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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We are fast approaching the point of “peak digital”, with the continued mass production and excessive consumption of digital technologies set to become a key driver of climate crisis, ecological breakdown and ongoing societal instability.
Digital Degrowth is a call to completely rethink our digital futures in these fast-changing times. It explores how degrowth thinking and alternate forms of “radically sustainable computing” might support ambitions of sustainable, scaled-down and equitable ways of living with digital technologies. Neil Selwyn proposes a rebalancing of digital technology use: digital degrowth is not a call for simply making reduced use of the digital technologies that we already have – rather it is an argument to reimagine digital practices that maximise societal benefits with minimal environmental and social impact. Drawing on illustrative examples from across computer science, hacker and environmental activist communities, this book examines how core degrowth principles of conviviality, autonomy and care are already being used to reimagine alternate forms of digital technology.
Original and stimulating, this is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, sustainability studies, political ecology, computer/data sciences, and across the social sciences.
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Seitenzahl: 241
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
1 The Need for Digital Change
Introduction
How digital technology became too big
How digital technology became too big to ignore
How digital technology became too big to criticize
Calling out the harms of digital technology
Pushing back against digital growth
Conclusions
Book overview
2 Does Tech Have Any Solutions?
Introduction
Techno-solutions to the societal unsustainability of digital tech
What is wrong with ‘Tech for Good’?
Techno-solutions to the environmental unsustainability of digital tech
Questioning the promise of ‘Green Tech’
Why these promises might not be enough
Repoliticizing conversations around digital ‘good’
Conclusions
3 Beginning to Think Differently About Digital Technology
Introduction
Imagining new values for new technology
What can degrowth add to rethinking the digital?
Taking a degrowth perspective
Some core degrowth principles to take forward
Moving beyond criticisms of degrowth
Conclusions
4 The Case for Digital Degrowth
Introduction
The beginnings of a turn toward digital degrowth
Tools for conviviality
Degrowth perspectives on technology
Early degrowth perspectives on computing
Looking beyond the Global North
The idea of ‘radically sustainable technology’
Toward a sense of digital degrowth
Conclusions
5 Finding Alternatives in the Here and Now
Introduction
Opposing ‘irredeemable’ ways of doing technology
Supporting ‘desirable’ ways of doing technology
Conclusions
6 Future Innovations
Introduction
Emerging forms of ‘radically sustainable computing’
Future forms of nature-based computing
Anticipating a new wave of nature-based computing
Conclusions
7 Where Now? Everywhere But Here!
Introduction
Building a vision of digital degrowth
What might digital degrowth look like in practice?
Moving toward digital degrowth – ongoing challenges
Moving toward digital degrowth – next steps
Conclusions
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Digital Degrowth
Radically Rethinking our Digital Futures
Neil Selwyn
polity
Copyright © Neil Selwyn 2025
The right of Neil Selwyn to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6329-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024948773
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
1The Need for Digital Change
Introduction
It is time to start talking in earnest about the societal and environmental impacts of digital technology. More specifically, it is time to start calling out the harmful ways in which large parts of the planet are now bound up in an excess of digital devices, digital infrastructures and digitizations of everyday life. We live in a world where there are considerably more smartphones than people. We have reached a point where many important parts of our societies, cultures and economies have been rearranged along digital lines. Crucially, this defining presence of digital technology is impacting in material as well as virtual ways. The billions of digital devices scattered across our planet are constructed from rare minerals and metals that are fast depleting. Some of the most remote places on earth are struggling to accommodate resource-hungry data warehouses that are stuffed full of thousands of computer servers, while our oceans are littered with hundreds of undersea internet cables. All told, it feels that the world is being steadily suffocated by this planetary scale of computing.
These burdens and harms have tended to be rarely noticed – let alone mentioned – in mainstream discussions of the ‘digital age’. As far as most people are concerned, digitization is something that is now so ubiquitous it no longer merits special attention. Yet, outside of mainstream media, policy and industry circles, calls are beginning to be made to break the hold that digital technology has over our lives and environments. While smartphones, AI and streaming might seem essential elements of modern life, we need to start thinking beyond the digital age. In a world of finite planetary resources and failing climate systems, it seems clear that digital technology cannot continue to expand indefinitely. The age of digital excess is fast losing momentum and appeal … let us look forward to an age of digital degrowth.
