 Welcome to the translation for the talk, Degrowth is Coming, Be Ready to Repair. The speakers are Anja Höfner and Nikola Gnö, and your interpreters are Waffle, Pascaline and Farmerfilmer. And we'd be very grateful for feedback on Twitter using the hashtag C3T, or tweet at C3Lingo, or send an email to hello at c3lingo.org. Hi, welcome. Great to see so many of you here. We've been introduced, but we'd like to introduce ourselves. I'm Anja, and this is Nikola. And both of us work for the concept-berg new economy. It's an association in Leipzig that deals in question of degrowth, post-growth and social transformation. Our talk has the title, Degrowth is Coming, Be Ready to Repair, and degrowth criticizes the current paradigm of economic growth and does this from several perspectives. We want to transfer this to the process of digitization today, and see how that might work. And in the second part, we're not only going to be talking of criticism, but also of alternatives, and Nikola is going to show some approaches that might work for digital technology. We sometimes talk of digitization in this talk, and we want to explain what we mean by that. It's the process of digital data production and transformation that covers ever more areas of our lives. And as you can see, there are several areas where that happens. This is a huge factor in our work or in work in general where things are digitized. It affects us on an individual level and in the area of interpersonal communication. It affects how we can conduct social co-determination by tools that are being used, and it has huge influence on the environment. We talked about this and it enters our collective confidence more and more, but this is something we'll be talking about today. And around these areas we have broken promises or not yet fulfilled promises of digitization, starting with the area of environment. Digital technology promises to dematerialize processes so that we need fewer resources to design processes. Another promise is that digital applications simplify our lives and enhance our comfort. We no longer have to plan a route on a map beforehand. We can simply start walking and there's a device that tells us exactly which way we have to go without having to think about it. A third promise that maybe belongs to the area of co-determination is a reproachment. The Internet initially wanted to simplify communication between all humans in the world on the same level and that still exists, but there's a concentration of power and a commercialization of the Internet. And a fourth promise is that automation liberates us of work and that it automates production. These are images that exist in the public sphere and there are two dystopias or utopias which have a way you want to describe it or understand it, between which these future visions of digitization exist. It's a spectrum between digital capitalism on the one hand or surveillance capitalism maybe and on the other hand fully automated luxury communism where we no longer have to do anything ourselves where we have all the time in the world and when machines do the work for us. Both of these are problematic because surveillance capitalism is very problematic for our democracy and our civil rights, but both of these only work with a large destruction of the environment and a large overuse of resources. So both of these promise material well-being, but it's questionable whether or not we can get there with digital technology because we've already reached a point where we've exceeded some planetary boundaries and many people have understood that we're in the midst of a climate crisis where material well-being is no longer possible to the extent that we have it in the global north and it won't be possible in the future. And this is where degrowth comes into play. It criticizes degrowth as I mentioned initially because it many criticizes this paradigm of growth and gives us alternatives beyond growth for a freer and more self-determined life in future where we can maybe achieve global fairness and have more time in our lives. And I would like to explain what degrowth is. It stands for a transformation path towards forms of economic activity and social self-organization in which the well-being of all is at the center and the ecological foundations of life are preserved. This includes a fundamental change in everyday practice in dealing with one another and a comprehensive cultural change as well as overcoming the capitalist mode of production with its growth, competition and profit constraints. So this definition shows several points. Most importantly, the keeping of the ecological foundation of life and the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production. This degrowth movement started in the 70s where the Dick Croissants movement in France showed up. It has a snail icon. An important point and that was the report of the club of Rome. The important thing or the special thing about degrowth is that it's not solely a scientific discourse but also, well, it's both scientific and a social discourse. It has strong social relations. Since 2008 there are international degrowth conferences where the community meets. It started in Paris with 140 participants and 2014 we had the first degrowth conference in the German-speaking countries with 3,000 participants and it refreshed this movement that was critical of power and it enlivened it, especially in the German-speaking countries. As I wanted to mention, it's not simply a criticism of the existing system but also wants to create concrete visions, there exists this term of concrete utopias where we try to establish strategic models and ways of a social togetherness in future and that enables a good life for everyone. So there are different streams and decoys so it is a term for the different streams. I will go and expand on this later. So there are different forms of criticism like feminism. There is a strong, sufficient oriented stream. There is a researcher who works a lot on degrowth and post-wachstum. Post-growth is used in