Review | Digital Degrowth

Digital technologies are part of every aspect of global capitalism, from militarism to fast fashion. Daire Ní Chnáimh highlights the need to include that perspective in left organising.

Microsoft sells AI tools to maximise oil extraction. Apple’s thirst for metals and minerals fuels war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Whilst the refining of minerals and the production of technology causes vast pollution of rivers, there is also an uptick in diverting drinking water away from people, in order to cool down the thousands of data centres which operate across our heating planet.

‘Digital degrowth’ is the anticapitalist answer to the environmental destructiveness of technologies, particularly those under the sway of Big Tech. This new book by Michael Kwet is an informative and convincing intervention, written for a wide public with no assumed knowledge. The myriad ways in which the technology industries impact the planet is difficult to grasp, and as the author says, ‘we cannot collectively oppose something we do not collectively understand.’ 

How does technology fuel growth?

On the heartbeat chart of planet Earth’s levels of temperature change, the first concerning spike was caused by the Industrial Revolution. This was the first instance of technology-driven capitalist production, and linked the burning of coal to the accumulation of profit. Coal was extracted and burned to power arms manufacture, transport and colonisation of lands that were exploited for further extraction, manufacture and profiteering. All the while, greenhouse gas emissions rose. Today, capitalism continues to drive climate warming with more mining, more drilling, more burning and more bombs. The senselessness of mass extraction from the global South is softened by forcing mass consumption on the global North. 

Modern technology industries are inseparable from this unsustainable growth. In this book, Kwet takes sectors of the capitalist economy and explains how digital technology is central to their contemporary mode of operation. This is a useful way to think through the effects of Big Tech on the environment. There are the environmental harms of technology itself – quantified through resource usage, the water and energy consumption of data centres, exploitative labour practices and harmful wealth concentrations. Then, there are environmental harms exacerbated by adding technological tools to accelerate other unsustainable industries – such as fast fashion, agribusiness, and the military industrial complex.

For example, agribusiness is one of the primary causes of global emissions, destruction of forestry and depletion of soil. Kwet explains a world of technological tools which accelerate these industrial practices and erode more sustainable farming practices. He writes:

If Microsoft and Amazon are to offer agribusiness products that lock in an industrial model, then they are now harming the environment even if the digital tech itself—such as aerial drones to monitor crops—doesn’t emit greenhouse gases.’

This pattern holds across other industries. Fast fashion is well-known to be wasteful and exploitative. Even if Amazon magically converted its server farms and delivery trucks to renewable energy, its platform accelerates and incentivises this overconsumption of cheap clothes. (Of course, a system of low wages and time poverty also creates a consumer need for fast fashion, which circles back to the need to transition to a new kind of economy as a whole.)

The environmentalist campaign ‘1.5C to stay alive’ was agreed as a goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and held by many as an upper limit to the global warming our planet could handle. But capitalist growth continued unabated, and in 2024, average temperatures had risen 1.6C higher than in the pre-industrial period. Capitalism deprives human society of the chance to survive.

What is degrowth?

Degrowth was coined by André Gorz in 1972, to make a case ‘for the limits to growth on socialist grounds.’ It’s a theory of climate action that prioritises sustainability. It recognises that because capitalism, with its endless drive to profit, will always be unsustainable, we need to organise an economy that prioritises human and ecological sustainability – ecosocialism. 

However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not incorporate degrowth scenarios into its models, since it is fixated on a continuation of capitalist growth. As Kwet illustrates through a survey of media outlets, degrowth is barely discussed in the media, and it has been almost entirely ignored by the digital justice movement.

The concept of digital degrowth stems from the recognition that digital technology is resource-hungry and energy intensive; that the concentration of wealth enabled by the profiteering of techno-capitalists has created huge wealth divides which allow billionaires to overconsume whilst the workers at the lowest end of the production line only scrape by; and that technology accelerates the worst excesses of other capitalist industries. Rehauling the digital sector would aid a transition to degrowth across the capitalist economy at large.