How digital technology became too big
Before we can start thinking expansively about digital futures it is useful to give a little thought to the digital present and past. This opening chapter takes time to map out the full extent of the intensive, excessive and profoundly harmful forms of digital technology that have come to pervade everyday life. Of course, some people contend that the distinction between ‘digital’ and ‘non-digital’ is no longer necessary given the near ubiquity of digital technologies throughout contemporary life. Yet this ignores many significant – and troubling – ways in which our dependency on digital technology has soured over the past few decades. This book starts from the premise that, now more than ever, it is important to talk explicitly and honestly about the digital.
The ‘digital age’ that we are currently experiencing is profoundly different from even ten years ago. The digital technologies of the 2020s are predicated upon overwhelming presence, conspicuous consumption and ‘always-on’ modes of operation. This is evident, for example, in how digital devices and platforms are now woven tightly into the fabric of daily life – an underpinning feature of everything from parenting children to managing household finances. It is commonplace for people’s most intimate and private moments to be mediated through screens and algorithms. At the same time, most of the major institutions that define contemporary societies, cultures and economies are also digitally dependent. It is no longer possible, for example, to contemplate a school, hospital or business fully functioning for more than a few days without its digital management systems or digital communications.
So, how has this state of digital dependency come about? The scale and scope of everything just described owes much to the IT industry and, in particular, what is termed ‘Big Tech’ – the large multinational tech corporations that oversee the core infrastructure that underpins our digitized lives. Together, these corporations have become ‘defining institutions of our day’ (Birch and Bronson 2022), modern-day equivalents of Big Oil, Big Banking, Big Tobacco and other twentieth-century power blocs. The likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, TenCent and Alibaba now wield disproportionate influence over the development and take-up of digital services. This gatekeeping role is evident in how Big Tech dominates the digitization of public services such as education, health and welfare, as well as economic sectors such as finance and retail. Any significant development – societal, cultural or economic – is now likely to involve one (or more) of these familiar IT industry names in one way or another.
At the same time, it is also important to remind ourselves how everything just described takes place through planetary-scale physical infrastructure. While the IT industry works hard to promote the illusion that its products and services are somehow virtual, immaterial and ‘in the cloud’, the reality is far more concrete and dirtier (Taffel 2025). All the digitizations just described are reliant on sprawling material infrastructures and convoluted supply chains. For example, it was reckoned that over a billion smartphones and around 400 million personal computing devices were manufactured in 2024 (Statista 2024). All these devices are assembled from components made from rare minerals and metals (such as lithium and coltan) that originate in places such as Congo and Brazil. Most of these devices are assembled in countries such as Vietnam, China and India, and then shipped many times around the world. While mostly sold to consumers in richer parts of the world, these laptops, smartphones and other devices are a truly global concern.
This planetary digital infrastructure does not stop at the point of sale. Once purchased, these devices are then connected through 1.4 million kilometres of undersea copper and optical fibre cabling sunk beneath the world’s oceans to carry transcontinental internet traffic. While we are encouraged to think of digital bits and bytes as ephemeral, much of the world’s data is processed and stored in over 100,000 data centres scattered around the planet, the biggest of which each contain upwards of 5,000 computer servers. Elsewhere, as these digital devices begin to age and fall out of fashion, a multibillion dollar ‘e-waste’ industry dumps discarded hardware into landfill sites in the poorest corners of Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, India, China and Brazil. The cumulative impact of all these operations is hard to understate – continually expanding as global demand for digital products and services increases year-by-year.
How digital technology became too big to ignore
These machinations tend to be glossed over in conversations around digital technology, primarily because they simply feel too vast to properly contemplate. However, the true nature of the digital ecosystem is occasionally laid bare through various breakdowns and glitches. These include isolated public outcries over the ethics of digital supply chains – exposés of draconian working conditions in Shenzhen factories which contrast awkwardly with the luxury retail prices attached to the products that these factory workers are assembling. Similarly, sporadic reports will detail how the development of AI systems depends on swathes of precariously employed, low-paid ‘ghost labour’ that steps in when the technology cannot recognize things – taking responsibility for content moderation, data labelling, language translation and so on (Casilli 2024). This was illustrated in outcries over Kenyan content moderators being paid less than $2 an hour to filter out traumatic material as part of the initial development of the Chat GPT generative AI tool.