the German-speaking regions but it also includes the degrowth. And like the Deguassance in France or the Groschita in Italy and the critics in this movement they all have in common that it is an ecological criticism, they say our system, the economical system is wrong and I will explain now 5 different forms of criticism based on this example of economic growth and of digitalisation. It's not all of them, it's just part of them. The ecological criticism is fundamental and it's important that general criticism about economic growth is that it destroys the foundations of life so we cannot have endless economic growth on a finite planet. There is no second planet. This would be nice of course but we don't have one. And in digitalisation this means we sometimes think that we could do a lot with the technical growth by having better technologies. We need less resources and solve the problem as that. But unfortunately this does not work, I will say more about this later because we need more many resources allowing to make all these digital devices that we use in our everyday life and it also uses energy to produce them. This graph shows which elements are used for electronic devices and the ones which are marked in colour are the ones which are for instance conflict materials in red, rare earths or the ones in greens and in yellow we have other substances which could pose a threat. So resources and energy are finite and some people might think oh we have renewable energies that are basically infinite but no this isn't the case. There's a limited sun supply it only shines a few hours a day. We have finite amount of wind etc. This periodic table gives us a nice hour. This is the next topic which is the North-South Critics. It's a critic of the existing system on a North-South basis because it says the economic growth in the northern countries should be similar to the ones in the south because at the moment the south is used for as a cheap source of materials and workers and this is also the same for the manufacturing process of digital goods so we have extraction which is not good for the environment in the south of the southern hemisphere and this also happened in other places for instance in Germany or in the Erzgebirge and this always leads to the destruction of the environment and the extraction of materials is hazardous for the workers too. It poses a risk for the workers. So this is a double problem and not only ecological but also social problem. When looking at the other side the production not the production but the discarding of what happens with the waste then this also usually or often ends in the global south. The biggest but the biggest production countries of waste, the way countries which produce the most waste per person are in the north of course. We produce about 4500 times the weight of the ivory tower as an e-waste and with much of them we don't know where it goes because recycling is not everywhere done very well. There are also other aspects when using and the utilization which is discussed as a digital divide we see that in the north we have many more so the graph shows devices with internet connection in 2014 it might have changed a bit but we still see that there is an inequity between the north and the south so we have inequality between the north and the south not only with the production and the discarding but also with the usage of the UISES. A third critique is the feminism critique also on the economic growth they say that the economic growth as it is now is based on labor that is mostly done by women and connoted with women and growth is connoted with the idea that wage labor has to be done and that it's mostly done in the background and the growth is profiting of this wage labor and it is creating ever more of this so if we look at digital technologies also here there are logics of production and of which were produced this inequalities between women and men and also because software development is still field dominated by men so stereotypes and were produced in software which are out of date but due to existing data sets and because there is a person behind each code these stereotypes are reproduced. In 2014 in Germany not even a fifth of the people working in digital technologies have been women so you can see here big inequality and also in digital services like for example in platforms such as helplink so there is an out of lay of jobs who have before hand been paid such as for example cleaning services and these are these are off late to our services and they become more precarious because they are no longer in a fixed work contract so a fourth stream of critique is capitalism critique so the main point here is that growth is based on capitalism production and accumulation so it cannot be regarded so it cannot be considered or comprehended without taking this point into consideration so if we look at digital capitalism we also see here big concentration of power and monopolization so diversity also on the internet is shrinking over time and one of the most visited site that is not a commercial one is Wikipedia and an accumulation and concentration is not only on the capital but also on the data so we have an accumulation of data there is also that idea that data are the new petrol so digital capitalism reproduces inequalities and exploitation instead of elevating them so the last stream of critique I will present is the cultural critique which which considers accumulation and people have to be ever more productive and ever more ever faster and digital technologies are forcing an alienation between the workplace and no are forcing an approach of workplace and free time so that the both of them become one such as for example when home office is being done so part of the feminism critique is how the work force well we saw that in this example of the helping platform where areas of life that previously were not coupled to profit are suddenly turning into profit-oriented areas why does that happen why is growth running away and why can't why can't