Decolonizing the Degrowth Movement's Imaginary of Technology

A call for Butlerian Jihad

In October 2018, I took part in a walk/run organized by Paiute, Shoshone, and Goshute peoples from Bahsahwahbee, also known as the Swamp Cedars, a sacred site in northern Nevada, to Las Vegas, as part of a campaign to stop a planed water extraction project. Notably, Bahsahwahbee has been significantly degraded by a wind farm built there in 2012. Photo by the author.

There has been a striking transformation that has taken place within the degrowth movement over the last 15 years. What was once a revolutionary movement primarily oriented at building power outside existing power structures, Dismantling these oppressive institutions and simplifying the way we live has morphed into a bureaucratic top-down approach in which academic output is valued over all else, and critical attitudes towards technology have largely been abandoned.

As a case in point, look at the transformation from Serge Latouche, who in 2009 advocated that the degrowth movement call to “Declare a moratorium on technoscientific innovation” and current degrowth leading star Jason Hickel writing in Monthly Review in 2023 that “degrowth scholarship embraces technological change and efficiency improvements”.

While Hickel weakens his statement with the qualifier “to the extent (crucially) that these [technological changes] are empirically feasible, ecologically coherent, and socially just,” his piece is fundamentally an apologia for technology. In character, this represents a radical shift which is indicative of how the degrowth movement has changed over time, away from empirically and intellectually robust techno-criticism and towards populist techo-agnosticism.

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The writer Martín Prechtel often talks of the Tzutujil Mayan culture he was adopted into, and that community’s relationship with technology. He describes that, in their traditional ways, the production of a tool such as a knife was a grave and serious matter. Throughout the physical effort of creating the knife, mounting a handle, and sharpening the blade, and extending throughout its use, many prayers and lengthy and exhausting ceremonies were required.

The power of the knife, Prechtel says, requires a spiritual expense, a lengthy reflection and meditation on the origins of the materials, the intended use, the ramifications of the technology, and the proper mindset with which it is to be used. The Tzutujil Maya, Prechtel says, didn’t invent bulldozers or aircraft carriers—not from any stupidity, but out of a cultural recognition of the costs (ecological, material, and spiritual) of such technologies.

Contrast this with Hickel’s perspective, which essentially argues for a precautionary principle to guide technological development. This would be a significant step in the right direction. And yet, the problem with this approach is that proper caution depends on proper information and, crucially, perspective.

For example: Hickel’s article is illustrated with a photograph of a bullet train. In much of the degrowth movement, trains have come to symbolize a low carbon and ecological alternative to automobile and airplane transportation. There has been an imaginary, a common sense, built around train travel as an idyllic and ecologically-friendly approach.

The problem is that trains are not, by any stretch of the imagination, an ecologically-friendly technology. Weighing thousands of tons and forged of iron ore and complex alloys, they are industrial products built using mass quantities of mined materials (which, regardless of the power source for the train, are smelted using coal). The spread of railroads around the world — especially in frontiers of capitalism — has signaled ecological catastrophe. The railroad enabled the mass slaughter of the buffalo in the United States and thus spelled the end of substantive Native American military resistance. Railroads today are the major terrestrial engine of extractive commerce, moving billions of tons of lumber, coal, oil, chemicals, mineral ores, and consumer products around the planet. In some towns near Brazil’s massive Amazonian iron ore mines, for example, a fully loaded train passes every 20 minutes, day and night. “[The town of Piquiá de Baixo is] a place where practically the whole population is likely to get health problems and lung diseases,” says local teacher Joselma Alves de Oliveira. Even when reducing a train’s ecological harms to carbon footprint, long-distance trail travel can be even worse for the climate than flying. That is, very bad indeed.

In my view, in this era of unconstrained technological escalation, in which rapid technological progress has led to the rise of existential threats such as AI, rapid increases in energy and materials consumption, uncontrolled changes to public consciousness and mental health, and so on, we need something far more: a programmatic rejection of technological development, our equivalent of the “Butlerian jihad” Frank Herbert envisioned.

Many thinkers are converging on this thesis. One is my friend Aashis Joshi, a PhD candidate studying climate adaptation in Nepal, who believes that technological “solutions” are not just destructive, they will increasingly become irrelevant as ecological collapse accelerates.

In a recent debate on whether globalizing consumer technology is the direction our movements should be taking, Aashis asserted that “given the scale of the problems we face, we need... to take a critical look at the chains of modernity that prevent us from taking meaningful action. Modern technologies have played a key role in our ecological predicament.... [and] colonial injustices including ecocides and genocides as well.”

As AI powers the deportation state, genocide, and enhanced oil recovery, technological escalation has our world on the brink, and new supposedly “benign” technologies like solar photovoltaics, electric cars, and wind energy turbines are spawning a new generation of billionaires and leaving new swathes of ecological destruction. What Langdon Winner called “technological somnambulism,” the zombie-like shamble into a techno-dystopian future, defines the popular approach to these issues. In the face of this, the degrowth movement, and our society, has much to learn from communities like the traditional Tzutujil Maya.

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