While such stories highlight the shocking dependence of the IT industry on worker exploitation in some of the poorest parts of the world, public consciousness in Western countries tends to respond to concerns that are closer to home. The 2013 Edward Snowden revelations were an early wake-up call – alerting US citizens to relentless state and commercial surveillance of their technology use. Since then, public concerns have been triggered by high-profile panics around online disinformation campaigns and commercial data breaches. Alongside this, many people have also tired of the relentless hype around obviously egregious developments such as cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and Mark Zuckerberg’s ill-fated ‘Metaverse’. We have also seen protests against ethically dubious state rollouts of technology such as facial recognition and lethal autonomous weapons. If one takes the time to look, there are plenty of bad news stories now circulating around digital technology.
All this is fuelling public distrust around digital technology. At the beginning of the 2010s, The Economist magazine picked up on what they termed ‘the coming tech-lash’ (Woodridge 2013). Throughout the 2000s, it was reasoned, general publics had remained relatively upbeat about the convenience of online shopping, social media and the democratic potential of the online ‘global village’. At this point, purchasing a new smartphone was still considered to be an exciting moment in one’s life. Yet, by the start of the 2010s, this digital optimism began to run out of steam. Indeed, some sort of tech-lash certainly seems to have gained momentum over the past few years. The beginning of the 2020s saw public trust in companies such as Meta and Google hit all-time lows (Washington Post 2021), while Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other tech titans continue to be treated with suspicion and contempt. For many people, then, the digital hopes and dreams of the 2000s have gone distinctly sour. As Sharon Vallor (2022) puts it: ‘We used to get excited about technology – what happened?’
How digital technology became too big to criticize
Considering everything just outlined, it might seem reasonable to anticipate this growing popular critical consciousness around digital technology to be prompting waves of mass public dissent and demand for change. Yet, the steadily rising sales figures and stock prices of major tech corporations suggest otherwise. Even if populations around the world are becoming disenchanted with the digital age, they continue to consume digital technology at ever increasing rates. The tech-lash seems to have been followed by little more than grudging acceptance amongst tech-using publics that there is little that can be done when it comes to improving the digital experience.
Such passivity reflects how general populations have been conditioned to respond to digital technology. First, is the commonplace way (often referred to as technological determinism) that technology is presented by policymakers and industry as an autonomous force that drives social progress and determines the nature of society. Whatever we do, there is no option to stop the development of new technologies – from the internet to AI – from having an inevitable impact on our lives. This sense of powerlessness is reinforced (and made acceptable) by the residual hope that these new technologies exist to make our lives better. There seems to be a hard-wired response to new digital innovations as inherently beneficial – something that might save time, reduce effort, be more precise and/or function at vastly increased scales and speeds. This optimism often tips over into what Evgeny Morozov (2013) and others have termed ‘techno-solutionism’ – the expectation that digital technologies offer potential correctives, solutions and ‘fixes’ to societal problems. All this results in endless cycles of hype, hope and disappointment. While many people’s lives have been blighted by previous digital failures and letdowns, it is very hard to let go of the hope that the next digital technology will somehow be different.
Anyone attempting to fight against this perpetual cycle of digital expansion clearly faces an uphill struggle. If nothing else, the IT industry works very hard to ensure that we do not pay too much attention to the digital technologies in our lives. Considerable efforts are made to distract consumers with a constant churn of new versions and product upgrades. Even if we stop to question the digital technologies that we are using, it is almost impossible to scrutinize them properly. Our devices come in impenetrable tightly sealed cases, while the coding of software and apps is similarly ‘black-boxed’ and shut off from inspection. If a smartphone or laptop ‘decides’ that a software update is due or that a battery cannot recharge, then there is very little that someone wanting to use that device can do about it. Even the most critically minded technology consumer has very little genuine insight into or control over the digital technologies in their lives. At best, we are expected to be grateful for the veneer of choice that comes with picking the colour of a new smartphone or opting to purchase a Mac rather than PC.
All of this fosters a weary acceptance that digital products and services are above being questioned, challenged and effectively pushed back against. Indeed, we are conditioned to believe that digital technologies are something that we cannot live without. Anyone wanting to keep in touch with extended family and friends is likely to feel beholden to their social media accounts. Anyone opting to stop using a smartphone altogether will quickly find it more difficult to continue with their daily routines. In this sense, owning a smartphone or using social media is not simply an individual lifestyle choice. Instead, excessive consumption of digital technologies is something that has been engineered across many of the key domains of everyday life. This all leads to what various commentators have identified as a default sense of digital ‘resignation’, where people are led to begrudgingly accept that they have limited opportunities to negotiate how they engage with digital technologies. When it comes to using digital technology in the 2020s, we are firmly conditioned to believe that ‘there is no alternative’.
