britone mwasaru

In an article titled “A practical utopians guide to the coming collapse” here https://davidgraeber.org/articles/a-practical-utopians-guide-to-the-coming-collapse/ David Graeber makes a case for slowing down. Quote here:

At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of produc- tivity. This might seem a strange thing to say—our knee-jerk reaction to every crisis is to assume the solution is for everyone to work even more, though of course, this kind of reaction is really precisely the problem—but if you consider the overall state of the world, the conclusion becomes obvious. We seem to be facing two insoluble problems. On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises, which have grown only more and more severe since the seven- ties, to the point where the overall burden of debt—sovereign, municipal, corporate, personal—is obviously unsustainable. On the other, we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of cli- mate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war. The two might seem unrelated. But ultimately they are the same. What is debt, after all, but the promise of future productivity? Saying that global debt levels keep rising is simply another way of saying that, as a collectivity, human beings are promising each other to produce an even greater volume of goods and services in the future than they are creating now. But even current levels are clearly unsustainable. They are precisely what’s destroying the planet, at an ever-increasing pace.

This was written in 2013, now in 2026 this sounds really like a strange thing to say to people. With new phones coming out every year, the artificial intelligence race and even the new usage of renewable energy as an alternative. The other day after another recent collapse of a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I was thinking will we ever get out of the need for minerals that run these technologies. Even when you talk of renewable energy technology like solar panels or hybrid cars they still use minerals from the earth. The energy is renewable but the minerals are not. Apart from the pressure put on earth, the enormous pressure on the labour is dehumanizing. Kenyans are forming organizations to fight the human conditions that the data labellers are facing when training machine learning (or AI as many people call them) systems.

Sometimes it feels like the only progress we have are the shiny devices we get yearly. The human condition is not getting better. Yes, you can argue that even the shiny devices are making life worse. Maybe we really need to slow down.