Central to the strategy of scaling down would be redistribution, both between and within countries. Bluntly, ‘rich countries in the North disproportionately consume electronic goods and then ship their e-waste to poor countries in the South.’ Degrowth would look different depending on whether you stand in the over-consuming, imperialist North or the global South countries who supply the North with its excesses.

China’s role in the digital economy

Contrary to the impressions given by Trump’s rhetoric, the US dominates China in terms of technology patents, investment, research and development, profit, and foreign investment. Kwet carefully lays out statistics to place the US and China in their proper context, which adds pinches of salt to Trump’s bombast around the tariff wars. The book provides ample research that debunks the false impression that China and the US are neck and neck for global tech supremacy. American companies own 48% of the global semiconductor market, China only 7 percent. The global cloud infrastructure – which enables most of the internet – is 73 percent owned by the US, and only 6 percent by China. (105) There are also obvious illogics to Trump’s characterisations of China, which Kwet usefully debunks: 

There are no Americans or Europeans in extreme poverty breaking their backs for 60+ hours a week so that Chinese people can snap high-resolution selfies halfway across the world…

While there is a great deal of consternation about offshoring US manufacturing jobs to China, as well as how China “steals” American intellectual property, it’s also the case that cheap Chinese goods benefit American consumers…

Ecological destruction is also offshored to China, where production for companies like Apple saddles workers and communities with air pollution, water degradation, chemical emissions, heavy metal discharges, hazardous waste, and exposure to substances that cause life-threatening illnesses.

This illustrates that to engage with the environmental effects of technology, the key focus is US tech companies and their global supply chains. One of Kwet’s core arguments in this book is that this needs to be understood through the concept of US imperialism. 

Hidden empire

What stands in the way of digital degrowth is not simply the digital industries, but digital colonialism. Kwet uses this term often throughout the book, but it would have been useful to spend some time defining it, and its distinctions from other forms of colonialism. 

The US has a long history of hidden empires. As Daniel Immerwahr has written, ‘one of the truly distinctive features of the United States’ empire is how persistently ignored it has been.’ Too few Americans know that between 1899 and 1903,  775,000 Filipinos were murdered in wars to retain US occupation. Even during World War II, the US government downplayed the fact that, as well as the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Japan invaded and temporarily occupied other US colonies: the Philippines, Alaska and Guam.

Although it later relinquished many of its occupied territories, the United States retained and obtained a multitude of military outposts. The US has over 750 military bases on foreign soil, leading some to call it a ‘pointillist empire’. (China, for reference, has only one military base on foreign soil, in Djibouti.) These bases are reinforced by technological clout and weapons technology. Further, the US feels entitled to pour money into training paramilitaries and installing puppet governments in other countries, to ensure they remain servile to its interests.

The book prompts a rethinking of the US empire to understand how powerful Big Tech multinationals shape the terrain of global capitalism. US capital profits, but does it control? If it withdrew, along with Trump’s protectionist promises, countries dependent on working for it would be left in the lurch. 

There is a global workforce contributing to US profits – companies like Amazon, with its hubs across the planet. There is also communications infrastructure – and as Kwet suggests in the book, platforms like WhatsApp and X could be replaced by open source alternatives like Signal and Mastodon. 

‘The internet is largely borderless, and the world’s countries have effectively become digital colonies of the United States.’ What goes along with colonisation? Violence, control, incarceration, heightened asymmetric trade between colony and metropole, dependency. Does the fact that everything whizzes along fibre optic cables at the speed of light change the nature of the violence, surveillance, control and asymmetric trade relationships?

As Kwet puts it, ‘the global economy is dominated by American technology to the point where it requires a reconception of theories of imperialism. The digital economy is enormously lucrative for American corporations… it is also a multifaceted source of power, conferring its owners political and social power in addition to unfathomable riches.’ This is seen in the way that Alphabet and Meta in some ways operate as states unto themselves, and how multinationals contravene laws and operate without paying full tax. A more thorough expansion of the concept of a digital colony would be useful.