Calling out the harms of digital technology
While it might seem an impossible task, we clearly need to work out ways of moving beyond this uneasy state of digital resignation. Put bluntly, the planet is reaching a tipping point where the downsides of the digital age are beginning to outstrip the benefits. As this chapter will go on to detail, the state of digital excess that now pervades much of the (over)developed world is simply not sustainable. Instead, we need to start thinking in radically different ways about what specific forms of digital technology we want to see in our societies, and what other forms of digital technology might be deemed undesirable, if not utterly unacceptable. This requires us to start making connections between our digital ecosystems and the broader societal and planetary crises that increasingly define these current times. It also requires us to start making connections between the alternative ways of living that we might desire, and different forms of digital technology that might support such change. Digital technology is fully implicated in the societal and environmental problems that the world now faces. How we collectively engage with digital technology over the next few years will be a key determinant of what longer-term futures we can look forward to.
All of this requires approaching the question of digital technology in radically different ways than is currently the norm. This involves seeing the present digital condition as finite rather than endless, and being ready to imagine what comes after this current phase of digital excess. We need to believe that digital technology is something that can be contested, challenged and resisted. We need to be open to the idea that different forms of digital technology are possible, and that other forms of digital technology might well be preferable. All this starts with being prepared to call out the specific harms arising from the excessive digitization that we are currently living with.
Digital technology is societally unsustainable
One major reason to begin thinking in radically different ways is the ongoing harms that digital technologies are causing to our societies. Most obvious are the various ways in which digital technologies have come to drive social inequalities and divisions. This stands in direct contradiction to the popular assumption throughout the 1990s and 2000s that computers and the internet would be an inherently democratizing presence in our lives. Instead of something that inevitably increases opportunities for everyone, it is becoming obvious that digital technologies exacerbate and entrench many of the major social fault lines in contemporary society. For this reason alone, it makes little sense to continue supporting the current digital status quo.
These are not particularly novel complaints. Indeed, the term ‘digital divide’ was coined during the 1990s to describe how access to personal computers and the internet had quickly become patterned along familiar divisions of social class, race, ethnicity, dis/ability and gender. Nearly forty years later, basic access to digital devices, connectivity, bandwidth and other digital infrastructure continues to be as unequally distributed as ever. The 2.6 billion people in the world still lacking internet access are generally living in the most impoverished and marginalized parts of the world. Thereafter, people’s capacity to benefit from having access to digital technology follows similar unequal patterns. The ‘Matthew Effect’ phenomenon of digital opportunities being of most benefit to the already privileged is evident across most applications of digital technology. In short, we are living in a world where digital ‘opportunities’ and ‘conveniences’ tend to advantage those who are already most advantaged.
All this means that bold promises of digital transformation are most likely to result in increased social inequalities and exclusions. Think of how the gig economy has panned out to be little more than ‘servitude-by-app’ – thousands of platforms that allow middle-class people to remotely task working-class people to do things for them. Alternatively, think of the difficulty of carrying out daily life tasks without a smartphone, online banking and/or reliable connectivity. Of course, large numbers of people do survive without these basic digital resources, but at an increasing cost and marginalization. While any digital inequalities tended to be brushed off by tech enthusiasts during the 1990s and 2000s as a passing phase (with tech apologists often parroting William Gibson’s observation that ‘the future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet’), decades later it now seems obvious that any benefits and advantages that accrue from digital technologies are never going to be distributed evenly. The question is whether those parts of the population that have benefited from having a surfeit of digital technologies in their lives care enough to do anything for those who have not.
Alongside persistent digital inequalities are the worrying ways in which digital technologies are driving various social harms and social injustices. Most recently, these harms have been an invidious part of the recent rise of artificial intelligence into mainstream society. This is evident in reports of AI-driven hiring systems that favour job applicants who most closely match the skewed demographics of employees previously hired by human recruiters (e.g. white, male, college-educated). It is also evident in reports of facial recognition systems that fail to detect people of colour, or voice recognition software that fails to detect particular accents and dialects. Put bluntly, it is fast becoming apparent that setting AI technologies loose in social contexts that are already discriminatory and disadvantaging for minoritized groups simply results in making these social contexts even more discriminatory and disadvantaging.
