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Binary Blinkers

“The previous culture war was between left and right,” Jezos says. Now “acceleration is the only option, degrowth is death.”

A similar thought was expressed by some president, "either you're with us, or against us" regarding some military adventure somewhere. The playbook is to setup a binary between (according to the speaker) a good thing and a bad thing where the good thing is the only choice. Oh, death? Death is bad. We must be for whatever the other thing is… right?

Let's try another example. Suppose your country labors under crippling sanctions as a result of a recent peace treaty. Do you continue with the ruinous sanctions, or throw in with a new political party that promises to improve things? Here, both the sanctions and the rise of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei were bad for various folks. One might also look for binaries where both options are good, or both are neutral, good or bad, bad or good, bad and bad, etc. For example, a particular business may benefit from either sanctions or war, or the issue may be irrelevant to others.

Details matter: who would benefit from tech acceleration? Who will lose? Who wants a war in $COUNTRY_DU_JOUR? Who will lose? A binary with bias should be treated with skepticism, especially given the various downsides of wars and tech progress to date.

Or how about this one: either you support the law of the excluded middle, or you are wrong!

Accelerandos may claim that their way is the way of abundance. Maybe. How are they so sure? And if so, abundance, for whom? To what benefit? What good is 20 billion humans or an embiggened Gross Domestic Product? Does the passenger pigeon get to vote? Here we see but one genocide of abundance; clearly, abundance is also a way of death.

Now, some have called for "more humble and more stable ways of life", to which one response runs along the lines of: if things cannot progress, then we must live as the cavemen did! You may recognize the form of this argument.

A growther may then argue that non-growthers really are growthers (they just don't realize it) or anyways that degrowthers are a radical ascetic sect. This second point can be dismissed on the observation that there are a wide range of options available to reduce mindless consumption and energy use that stop well short of living under an overpass; casting your opponents as extremists is anyways a pretty typical rhetorical play. Do you really want to be one of those un-American deep green radical communist woke hippie ecoterrorists? No, you don't! Therefore, join the growth party, today!

The growthers also come in a variety of stripes, with some of them being more sensible than the type that roots for welding the "go" pedal down; this brings us back to the first point of "you haven't realized you're a growther, yet". The argument here is that degrowthers are for the awkward phrase "economic disextensification" which means using less resources and having fewer people, but while also implicitly supporting "intensive growth" of technology that lets us do more with less. Hence, you must be a growther, as tech improvement is growth. There are several ways to argue against this; first, not all degrowthers support particular technologies; the Luddites were very much against the progress that destroyed their lives for generations. About that rising tide that did not lift all boats. Now "progress" really should be written as "change" or possibly "disruption" to avoid the unwarranted association of anything technological with good. For one, technology can run headlong into the Jevons paradox, where the improved efficiency makes the situation worse. "Whoops", said Prometheus, "I didn't expect that to happen." Another, the technology may not necessarily be a net positive, as happened to the Luddites, or doubtless one can find other examples. Nuance is required: what is the technology, who benefits, who gets thrown under the bus, is is worth it given the externalities, etc.