4 ms·
That's a fascinating concept, but I don't think all growth is of that sort (even if much of it is). Facebook as one example has seen enormous growth. Was it ba
by abraae 9y ago
That's a fascinating concept, but I don't think all growth is of that sort (even if much of it is).
Facebook as one example has seen enormous growth. Was it bad for the planet? (apart from the incalculable cost of being an attack vector against the more easily manipulated members of society, leading to an anti-environmental administration).
Maybe not. Facebook users sit quietly, hunched over their phones, sipping small amounts of energy. Comparing them to someone who drives their 4WD for a hobby, they look good.
- crispinb 9y agoYou're right of course, and I would hardly claim to have a fully articulated theory. I'm fairly confident though of the minimal notion that aggregate "economic growth" (sorry, I need the scare quotes) is at the cost of entropy increase in evolved ecologies (another way of putting 'matter transfer from living to dead'). There was much talk in the 90s of decoupling economic growth from 'resource use' (sorry about the scare quotes again: I also think the term 'resource' masks a related myth). There were even individual companies that claimed to be getting there (eg. IIRC a carpet company that leased carpets to offices so they could control the whole lifespan?). But evolution has had millions of years to explore state spaces using recycling. Carpet companies notwithstanding, on a planetary scale I doubt we can do it any more efficiently than evolved systems do, without developing systems of comparable complexity. And we're clearly centuries (at least) away from being up to that, and we don't have centuries to play with.