In short, everyone lucky enough to be not experiencing such disadvantages needs to ask themselves if they are content to live in times when digital technologies and digital systems work to reinforce and amplify existing social divisions in society. So far, it is telling that the problems and concerns just outlined have tended to be raised by activists, researchers and tech-insiders from minority groups and marginalized backgrounds. Indeed, anyone who is black, queer, female and/or ageing is likely to have learnt to not expect new digital technologies to work in their best interests. As Ruha Benjamin (2019) points out, any form of digital (dis)advantage is relational. The flipside of some people being empowered and advantaged by digital technologies is that others are being disempowered and disadvantaged.
Yet even the most digitally advantaged sectors of society are beginning to increasingly feel that digital technologies are not a wholly positive phenomenon. The past few years have seen rising concerns that digitization is leading to diminished and downgraded ways of doing things. Cory Doctorow (2024) describes this as the ‘enshittification’ of the digital, a term intended to describe the tendency of established digital platforms and systems to now be decaying in ways that drive the steady degradation of key services and overall living conditions. According to Doctorow, this is an inevitable by-product of the prevailing Silicon Valley business model of: (i) first developing apparently ‘free’ services to draw in huge numbers of users, then (ii) establishing economies of scale, and finally (iii) steadily monetizing and extracting value from these platforms to claw back value until the original essence of whatever made the service attractive to people has been hollowed out.
Enshittification certainly seems an apt description of people’s recent experiences of interacting through a technology such as Facebook, joylessly watching the platform descend into an ever more frustrating means of keeping in touch with family, friends and community. This feeling will also be familiar to anyone who has tried to interact with their local restaurant or municipal services department through a customer service app, or regularly engage with online retail platforms, review sites and news websites. In all these instances, initial promises of digital convenience, flexibility and accessibility have been undone by the subsequent deterioration of core activities and services that the technology is supposed to enhance. Doctorow suggests that tech firms have been able to get away with this through a fundamental lack of regulation and competition, coupled with a stifling of employee power and an underlying public sense of powerlessness to do anything differently (i.e. to switch platforms, install ad-blockers, or simply stop using our devices). All told, the contemporary enclosed and enshittified digital landscape certainly feels a world away from Tim Berners-Lee’s utopian ambitions that ‘the goal of the web is to serve humanity’ (Berners-Lee 2010). Four decades on from the birth of the worldwide web, we are living in a very different (and distinctly dysfunctional) digital environment.
Digital technology is environmentally unsustainable
Unfortunately, this societal ruinification is only half the story. It is also necessary to face up to the various ways that the ongoing digitization of society is proving to be profoundly environmentally damaging in terms of resource depletion, energy consumption and toxic waste. While complaints over digital divides, algorithmic discrimination and enshittification might feel instantly familiar, we tend to hear far less about the environmental consequences of digital technology. These are problems that might seem more abstract but are no less significant.
One fundamental point of concern is how the manufacturing of digital hardware depends on the extraction of fast-depleting scarce resources – what Toby Miller (2015) describes as the ‘dirty material origins and processes’ of the digital age. All our digital devices, batteries and attendant infrastructures are assembled from dozens of different non-renewable natural resources, including scarce metals and rare earth elements. Alongside these material origins, the production of digital hardware takes place through a ‘vast planetary network’ (Crawford and Joler 2018) that facilitates the smelting, processing and mixing of raw materials which are then shipped halfway around the world to be assembled. Each of these stages involves the production (and disposal) of further toxic waste. As Samir Bhowmik (2019) notes, most consumers have no understanding and/or interest in the ‘messy’ and ‘primitive’ ways in which their digital devices come into being. There is nothing virtual, artificial or other-worldly about digital technology.
With literally billions of digital devices being manufactured each year, this all comes at a considerable environmental cost. Many of the component materials essential to the manufacture of laptops, smartphones and other devices are in scarce supply. For example, almost half the world’s extraction of rare earth elements such as cerium, neodymium and dysprosium (materials used for hard-disc drives, LCD screens and fibre optics) takes place within a 15 km by 19 km area in Inner Mongolia – a location whose resources are non-renewable and fast depleting. The extraction and production of many of these resources is itself environmentally harmful. Much of the mining of rare earth and metals involves the excessive use of chemicals and water, and has led to illegal mining, pollution and deforestation. All of
