*A working draft for a hacker culture inspired perspective on degrowth
NOTE: this branch is about getting the text for the book chapter of Degrowth in Bewegung(en) (Degrowth in movement(s)). Please make contributions and editions directly on the questions, inside the movements/ folder
With the invention of the World-Wide-Web in 1989, the Internet has rapidly turned into part of everyday's life. It's presence is in many places of the world already unavoidable: even if you only use your old analog phone to communicate, your provider is most probably just converting that old analog signal into digital binary, and sending it through a chain of cables made of different materials and routers and servers controlled by different institutions and corporations.
Within the degrowth movement, technology, and especially digital technology, is seen by many as something to reduce or remove as much as possible from life and society. The Internet is, under this narrative, seen as a contradiction to a simple, ecological and convivial living. Certainly, increased resource use, both associated with the production of artifacts of modern technology, but also to potential rebound effects emerging from the increase of efficiency are feared and criticized - and not without reason: modern technological advances are mostly resulting from and used as tools for further optimization and efficiency of operations, industrial advancement and ultimately growth.
The complexity of the resulting industrial-technological complex is today supported by large institutions and corporations, which progressively distance its users from the technological choices and agency, the infrastructure that hosts it, the processes of technological production and of resource extraction.
Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has recently written a book describing this new industrial age we are going through. One that is no longer represented by the mechanical, huge, 19th century factory, but rather by brands, titans of the digital world, which establish their monopolies with socially networked platforms. These are presented as a spike of a late or new capitalism times: massive amounts of venture capitals are injected into ideas emerging into the digital society, with the objective of capturing as many users and data as possible, and eventually establish a monopoly and universality in the service provision: no one should get a ride if not on Uber, no one should find friends if not on Facebook, no one should find a date if not on Tinder. Still, the same Rushkoff - and along with him a few other intellectuals, hackers and activists in the collaborative economy, free software movement and commons - sees the internet as having a distributive power without precedents in the history of Humanity.
Up to now, research and praxis on degrowth has unfortunately brought too little contribution in building up a coherent, critical vision on different innovations and movements that are emerging on the digital technology scene. On the contrary, there is often a distancing of the actors of degrowth from touching the technological aspects - as if diving and getting busy with it would come into conflict with the meaning of life, voluntary simplicity and some back-to-the-roots romantism that are embedded into the degrowth movement.
It is true that at the resource level, the technology of the digital age contributes to an environmental and social disaster. Initiatives such as the fairphone or the fair mouse just reveal how difficult it is to actually achieve a fair and ecological production of things as "simple" as a mouse for the computer. But how far are concepts such as the (fully) automated production, smart cities, cryptocurrencies, the internet of things or big data from forming part of degrowth utopias? What do we need to do, how do we need to shape them, so that they contribute towards a radical distribution, rather than to the furthering of capitalism accummulation and increase of societal dependency on services provided by corporations? How can actors and institutions related to degrowth (not) achieved in terms of getting control over the technology they use?
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality." -- Stephen Hawking
"If you decide where you contribute with you work based on getting paid for it (with currently mainstream monetary currencies), you very likely participate in building our common future as envisioned by very small minority of the world population! Does the outcomes of your daily work contribute directly to building the future that YOU envision?" -- Pawel Stanczyk
The issue raised by Pawel Stanczyk is a central one. It manifests why it is not easy to dedicate your life to projects for the societal transformations and the commons. It is always easier to get startups working for the order and value generation models established by this ever smaller and powerful elite of wealth owners.
Venture capitals, capturing creativity and ideas from society, trapping them back in the 1%, impede them to be developed otherwise, such as the patterns of solidarity and communication that contributed in first place to their emergence. By emptying the economic production process from the political and the social, they steal the commons and transform them into commerce. And while capturing the economic resources for alternative patterns of productions, they still manage to externalizing risks of failure to the single beneficiaries of these small investments - certainly some will fail and die on the way, but these are expected and planned in probability and statistics, as part of a cut-throat competition model.
The tragic of all of this, is that a big part of the 99% also support and pair with those who work within the 1% model. Because the 99% also was raised under the cultural premise, accentuated by economics and sociology strains, that work, value, income and wealth are tightly bounded. That when you use a technology or product you are a consumer that should have a service with certain quality standards given by pieces of text such as a SLA.
The path towards breaking out of this dependency is by articulating and providing mutual support at the grassroots between people and initiatives sharing common values and approaches. We cannot be consumers of technology directly or indirectly shaped by the 1% and where data is privately owned. If we are willing to change this, we need to find ingenious ways to make the economic resources flow into our own patterns of cooperation (https://discourse.transformap.co/t/separate-commons-and…/625).
Close to the concept of autonomy of Cornelius Castoriadis, one can identify in Illich an approach to technology where the focus is on the institutional model and way of distribution, rather than being critical on technology per se (although he's usually perceived as being strongly anti-technology). Pushing on criticism towards a centralized approach to distribution of learning content, Illich explains how with the same amount of money invested on building up a TV broadcast for state and corporate controlled contents, could be replaced by a tape recorders network, allowing a much larger group both not only to receive, but also to produce and disseminate information.
