Reviews and Comments

This was a brilliant read on the folly of "green growth". Saito does an amazing job at collating the evidence for why trying to implement any "green growth" is bound to fail and how capitalism would subsume those efforts. He also does a great job at providing a potential alternative model - degrowth communism - that could help us overcome those barriers.

These efforts center around re-building the commons, both in the local, environmental sense (e.g. land water) but also the communal, local ownership (of infrastructures) and how co-operative ownership of the commons can bring about those changes. A worthy read to think about how we can collectively act at avoiding even worse-case scenarios in the future.

The one thing that somewhat negatively stood out to me: I get that it's not "just" a collection of evidence but a manifesto, but I was nevertheless surprised how little room Ostrom's work on governing the commons got, in light of how central the commons are to his argument.

As an aside: It's hilarious to me that the non-US versions of this book actually comes in a bright red cover with the subtitle "How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth" instead of the tamer, green "The Degrowth Manifesto"

I'd say this book has two sides two it:

The first half makes a very well laid-out argument about how the design of our digital infrastructures not only mirrors the communication structures of the organisations that create them (Conway's Law) but increasingly also inverts this, to shape what types of organisational structures we think are realistic and something we should strive for. Thus, the "admin" model of the world ultimately diminishes our modes of participation and moves from the Californian Ideology into "implicit feudalism". This part was great and I'd love to have seen more musings on that. I also very much loved the critique of "scale" and all the issues related to scalability and how subsidiarity can address this to create more governable spaces.

The second half of the book tries to explore potential solutions, and this is the part that I personally found so much weaker on multiple fronts: As is so often the case, there is a bias towards looking at US/North American solutions, with what feels like honorable (exotic) mentions for the rest of the world. While this might be fair enough (coming from a US perspective as a writer), I wish there'd been a deeper exploration of how different cultures think about governable spaces and how this increasingly clashes with the "Californian Ideology" due to the global reach of the online systems we use. The second bit, that I found even weaker, was that the author seems quite invested into blockchain (and related things like DAOs) as potential solutions to these issues of governable spaces. I feel like in 2024 it seems quite clear that this is not the case.