digitization as it's happening today contribute to a different way there are several mechanisms that I want to explain it's there are three of them the first is the rebound effect then there's the coupling and the network and network effects and I want to explain what these are and how they work because it's good to know that for an analysis many of you have probably heard of the rebound effect it's an increase in efficiency that's brought about by a technology or a device and leads to less energy being used but the energy that's being saved isn't actually being saved it is instead replaced by an increase in consumption and we may end up consuming even more and these rebound effects exist on several levels they're direct indirect or macroeconomic direct effect is an increase in demand for the same good so let's say I have a lamp that needs far less light a far less power to burn for the same amount of time I might leave it on for longer time because I'm apparently saving energy so it creates an increase in demand for the same good indirect effects is for example me saving money with a car that uses less fuel and I can use that money to consume something else for example fly fly fly on vacation and macroeconomic effects are effects that happen by one person saving energy which is then still on the market as as additional supply which drives down price and stimulates demand and somebody else ends up consuming that resource and this happens a lot with digital technology because we have a constant increase in efficiency computation gets ever cheaper and yet we compute ever more streaming is another great example we no longer have to drive somewhere to get a dvd there's less input required from us to reach a goal of watching a movie and this means that we consume more the second mechanism that I want to explain is decoupling decoupling is the idea that the economy continues to grow without an increase in the consumption of resources there's a relative and absolute decoupling that's not very important but digitization is often combined with a contribution to dematerialization but people tend to forget that the material basis behind all these devices there is no cloud just other people's computers there is no digital service without a material infrastructure behind it and thirdly there's the network effect it explains how the use we get from one product changes when the number of consumers increases so if I have a telephone I don't get a lot of use out of it if there's only one other person who owns a telephone but if there are three people I can call a lot more people and if lots and lots of people have a telephone then I have the highest use for my telephone it's obvious that digital platforms exhibit this effect a platform is more successful the more users it has that's why monopolies are able to develop digital monopolies such as amazon or facebook or whatsapp I the more people use it the higher use I get out of it but this is not solely positive because it leads to monopolies and makes it difficult for alternatives to appear I can't simply start my own social network because I need a certain number of users before it becomes attractive so there's a fairly high initial cost and maybe there are alternatives despite this blockade and this is what Nico is going to show you now thank you Anja we continue we are now at a point where we so unheard what is the state of current state it doesn't look that good we have some problems and we see that we can see that we are driving towards cliff which probably everybody knows this is a known graphics it's a years between the 19th century and we see the the temperatures in the years and we see that high temperatures are becoming more often so this somehow the earth is getting warmer obviously we have the problem that yeah this is a problem and we stand in front of a contradiction on one side for economic reason we would like to solve the economic growth and which would be good for from an economic point maybe social perspective but on the other hand we need to solve the foundation for for our life and this is our two goals which are yeah the two different goals and yeah we have a problem with our with the term of progress so when talking about progress what should should this mean should it mean more production should it mean more efficiency then we can continue going into this direction so that is this is current state where we could say okay we have to go degrowth one day or another at at latest when resources are exhausted for instance oil or rare earth materials coal already began we go into a direction where there is obviously no more future to go do this long term and this leads to big problems because what will happen when when we have these problems then it may be too late another way is to forebring the idea of degrowth to make a decision that we want to degrowth before it is before we have run out of exhaust resources it's a decision which would be more rational it's also more rational than most decisions in capitalism which are only profit based and it would be a really important decision this means we need to to reorganize our entire life and the economy and there in this example we see the idea instead of yeah in the example of mobility we could still try to save our cars faster cars more cars or new technology cars but we could also take a complete the other technology for instance the bicycle which is a lot more sustainable but this is more complicated for digital technique technology so we need to evaluate different criteria and tools on how to solve this and the question about criteria leads to us having to decide on how we want to proceed how we want to do degrowth and in the degrowth movement we usually discuss about how a good life for everyone would look like like I always like this picture it's this is on a climate camp it looks very well but maybe this is not the utopia for everyone not the way everybody would like to have so this question about a good life for everyone really depends on the taste of everyone and it has to have