Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #60
From the slow life revolution to our commodity addiction, degrowth for engineering, an alternative to COP, and subsidizing slowing down
THIS WEEK → 🐌 The Slow Revolution 💊 Commodity Addiction 📉 Degrowth Engineering ➕ A COP Alternative 🚿 Subsidizing Slowing Down
Rabbit Holes 🕳️
As always, here are three perspective-shifting ideas to create a better world, plus some fun extras below. Enjoy!
#1 🐌 The Slow Revolution
Are we on the cusp of a slow-living revolution? I’m not sure. But, in line with the observations in the article below, I, too, am increasingly seeing signals that point toward a feeling of enoughness, of exhaustion coupled with boredom, disenchantment, and overwhelm in our societies. An important point that one can maybe spot between the lines here is that once people take the first (baby) steps into slow living, the sort of meaningful nourishment that comes with that makes it hard to go back.
“800 page novels, 3.5 hour blockbuster movies, 4+ hour podcasts… Not to mention homesteading social media accounts with millions (and millions) of followers, slow food journaling version 2.4 promoting sourdough bread-making, old-school pickling and marmalade making — what’s going on?
Are we experiencing a new and evolved slow revolution? Is this the beginning of a silent revolt against TikTok and other kinds of mind-numbing fast-pace entertainment that encourages overconsumption and is destroying our attention span?
I started noticing these changes a couple of years ago. But the past half year they have been impossible to ignore. […]
It appears that many of us have had enough. Enough shallowness, enough empty calories in the shape of mindless entertainment, enough smoothness and sameness, enough each-to-their own, enough ridiculous TikTok shorts of tripping cats and chewing people and lip syncing and make-overs, enough consumption — as in buying stuff, going through it and discarding it again — and enough homogeneous, mass-produced convenience-foods and fast fashion products.
The slow revolution anno 23–24 is about reclaiming our civil rights to celebrate diversity, to engage in meaningful conversations, get aesthetically nourished by well-made things that last, to age with grace, to celebrate nature and seasons and the rhythms of life, and to have time enough to engage in reading, cooking, gardening, talking, playing, and listening to vinyl records.”
» The Immaterialist | The Slow Revolution Anno 23-24
#2 💊 Commodity Addiction
As you might know by now, I like ideas that expand existing concepts of changing the system or making the world more sustainable. This piece here does exactly that by framing the current destructive mode of living as an addiction. This adds an essential component to my recently published report on Alternative Prosperity. Namely, that efforts to popularize a sustainable way of life – or of reframing “the good life” – have to be approached in a therapeutic manner, as opposed to a patronizing or higher-morality approach.
“Human beings need guiding purpose in life as they need air to breathe – not just the ad hoc tasks and goals with which each day presents them, but a pattern of settled purposes organised by the pursuit of what is felt deeply to carry lasting significance, which will implement in turn an abiding structure of values. […] The underlying insight has always been that purpose and meaning depend on the principle of life working creatively through each of us […].
Meanwhile the increasing predominance of passive entertainment in the forms of semi-literate fiction, cinema, popular music and the television has brought with it a lethal lapse of cultural authority for genuine art as the guarantor and prime exemplar of creativity. The upshot has been an almost complete dissipation of the cultural resources which were once available for bringing this third dimension of human experience – the life-dependent creative responsibility which is the essential religious recognition – properly to mind, let alone for talking of it in any way of which the ordinary majority could hope to make living sense.
As a result their lives are, unprecedentedly in history, radically two-dimensional. And this is the context within which we have to place the widespread contemporary phenomenon of destructive commodity-addiction if we really want to understand it.
It is, in other words, from a hole in the collective soul or psyche so deeply configured in Western culture as to have the force of inevitability, that this form of addiction arises. […]
Western culture has so powerfully reinforced a two-dimensional picture of the options (subjective self confronting external material world as all there is) that it has progressively deprived the majority population of resources for recognising any third dimension in which significance is given both through and as the life-dependence of the creatively-responsible self. Hence everything to which they turn in the hope of meeting the profound need for life-purpose and direction must either exalt the subjective will, or impose some kind of external requirement. […]
The logic of capitalist production, distribution and exchange dictates a constant quest for novelty and ‘improvement’ in the relentless pursuit of market advantage; and keeping up, or attempting to keep up, or even just aspiring to keep up with this dynamic supplies to people who ‘find their soul in commodities’, as Marcuse once put it – in iPhones, cars, flat-screen televisions and holiday flight-packages, to update his examples – a permanently available source both of apparent autonomy and of apparent point in their lives.”