These dimensions of democracy and justice have been subjected to strong debate among some of the main references of the degrowth movement: these converge on the importance of having access technology and the capacity to understand and use the technology without resorting to huge institutions (nowadays mostly corporations). One can see such concerns shared by Richard Stallman, the open source guru (GNU Foundation) mentioned on last years' Chaos Communication Congress (the largest hackers congress in Europe) that "teaching children to use proprietary software is like teaching them to smoke".
Collective ownership of technical infrastructures and data, interoperability, linked open data (LOD), and the semantic web with its vocabularies and ontologies are some words that are expected to appear more and more in the discourses engaged in building up postgrowth futures. As Silke Helfrich mentioned at the recent international solidarity economy congress (Solikon) in Berlin, "if you control the infrastructures of production, you don't need certification". It is hard to imagine that Ivan Illich would not feel excited about the convivial, deschooling and deinstitutionalization potential of the world wide web and an underlying commons infrastructure.
// TODO: Blockchain critique and how degrowth could contribute to the debate on the structure of social organisations and its relationship to technology, http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Blockchain#The_key_questions_about_the_blockchain ; https://english.lasindias.com/blockchain-is-a-threat-to-the-distributed-future-of-the-internet
- Ethereum and similar blockchain enabled systems may distribute the verification of the ledger, but they are still centralised systems that easily become controlled by a few big players with more infrastructure resources. The contracts and transaction ledger may be decentralised, but the infrastructure isn't.
- Decentralisation in and of itself will not lead to P2P principles, or more social justice. In face, it has just as much power to great exacerbate social inequality. The most likely outcome of widespread adoption of block-chain enabled decentralised technologies is simply increased efficiency and wealth for big banks and governments. The discourse around the blockchain does not seem to acknowledge this. This WILL be co-opted (already is).
From autonomous and grassroots political movements, to transition initiatives or the broad range of „nowtopias“ (Carlsson and Manning, 2010), learning and innovation seems to be taking place at a pace never seen before. Despite the diversity of actors and praxis in the degrowth movement, they have been converging in temporary and permanent spaces that appear as a response to the crisis (Demaria et al., 2013). By exploring these contradictions, researchers and activists can develop a sustainability dialectics (Giampietro, 2004; Baptista, 2011) that is capable of dealing with the multiple narratives of degrowth and advancing its concepts and paths towards societal transformation.
Addressing the accumulation and appropriation of big data (the new capital) by corporations and states, linked open data may contribute to a world of massively scaled small data hosted on a federated commons cloud.
The technology for deploying such an infrastructure is available now and at the software level it is even open. But what institutional settings could support such a cloud infrastructure to be largely deployed and to overcome Facebook, Google or Condoleeza's Dropbox?
This issues are being targeted by movements associated to and emerging from the free software culture. More recently, with the dissemination of initiatives around Open Source Ecology or the FabLabs, the resource aspect has been approached. Bauwens talks about the new wave of global thought and local production - knowledge is shared across all parts, while production is localized. He uses the example of a tractor, built with parts that can be built by anyone and which building schemes are available for general use. Community networks supported by wireless (open source) technology such as the Freifunk initiative contribute to a grassroots development of "mesh networks" and directly contribute to distribute ownership of internet infrastructure. The low cost Raspberry Pi, among other "smart devices" can then serve, for example by installing the "FreedomBox" software, for having an own cloud and server for as low as 30 €, consuming around 10 W and fitting in the palm of the hands.
The idea of commons has been particularly prolific in the digital sphere. The movements and development behind Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) has been able to generate the largest encyclopedia ever created, putting the Encyclopedia Britannica out of business in a few years. The Linux Kernel, has been released by the Finnish student Linus Torvalds in 1991 and consists today of over 18 million lines of source code under a license (GNU Public License or GPL) that prohibits any commercial usage of it. It's success was so immense that most of the world wide web, as well as a huge number consumer devices - from Android smartphones, to TomTom GPS - are built on top of the Linux Kernel.
Today we observe the emergence of new patterns of production and consumption of technology. Social-technological innovations, rather than pure technological innovations, seem to be the dominant pattern of innovation. Code development and recombination "factories", such as the famous GitHub have become social networks for a global sharing of digital production. At the hardware level, FabLabs, Repair Cafés or Open Source Ecology are sharing their knowledge globally, based on their accumulated experiences while articulating production and learning with their local communities (of practice).
In fact, the open source movement has provided an example on how to overcome the role division of specialized producers (the IT specialists) and the consumer (end users). The concept of commons-based peer production (CBPP) emerged recently as a socio-economic system anchored on the same ideas of exchange and participation that the digital era brought: groups of individuals join to work together to produce information, knowledge or cultural goods from and for the commons (Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006).
This blurring of roles, which Alvin Toffler designated as „prosumers“, might nevertheless contribute to generate new forms of capitalist exploitation, throw the tendency towards generating unpaid labor, while keeping power and decision structures untouched (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010; Rogero, 2010). Bauwens (2006) and Benkler and Nissenbaum (2006), argue, however, that peer production which follows the distributed logic of P2P and CBPP may operate independently from the market logic or existing power structures.