How to decolonise?

In his excursions and diversions away from ‘tech power’ into the ecological tolls of the fashion industry, the US military, border walls and agribusiness, Digital Degrowth leaves you with the impression that the crises we face are too innumerable for the mind to compute. However, each of these are sectors of the global economy, each part of a convoluted, tottering apparatus made up of millions of unreliable parts. This can work to our advantage.

Kwet levels strong critiques at the highly-paid researchers who over-focus on algorithmic bias, anti-trust laws (or creating ‘good capitalism’), or the few high-profile weapons projects under the auspices of Google and Amazon. These influential voices, often on the payroll of elite US academic institutions, fail to name the core problems of the technology industry – its inherent colonial and ecocidal nature means that Big Tech is wrecking the planet.

Admirably, Kwet makes thorough proposals for what revolutionaries could aim for to rehaul destructive technology. Because digital colonialism is perpetrated by the US, and indeed ‘Big Tech corporations are the apartheid equivalents of the global community,’ Kwet pushes for a Big Tech BDS campaign. This is further supported by the recognition that it is the US that enables Israel’s occupation of Palestine, therefore they’re also a straightforwardly genocidal state that could be boycotted.

Kwet proposes an ecosocialist movement for digital degrowth, under the slogan ‘People’s Tech for People’s Power,’ to seize the means of computation, production and knowledge, in order to redistribute this property. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is publically available and outside corporate control. This is an old thing, weakened by profiteers, yet can be pursued to improve public life. All schools in Kerala already use open source software, for instance. However, the principle runs aground when it tries to think through open source hardware. Kwet says ‘we need to figure out how to socialise the multifaceted supply chain across borders,’ which opens the question about the under-researched extractivism within computer hardware. 

Theories of environmentally unequal exchange, the colonial form of trade which is the norm under capitalism, when updated to think through technology, have concluded that there is no egalitarian technology production – distribution of artefacts which require such a high dispersal of bio-resources and labour into a commodity cannot but be unequal under capitalism. It remains to be thought through, whether hardware manufacture could or would continue outside capitalism. 

As well as divesting from reliance on private tech to open source tech, Kwet proposes a ten-point Digital Tech Deal to ensure the digital economy falls within social and planetary boundaries. It offers a vision for what many would dismiss as unthinkable: socialist internet. This entails an end to Intellectual Property and a proposal for better ways to sustain vibrant cultural production; the socialisation of physical internet infrastructure, which could be operated at cost for the public good; socialisation of platforms and data; the abolition of the advertising industry to curb environmentally harmful consumerism; an end to planned obsolescence for consumer electronics. 

Who wants a ten-point plan?

Kwet’s solutions could be termed ‘galaxy-brained’ in that they aim to vitiate every golden goose of the profiteering Big Tech giants. However, as he rightly says, it is the nay-saying ‘”pragmatists” who are unrealistic. Business as usual cannot hold.’ But a transition is not about to occur, especially when most people are unaware of the harms of the technology industries. Before communities can act together for degrowth, people need to be persuaded of its necessity.

With data center energy consumption set to double by 2027, we need to begin discussing how we transition from our societal dependence on Big Tech infrastructures. Kwet predicts that ‘those who want degrowth will have to force the issue through unprecedented levels of strikes, direct action, and civil disobedience.’ However, it feels unlikely that organisation will originate in activism around digital solutions, because it is so abstracted along opaque supply chains. 70 to 75 percent of the emissions from the Big Tech companies are from their global supply chains. That said, all revolutionary organising which builds internationalist solidarity and the capacity for collective action, will ultimately help to build a future where we can choose the technologies our society will accept. For the moment, it is okay that Kwet’s digital degrowth plan has no straightforward path toward implementation.

This book convincingly argues that digital degrowth needs to be at the centre of the leftist discourse on technology, and is a brilliantly useful contribution to that discourse. 

Digital Degrowth is published by Pluto Press