to provide a certain liberty but we also have to see it should be a good life for all not a really nice life for some of us which we currently have in the north and this is of course a difficult thing because we need more other principles one of these principles is in is the sufficiency which means I don't mean always more and more I don't need an own car I could maybe maybe share it and but this needs an active decision that my life has should not have a negative impact on others lives it's not an individual question it's a question of how to do the entire economy and the entire life considering digital goods and digital tools this also has an influence so maybe we should do something a deceleration of our digital life it's very good to yeah so currently I need a big infrastructure but we have a nice real-time communication but maybe we could also have a less powerful infrastructure which allows less less fast communication for instance email they're still quite fast it's maybe would maybe not be nice to have to read less emails per day and also less data retention is a good keyword so produce less data store less data so use less resources to save data and it's also a good idea from a privacy point of view of course so we can could discuss everyone what is a good life for everyone how and how do we get there because maybe some people will be afraid of this because they can't do everything again that they have now some people would maybe like to do certain things but it's not possible anymore so the answer would be to have a dialogue everybody would have to see what would be right for his or her life and which parts are maybe not needed anymore so we need to see everybody needs to see that this is a question of yeah everyone has the right of it so we need to redistribute goods in our and our system so this has to mean that those that are more wealthy at the moment they will have less but this also means that those that are poor at the moment will have more so it's a question of fairness and a question of sharing so so one thinks that this should work very easily with digital goods but here it is very important to take into consideration the economic costs because there's always this this question of the material of the infrastructure and the raw materials so we have to decide which what should be shared and how and to what cost so sharing is a very complicated question so we can also look at our everyday life and how we use technology so maybe this technology can help us make this decision how to share how to live so a very important aspect is repairing and longevity of things so so that the things we use that they may be kept up for longer than a few weeks or years and now we can ask ourselves was that easier or better before so it was mainly different before so to repair things meant to have to use fewer resources so so and also the tools were easier to use back then there wasn't an update for your hammer and there was no problems with things that weren't usable after an update anymore so today we have more complicated tools more complicated technologies which make it more complicated to repair and to use over a long time so in regarding to repairing things it's important to think hardware and software as one and if software is no longer updated is it still usable and the hardware it is on is no longer usable as well so the one idea of repairing it might be to write your own software for it even if it's no longer officially supported so it's important to take into account both of these aspects so modularity is a very important aspect of this you know this in software but it's also for repairing a very important concept so it's it's very different from what we nowadays know about smartphones and it's very important that we try to fit the software and hardware to our needs and so there's also a question of standards so if we want to repair things we need to know how does the technology work so hardware has to be more open source but there are also complicated questions following this so questions of transparency questions of privacy which data should be transparent which data should not my private data should not be transparent but maybe the data of big companies should be so there's that question of standardization it's important and it's also important because standards are needed to resolve complex problems such as long video of usage of software and hardware so that the economical costs are reduced or lessened an important point is which technology are we using and is that high-tech technology a very cutting edge that's nice but there's also other forms of technology that are very interesting such as low tech or low tech so there are many tools we use but we don't use them anymore because there's no software anymore but there are people like hackers who take old tools and look at these and try to use them again and to continue using these resources that so you're probably so it's known and you have to decide what do we want do we want new features or do we want things that are long with it that have long with it so this is a point where you also have to look at software and hardware together you cannot consider them separately so these questions of what is the technology has also a very it's also a very important point at the question of who is using it who is developing it so Anja talked about the feminism critic so this is an important point so for who develops software and hardware and for whom is it developed how do we share how can we share this technology so we are now nearing the end so we booked some literature tips with us so if you want to inform yourself on degrowth so there's an introduction we book the first one which is also interesting and the points that Nico brought up is the second one it's called repairing the world you can download it also from so another book is a collection from 2016 it's a bit older and there's also a book which summarizes and describes the different streams in the degrowth movement and now now we talked about many points like