If by degrowth…
Both sides of the degrowth debate are right, and I can prove it by Luna NovaFriends keep asking where I stand on degrowth. Some call me a doomer, others assume I've bet everything on the exponential.
Allow me to take a stand:
If when you say degrowth you mean that blessed liberator from the treadmill, that breaker of Goodhart's tyranny, who sees the all-mighty needle of Gross Domestic Profit climbing while the suicide rates follow;
if by degrowth you mean the great unshackler of human potential, who frees us to pursue meaning instead of metrics, who lets us build a world where we can be more than just efficient nodes in a vast machine, who understands that the only way to improve is to let some things die;
if by degrowth you mean that we stop speedrunning the 35°C wet-bulb death zone, cease burning the great forests that sequester our CO₂;
if you mean a ministry for the future that puts human well being at its core by applying an immediate forcing function against externalities that would otherwise race to destroy the peoples of the future;
then certainly I am for that.
Yet, if when you say degrowth you mean that great Malthusian specter, that cold arithmetic of enforced poverty;
if by degrowth you would condemn billions to freeze in the dark while their children starve;
if when you say degrowth you mean that grim reaper of progress, that jealous god who would chain Prometheus again, who would tell the child dying of malaria that her suffering is necessary for Gaia's balance;
if by degrowth you would deny us our Dyson spheres and O'Neill cylinders and our glorious diaspora across the stars;
if by degrowth you mean preferring to sit around idly while millions die rather than contemplate the great geoengineering works that could save us all;
then certainly I am against it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.
I'm about to McFuckin' lose it from the horrors of an in-progress writeup about some deficiencies in the ROCm GPU compute ecosystem; the combination of that irritation and seeing some people absurdly talking past each other about degrowth and YIMBYism on social media put me over the edge.
Rather than engage directly, why not argue both sides in the form of a classic speech and maximize pretentiousness?
It's upsetting how proponents and detractors of a term can entirely lose sight of what the other side means by it.
We'll return to our irregularly scheduled technical posting shortly. Be well, everyone.
Cite as BibTeX
@misc{if-by-degrowth,
author = {Luna Nova},
title = {If by degrowth…},
year = {2025},
url = {https://lunnova.dev/articles/if-by-degrowth/},
urldate = {2025-11-22}
}