Currently, startups and especially the so-called unicorns (startups with value over 1 billion euros) have increased their role in shaping the business landscape, moving the internet even further away from it's post-commercial nature (which was effectively in force until 1996). Tensions on the appropriation of terms emerging from the grassroots, such as sharing economy, open up new tensions and spaces of debate in society. These businesses share the feature of not owning a single piece of the means of production: they just provide closed and commercial platforms, digital marketplaces which abruptly reduce transaction costs and allow for individuals to engage in peer to peer economic relationships with a global crowd of consumers. It is not about sharing, but rather increasing the economic efficiency associated to the use of resources they "own", be it their cars or their houses.
Nevertheless, the developments and new modes of production and consumption being pushed by the so-called Sharing Economy provide interesting insights into the degrowth debate. As Maurie Cohen recently wrote, "the antagonism between producers and consumers that is inherent in predominant systems of exchange frequently results in consumption in excess of genuine needs -- often through the use of tempting volume discounts and the manufacture of goods that become prematurely obsolete." As such, rather than completely dismissing the patterns of exchange of the sharing economy, Cohen argues that through the development of "reciprocal relationships, producer-consumer cooperatives could bring the intentions of production and consumption into closer alignment". The challenge would be to develop a "more efficacious sharing economy" capable of constraining the "expansion of mediated micro-entrepreneurship and serialized rental in favor of modes consistent with communitarian provisioning".
Cohen speaks about platform cooperativism as an alternative. The praxis of the collectives on this is one of engaging in collective and federated production processes. As an example, the TransforMap project, an initiative involving dozens of networks, NGOs and initiatives worldwide, aiming at building up the "mother of many maps" for the alternative economies, combines network and community building, agile development practices (scrum) with events such as mapping jams, hackathons and (geo)vocamps, for developing a technological stack that is capable of providing meaning and use for the diversel of narratives and movements emerging as a response to the limits of growth and the current multiple crises.
A growing number of collectives worldwide are similarly working on recombining and further developing the existing free software into stacks that provide a more democratic access to services, shaped to needs and uses of the target communities. A particular interesting fund has been recently launched by the EU, to support "collective awareness platforms for sustainability and social innovation" (CAPSSI). Far from being a top-down research project, the fund specifically recognises the contribution of hacker communities and grassroots movements and is putting major efforts in networking these actors to build pilot platforms.
And here lies the big challenge for researchers and action-researchers on technology and degrowth: while it is desirable for researchers to engage in the actual production of (free and open) technology, it is simultaneously important for these to combine with existing efforts coming from the DIY, hackers and other grassroots movements. The technology is there, but building up a solid social-technological development aimed at creating the underlying infrastructures and processes supporting a transition towards, or compatible with a postgrowth society, asks for more resources from different sides.
Making research projects to accumulate even more knowledge on how things work or should work is really not the interesting thing to do today. We rather need more convivial research (Vetter, 2015) in the field, capable of bringing scientists - also non-technical ones - to the collaborative development of platforms, onthologies and vocabularies for data openness and interoperability. Supporting events such as hackathons, or using (and supporting) commons server infrastructure and free software services are examples of actions that support the transformations and resistances happening in the field of technology and the digital commons.
Rushkoff and Vial might not even identify themselves as degrowthers. But we see a pattern emerging, which brings together (some) social businesses, the do-it-yourself culture, the capitalist-critical grassroots, the commons and free software movements. They converge on the will to (re)appropriate and decommercialize technology. They organize and often collaborate in building up the "learning webs" by Illich in the 1970's, which at the present times effectively exist and have become part of our daily lifes, after the invention of the World-Wide-Web. It got further strenghtened - or rather, released from the institutional boundaries and centralization, of which Illich is so critical - on the peer-to-peer technologies.
- Bauwens, Michel. 2005. “The Political Economy of Peer Production.” CTheory 1. URL: http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~graebe/Texte/Bauwens-06.pdf.
- Benkler, Yochai, and Helen Nissenbaum. 2006. "Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue." Journal of Political Philosophy 14 (4): 394–419. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2006.00235.x.
- Ritzer, George, and Nathan Jurgenson. 2010. “Production, Consumption, Prosumption The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘prosumer’.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10 (1) (March 1): 13–36. doi:10.1177/1469540509354673.
- Roggero, Gigi. 2010. “Five Theses on the Common.” Rethinking Marxism 22 (3) (July): 357–373. doi:10.1080/08935696.2010.490369
- Vial, Joshua, 2016. Hacking capitalism with capped returns
- Illich, Ivan, 1973. Deschooling Society. Chapter 6: Learning Webs
A few example projects with relevance to the challenges addressed by the degrowth movement are worth mentioning here (as indication only, as many more potentially relevant projects are out there):
- A subjective list of "nice hosting providers"
- The Enspiral network, behind the Loomio decision-making software