Big is Bad, Small is Beautiful, Less is More

The preoccupation with growth and technology accelerated following WWII, fuelling the illusion of infinite growth on a finite planet.  The rise and fall in the belief in technological progress can be illustrated with data from Google Books Ngram Viewer.

I have been observing these trends since the mid 1980s, when anthropocentric confidence in technology and growth seems to have peaked, and when neoliberalism was “installed” around the world as the future engine of wealth and prosperity. Under the hood, the neoliberal engine was powered by the availability of computers and software, and by the economic logic of Moore’s Law. Looking back over the last 30 years, the entanglement of the evolution of digital technologies and neoliberal economics can be summarised as follows:

Software product design conducted in isolation, without giving customers and marginalised groups the ability to shape the design, is a form of social engineering, whether intentional or not. All users of the Internet are familiar with the social externalities.

Our laws and social norms have been shaped by the metaphor of society as a factory and on the metaphor of people as machines. These metaphors have not only warped our relationship with the natural world and our conception of humanity. They have led to techno-cults in which technology corporations have taken on the role of sacred places of worship, and CEOs are the high priests, praising the divine qualities of artificially intelligent technologies. In the emerging technoverse, biological life is perceived as becoming irrelevant.

When society is a factory, the only things that count in are things that can be measured. It is no coincidence that scientific management (Taylorism) was conceived in the wake of the invention of the steam engine and machine assisted manufacturing, to complement the the laws of physics that governed the mechanics and the productivity of the machines on the factory floor.

The discipline of economics allowed the scientific approach to managing humans to be extended to the scale of nation states – another conceptual building block for organising human activities in industrialised societies. There are a number of parallels between the impact of the development of economic theories on human society and the social impact of the development of the Internet. Neither the Internet nor economics draw directly on an evidence based understanding of physics, biology, and human behaviour. Both the Internet and economic theories are best understood as prescriptive rather than as observational tools – as language systems that are based on specific European/North American cultural conventions that are assumed as “sensible” (common sense) or “obvious” (self-evident). With these language systems in place you can measure data flows and economic performance, but only in terms of the scope and the preconceived categories afforded by the formal protocols and languages.

The introduction of a formal economic language system and the introduction of formal protocols for digital communication have shaped human culture around the social ideologies espoused by early industrialists and early information technology entrepreneurs. Over course of the last two centuries governments have become increasingly dependent on economists and information technology entrepreneurs in order to understand and engage with society, and also to understand what what technological options are on the horizon. In this process anything that lies beyond the scope of what is deemed relevant or acceptable is discounted as non-essential or unproductive. In multiple bottom line approaches the conveniently simplistic thinking becomes evident when metrics from the natural world are translated into monetary metrics – as if a monetary number can adequately represent the loss of biodiversity and the destruction of entire ecosystems in the name of economic “progress”.

Astute observers have been lamenting the chasm between digital hype and the way that technology manifests in our lives for decades.

In the face of the multiple existential threats created by industrialised civilisation, we are well advised to adopt less life denying filtering, collaboration, thinking, and learning tools for the next 200 years, a topic that I have been been working on since 2006.

A couple of months ago Douglas Rushkoff publicly connected similar concerns from his perspective. He starts off with his usual story of the NZ bunkers of the tech billionaires, and then does a great job of painting the bigger picture in accessible terms, concluding with an appeal to reconnect technology and abstract metrics to the beautiful diversity of the living world and to the limits of human scale.

I would add that the cult of busyness has not only infected billionaires, but has been force fed to a broader class of professionals who find themselves trapped as employees and investors in super human scale corporate and government bureaucracies. Some of these people have become as addicted to the drug of social power as the billionaires. Their decisions, some of which affect many millions of people, need to be understood as decisions made by power drunk addicts.

Nate Hagens recently facilitated an an excellent panel discussion on natural resource accounting, exposing the extent of wishful thinking and denial of material constraints in the cult of busyness. The barrier to the urgently needed transition to degrowth is ideological inertia, an artefact of WEIRD psychology. The sooner the life destroying cancer of economic growth collapses under its own weight, the less the overall level of suffering. Locally, my friend Deirdre Kent illustrates the effects of the invisible hand in the context of “emissions trading”, and points to the conceptual tools and metrics needed for coordinating economic activity on a path of degrowth.

