The Case for Digital Degrowth

Last year saw the rise of a new sub-concern within the global debate over the ecological polycrisis of climate change, nature loss, pollution and waste. It centered on the environmental footprints of artificial intelligence and data centers, in particular their contribution to energy and water consumption. While worthy of discussion, this growing obsession among the tech pseudo-left is misleading in more ways than one. Enhanced by a social media echo chamber, it often grossly overstates the impact of AI and data centers, while distracting people from seeing the bigger picture. The fact is, the impacts of AI and data centers are most acute at the local or, in some cases, national level. More important from a global perspective are the ways the broad digital economy contributes to aggregate economic growth, and how that growth is distributed.

The core contribution of the digital economy to ecocide is not the “direct” environmental footprint of the information and communications technology sector. Rather, it is elite accumulation and ecologically unequal exchange within and between nations. If we aspire to reduce and cap global material resource consumption, then we have to rapidly transition to a system that drastically reduces inequality between and within countries. As a matter of urgency, we need to shift our thinking about the digital society to a new paradigm, digital degrowth. What follows is an excerpt from my new book, “Digital Degrowth: Technology in the Age of Survival.” Based on over a decade of research, it offers a framework for understanding the role of digital technology in society. Unlike focus on AI and data centers, it offers the possibility of creating the changes needed to save the planet. Time is not on our side.   

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?

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 who created the modern 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. 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.

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 1.2 C 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 rainforests 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. 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 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 believe worldwide economic growth is incompatible with environmental sustainability.

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?

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. It obtains its riches in large part through the violent exploitation of the world’s people. The U.S. 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 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 noncelebrity 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 super-charges 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. U.S. corporations also control 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 U.S. and its allies across the world. Environmental defenders on the front lines — mostly in the 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 U.S. power, irrespective of their identity.

Added to this, the digital economy is contributing mightily to environmental breakdown. The Information and Communications Technology sector emits 1.4–3.5% 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 U.S. plunders it, doing everything it can to maintain the disparity between the rich and the poor so that it can maintain 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

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 U.S. 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 U.S. corporations, and exploit their labor for pennies. In this sense, the U.S. is still “civilizing the savages.” I hope that Americans — of which I am one — will open their minds to a different story. Time is running out, but we can still save the day by fighting for equality.