modularity, longevity so these are also what we asked on the bits and boimel conference where we were also represented and there are 11 demands and propositions what do we need what do we want to have digital technologies to procure a more efficient at this better in the future so we also have an assembly and we are in the about future cluster in the ccl you're welcome to join us there to discuss and please continue to repair instead of construct new things thank you for coming thank you for your attention and now we have some time for question and you've been listening to waffle pharma firma and pascalina translating for you if you have any feedback we'd be very grateful to receive an email from you hello at c3lingo.org or you can also tweet at us at c3lingo or use the hashtag c3t and we have time for questions and answers now and we're going to start with microphone number three hello thank you for the lecture i have one question about the slow communication because somehow this is not that intuitive for me i mean it's i i come yeah but if we if we transmit less information this makes somehow sense to me by for instance not not transmitting too many megabytes of data but having slower communication for instance not having instant chat or telephony anymore they don't use much data they are yeah how how do you see this or did i did i understand it wrong i think it's a question of balance it's hard to determine beforehand what we're going to do with the resources that we have and we'll have in the future but data volume is a is a large question but i'm very interested in this idea of slowness where there was a talk yesterday of a person speaking about regions in india where some villages don't have any access to the internet and so somebody wrote their motorbike through these villages collected emails from everyone and then and passed them on that was an interesting example of of creating your own infrastructure this slows down communication but maybe it's it's easier thank you let's continue microphone two please i like all your ideas and our company it's it this would probably be unsuccessful because it is not cost efficient so my question is how could we make this more appealing to people to companies how can we sell it it's always a bit complicated it's a large step but if a company were operated by collective where people working for the company are allowed to determine then they might be happy to work less and produce less and it would be a nice to have these criteria instead of this growth paradigm and of course the question is how do we get to this point can we say that this practice is not sustainable but at some point raised the large question of changing priorities i understand that this is difficult but it remains true that we have to deal with this there is a clear path composed of small steps that get us there and we have to reimagine you said that we have to resign from things and i think this is true yes not only because of the problems you described in the first part i'm i'm ready to resign to things but how can i be sure that this really has an impact and it's not somebody else uses more in the degrowth introductory book there are strategies of how we can get there because of course it's one thing to have ideas but then we also have to secure these concepts for a long term and to ensure that these aren't consumed by capitalism again that's an important step and i lost my thread a bit here we'll find it together how can i be sure that mario is signed already as an impact i well we we already have this today i mean it release my conscience when i when i consume responsibly responsibly but of course i want to be sure this doesn't stimulate more consumption in society and of course network effects may lead to renewed monopolies that's why open interfaces are a request of this bits and boime movement because that would mean that it doesn't matter if i'm on facebook i could use facebook to communicate with somebody who uses twitter or mason don so having these interfaces would be one approach against this concentration of power thank you michael too hello and thank you for your for your talk yeah to see this to have this topping it in a bigger audience here last year i was at the bits and boime conference and i thought this this thought was sounded quite inviting for people how's this thought being continued now there are no ideas that i know of to organize a large conference but we decided to liberate this name and say that everybody who wants and to create a non-commercial conference is welcome to do that so if you know people from different different parts of the this spectrum then do it and there are some continuations for example there was a one-day conference in may in dresden this year which dealt with questions of renubility there are mainly in this there are there are associations there are forums where these topics are being discussed discussed and i think there's even a group in the ccc that tries to bring bring these topics on to the agenda but it's unsure how the conference the large conference is going to develop but of course we wanted to continue but it's it's a question of capacity as well allow me to say that annie also worked for a book on this topic so the connection between bits and trees and you can even download it as a pdf from the publishing house next question is there is there a kind of company consulting where companies could hire people who are still into this topic are already into this topic the institute for ecological economical research has a did a study of this where they um well they they wrote portraits of societies that companies that don't want to grow any further premium cola is another example of a company that says we do what we want to do and we we're not planning to expand this is interesting because these are these are examples that might be cool for you to see maybe their strategies of arguing and i know of one other person who who works on this top topic and come see me after the talk thank you to ania hüfner and nicola gino and