The longer the established power structures prevail, the greater the overall amount of suffering. From here on onwards, it’s materially downhill across all potential scenarios. The open question is how far down we’ll take the entire planet. The current monocultural and energy intensive way of life has no future. The kinds of technology that humans will be able to maintain and operate sustainably over the next 100 or 200 years, will be much simpler and less energy intensive – much more economising. Manual human labour and in-depth understanding of local ecosystems will be back in demand, and will be appreciated. We can start with that today.

Whilst all paths into the future involve a radical decrease in material consumption, how the transition will be experienced is very much a question of cultural evolution and adjustments in expectations. No matter how various local cultures evolve, the unavoidable suffering will be greater the longer the inertia of established institutions prevails, as it only deepens the level of destruction of the biosphere and the remaining human habitat. Pedal to the metal, running on the neoliberal engine for another decade, as far as that is even possible, will lead to delayed but ultimately greater suffering.

Joseph Tainter’s timeless conclusion (1988) about collapse from his analysis of collapsed civilisations applies and provides useful guidance:

The notion that collapse is uniformly a catastrophe is contradicted, moreover, by the present theory. To the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is an economizing process. It occurs when it becomes necessary to restore the marginal return on organizational investment to a more favorable level. To a population that is receiving little return on the cost of supporting complexity, the loss of that complexity brings economic, and perhaps administrative, gains.What may be a catastrophe to administrators (and later observers) need not be to the bulk of the population (as discussed, for example, by Pfeiffer [1977: 469-71]). It may only be among those members of a society who have neither the opportunity nor the ability to produce primary food resources that the collapse of administrative hierarchies is a clear disaster. Among those less specialized, severing the ties that link local groups to a regional entity is often attractive. Collapse then is not intrinsically a catastrophe. It is a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of examples of good human scale initiatives on the margins. Our friends from Local Futures have just run an online knowledge sharing workshop with participants from a range of countries: part 1, part 2. As the old system is dying, new systems are being birthed as part of the big cycle of life.

We can learn a lot from the Congolese forest people. Humour is the ultimate weapon. It is time to have a good laugh, and to show power addicted capitalists the immediate exit – without any further returns. At the same time, we can offer education that guides those who feel trapped towards safe exit paths into emergent alternative human scale realities. 

Onwards!

Further reading

Meadows, D. et al. 1972. The Limits to Growth. Club of Rome.

Schumacher, E. F. 1973. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Harper Perennial.

Tainter, J. A. 1988. Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press.

Babiak, P. and Hare, R. 2006. Snakes in suits: When Psychopaths go to Work. Harper Business.

Graeber, D. 2006. “Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity.” London School of Economics. May 2006. http://libcom.org/files/20060525-Graeber.pdf.

Owen, H. 2008. Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Tomasello, M. 2009. Why We Cooperate. Boston Review Books.

Weinberger, D. 2012. Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge now that the Facts aren’t the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room. Basic Books.

Low-Tech Magazine. 2012. “Electric Velomobiles: as Fast and Comfortable as Automobiles, but 80 times more Efficient.” Low-Tech Magazine. October 2012. https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2012/10/electric-velomobiles.html.

Ostrom E., 2015. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Bowles, S. 2016. The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are no Substitute for Good Citizens. Yale University Press.

Sale, K. 2017. Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future. Chelsea Green Publishing Company.

Sloman, S. and Fernbach, P. 2017. The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone. Macmillan.

Manevich, D. and Chwe, H. 2017. “Globally, more people see U.S. power and influence as a major threat.” Pew Research Center. August 2017. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/10/chinas-government-may-be-communist-but-its-people-embrace-capitalism/ .

Dell, K. et al. 2018. “Economy of Mana.” MAI Journal 7, 1 (2018). University of Auckland Business School. DOI: 10.20507/MAIJournal.2018.7.1.5.

Levine, B. E. 2018. Resisting Illegitimate Authority: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Being an Anti-Authoritarian – Strategies, Tools, and Models. AK Press.

Aldred, J. 2019. Licence to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us. Allen Lane.

Bauwens, M. et al. 2019. Peer to Peer : The Commons Manifesto. University of Westminster Press.

Ramos, J. 2019. “Cosmo-Localism.” P2P Foundation. October 2019. https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localism.

Eisler, R. et al. 2019. Nurturing Our Humanity : How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. Oxford University Press.

Hickel, J. 2020. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. William Heinemann.

Saijo, T. et al. 2020. Future Design: Incorporating Preferences of Future Generations for Sustainability. Springer.

Bettin, J. 2021. The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless Patterns of Human Limitations. S23M.

Townsend, C., Ferraro, J. V., Habecker, H., Flinn, M. V. 2023. ‘Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 378(1872). doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0414