None could break the Web: Industry, Degrowth, and Why Less is More

Absolute Zero, a newsletter from RJ Eskow and The Zero Hour

Topic: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, by Jason Hickel

Jason Hickel and Richard (RJ) Eskow on The Zero Hour

The words sound like they were written for the Internet age:

None could break the Web, no wings of fire,

So twisted the cords, and so knotted

The meshes, twisted like to the human brain.

They’re actually from William Blake’s Book of Urizen, which he printed and self-published in 1794. You’d think he was talking about social media’s blurring of fact, fiction, and fanaticism. Like all of Blake’s “prophetic books,” Urizen is famously challenging to interpret. But it seems pretty clear that Blake is reckoning with science (“Urizen” = “your reason”) and mechanization during the Industrial Revolution.

The internet isn’t “new” or “clean.” It’s the latest in a long line of exploitative industrial technologies. We rarely consider its devastating impact on the environment, from the chemicals in microchips to server farms’ massive energy consumption. Like automobiles, the internet is a destructive technology when it’s in profit-seeking hands. We can imagine an alternative internet based on depth and meaning, not rapid clicks and flickers of cognition – one that would respect the value of human attention, support human fulfillment, and do vastly less harm to the planet. But Big Tech, like other industries, is addicted to exploitative growth.

The engines of the internet burn night and day with our attention as their fuel. And we remain hypnotized, to quote Blake, till the shrunken eyes, clouded over, Discern not the woven Hypocrisy.

Half a century after those words were written, another writer/illustrator’s words also seemed to resonate with England’s industrialization. “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him,” John Ruskin wrote. “You cannot make both.” Tool or human: a choice we still face in the age of social-media mesmerism.

Which brings me to Jason Hickel’s new book, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. I was raised on a Left vision that assumed we needed constant economic growth to meet workers’ material needs. Jason’s book is an important step in breaking our addiction to growth and our economy’s addiction to profit. In my conversation with Jason, we talked about his book and touched on what a society might look like based on other models of human fulfillment.

I recommend Jason’s book highly. I’ll continue, as you will looking for new ways to imagine the world – and by re-imagining it, perhaps to rescue us from the fate Blake envisioned 227 years ago, living

In chains of the mind locked up, Like fetters of ice shrinking together, Disorganiz'd, rent from Eternity.

We, and the planet, deserve better.

Buy Jason’s book here: https://bookshop.org/books/less-is-more-how-degrowth-will-save-the-world-9781785152504/9781785152504 (or, you know, at that other place if you must)

Support The Zero Hour here: www.patreon.com/thezerohour