowth, industrial agriculture, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, ecologically unequal exchange, American Empire, resistance movements, social media, anti-apartheid, police, the military, race relations, radical unions, and more. Bringing a wide variety of topics together into a coherent whole, it offers a big-picture analysis of the digital age viewed in the context of the environmental crisis.

While I cover a lot of ground, I wrote this book for the global public—not specialists, technologists, or academics. Over the years, I ran the ideas and stories by family members and friends who aren’t heavily tuned into politics. This book can be read by a mom, a high school student, or an everyday worker listening to an audiobook. I assume the reader knows almost nothing about digital technology, the environment, the United States, or politics. Everything is explained from scratch, with references at the back of the book should the reader want to learn more.

While this book can be read by a general audience, it also addresses intellectuals and activists. On that score, let me mention a few words about the two major camps of intellectuals writing about the two core topics of the book—digital politics and degrowth.

As for the first (digital politics) I argue that the common understanding of digital technology needs to be reframed around degrowth in a global context. In this book, I offer a new paradigm, digital degrowth, that lays out the needed theoretical framework for all digital politics. This stems from the degrowth science. By the time you get through this book, you will never see the world the same way again.

The framework in this book is missing from tech, I argue, because digital politics is dominated by a US-centered tech left that has shaped the narrative in most of the world. This American School of digital politics erases or trivializes the American Empire, digital colonialism, and degrowth, while instead focusing on things like Big Tech’s surveillance of internet activity (e.g., surveillance capitalism), moderate reforms to make digital capitalism more fair and competitive (e.g., antitrust), and narrow human rights (e.g., racial bias in algorithms).

Here I put left in scare quotes to label these individuals who exploit social justice to get rich and famous. Like politicians, they pretend to stand for the people, but instead service the power elites they work for. Genuine leftists are internationalists who stand for full economic, political, and social equality across the world. They do not use social justice movements to get wealthy and build extravagant lifestyles. At a bare minimum, they tell the plain truth about power. Many of them take it further and endure low income, joblessness, imprisonment, torture, or death as a penalty for taking a stand.

As we’ll see in the coming chapters, it makes no sense to even think about digital tech without framing it around degrowth and digital colonialism, with a focus on the American Empire as the central actor. Imagine trying to explain the motion of the planets without accounting for the sun, or trying to explain global politics in the nineteenth century without ever speaking about the British Empire, as if it doesn’t exist. Imagine trying to discuss Israeli politics without mentioning the occupation of Palestine, or writing a book on South African history while only mentioning colonialism, apartheid, and white supremacy in a single paragraph. People might say, wow, these people are morally and intellectually bankrupt. In the closing chapter, I argue that the American tech left is actually this bad, and that they operate within a racist, imperialist framework required by their connections to money and power.

Having spent years at Yale Law School and reviewing the works of scholars and journalists, I can say confidently that the American Empire and degrowth have been erased or trivialized across the board by the thought leaders from the top universities (especially the Ivy League), legacy media, NGOs, think tanks, government agencies, and Big Tech corporations themselves—most of whom are taking money from Big Tech, Big Foundation capitalists, and the government. This network receives accolades from the big corporate media, films streaming on Netflix, jobs at moneyed institutions, and top positions in the US government. Many of them are striking it rich manufacturing consent for the American Empire.

But it’s more than just the theoretical framework that needs to be changed. That’s just the start. More importantly, we need to change our behavior—our activism, our strategies and tactics for social justice, our policies, our workplaces, our ways of life. I believe we the people can save the day, but we need two things to happen. First, the mass majority needs to strongly desire full equality, and second, the masses need to create it themselves by working together as equals. The idea that there are saviors—be they charismatic leaders or political parties on the right or left—will always empower a minority that oppresses us. We, the common folk, have to liberate ourselves.

*   *   *

As for the second camp of intellectuals, degrowth advocates are much better than the US tech left, but they have a few areas for improvement. In particular, degrowth advocates have hardly interrogated how the digital society connects to degrowth. When it comes to technology, most degrowth research and activism focuses on green technologies like solar panels and wind turbines, not the relationship between companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook to degrowth. This book is the first to do this. For that reason, I am hoping it will widely appeal to environmentalists.

Moreover, degrowth advocates typically speak of a future society where everybody is flourishing—one where we spread the wealth equally, work fewer hours, and live in harmony with each other and the environment. It sounds awesome, until you think about the transition process to make it a reality.

To be sure, we should all want this kind of society.