» Green House Think Tank | Rethinking Consumerism by John Foster
#3 📉 Degrowth Engineering
Engineering is (unconsciously) driven by the assumption that humanity’s needs for speed, comfort, materialism, and convenience are limitless. What if we introduced limits (economic, human, and ecological limits) to people’s needs? How would engineers design the things we use in a world that sets limits to growth?
“A societal consensus to set limits on humanity’s impact on the planet will help usher in a new version of engineering and science. Steady-state economics can help engineers reframe the problems they address by revisiting the concept of human needs and re-examining the orientation of engineering.
While things—the stuff we use—are designed by engineers to meet people’s needs, those needs are typically assumed to be limitless. “Sustainability” programs evaluate the energy efficiency of products without acknowledging the ever-expanding definition of “need.” […]
Could engineers design technologies that are oriented away from cultural norms of speed, comfort, and convenience?
Do we “need” energy storage to give us energy anytime, anywhere, and in any amount? […] Similarly, do we “need” fresh produce year-round, grown using high-input, highly industrialized agricultural processes? Might we learn to eat seasonally, relishing fruits and vegetables that arrive at our tables in their time, rather than ours?
Some engineering assumptions, like the need for speed, may also need to be rethought. Transportation engineers design roadways, railways, airways, and other transportation systems with “access” as a primary metric of concern. Access is defined by the time it takes to reach a place, and thus providing greater access means providing travelers with greater speed. Via this metric, engineers contribute to a continual ratcheting up of travel speed as part of their technological design and improvement process. […]
In a world with equitable restraints on growth, ever-greater distance is removed from the criteria by which engineers design systems. In fact, they may have to explicitly design for slower speed and lower-distance systems. Such a degrowth move would not block engineers from designing wonderfully creative transportation systems—imagine the engineering required to effectively convert car lanes to space allocated for buses, e-bikes, regular bikes, and rickshaws—but it would alter the metrics of success around which they design. Similar assumptions around cost reduction, productivity, and economic growth will be altered in the degrowth-enabled engineer imaginary. […]
The steady-state/degrowth movement opens the possibility of re-defining “needs” and reorienting engineers to achieving equitable prosperity on our one shared planet. That’s what we mean by “degrowth for engineers.” […]
As the world downscales, engineers will be asked to manage and shape technology to function effectively and sustainably within the rapidly evolving world. In fact, engineers will likely be valuable in determining which technologies societies should actively limit and reject, making engineers pivotal actors. This powerful positioning implies a heavy responsibility. It requires that engineers transition to a new understanding of their critical work and a new way of building the world.”
» Resilience.org | Degrowth for Engineering and Engineering for Degrowth by Kendrick Hardaway & John Mulrow
➕ Extras
💡 If COP28 Is A Farce, Activists Ask, What’s the Alternative? by Yessenia Funes
”As activists lambast the annual climate summit for failing to produce substantive change, they’re envisioning an alternative convention that platforms people rather than powerful governments and industry.”
💡 How Popular are Post-Growth and Post-Capitalist Ideas: Some Recent Data by Jason Hickel
”A list of studies, surveys and polling results that shed some light on popular perceptions of post-growth and post-capitalist ideas.”
💡 Being Human by Willow Defebaugh
“The human body is made up of a consortium of micro-communities and ecosystems, harboring whole worlds beneath our skin.”
📕 Self-Promotion Without Social Media by Tess McCabe
”What does self-promotion look like without social media? This guide reveals how creatives and solo business owners from all industries can increase their visibility, attract clients and market their work, without the daily grind of active social media promotion.”
🚿 Shower Thoughts
That’s it for this week!
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