💾 Archived View for thrig.me › blog › 2023 › 06 › 04 › degrowth.gmi captured on 2023-06-14 at 14:02:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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And so what happens? Well, we build more stuff. Never once have we said, “Great! Let’s do less."
gemini://circadian.gemlog.org/2023-06-03-the-jevons-paradox-and-software.gmi
The OpenBSD crew periodically throws out code, so "let's do less" while maybe not common is not unknown, e.g. the great OpenSSL cleanup that followed some dastardly CVE or the other:
https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140415093252
Sometimes it takes a bunch of rewrites and a lot of bad code before you can zero in on something elegant (as in writing and music) or at least something less terrible. But this takes time and effort that in a commercial environment management may be like "nope!", so you end up with a cron job running every five minutes that restarts the service because the service leaks that much memory. Who knew it would get so popular?
OpenBSD is still increasing their lines of code, just at a slower rate than if they had not done the purges. So not exactly non-growth or even degrowth. And folks keep coming out with new hardware to support. Computers are still terribly new, so realistically we have to guess at what sustainable computing might entail over 10,000 years or longer—itty bitty Z80s? something like what we have today? something totally new and different? nothing? Who knows!
Meanwhile, the Roman empire and many others have mostly all done the "fish belly, in the sun" thing, which is generally followed by doing less with less. What's new this time around is a globe-spanning system and Pandora with a free round of externalities. And what have the Romans ever done for us?
What if we launch ourselves not into a great act of expansion, but into one of *contraction*, and do it with exactly the same level of enthusiasm and sense of purpose and grandness of scale and hand-waving disregard for questions of financial or political practicality?
gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/one-billion-one-continent.gmi
Authors have touched on this; "Das Glasperlenspiel" by Hermann Hesse (1943) notably imagines a future society where the characters mostly walk where they need to go; there are vehicles, but they are few and reserved for Important People. Much effort is put into playing a somewhat non-productive game rather than expanding empires or going off to the stars. (Rituals can help glue a society together, provided the ritual does not put too much burden on the society or the environment, but that was old well before Confucius spoke about it.)
There are various folks active in this space—Low Tech Magazine, the Post Carbon Institute, and you can probably find other books and writings that generally are not on the bestseller lists. Others active here are not even on the internet—they're busy doing less in some forest or a monastery. But, this is a pretty fringe space; most follow the Myth of Progress™, or if anything are too busy just muddling through life as best they can, given their circumstances.
˙˙˙uʍop-ǝpᴉsdn pǝuɹnʇ pןɹoʍ ɹᴉǝɥʇ ʇuɐʍ ʎǝɥʇ ǝʞᴉן ʇou s‚ʇᴉ