tl;dr: Those who want to talk about digitalisation should also talk about the circular economy and sufficiency
Is the digital economy an enabler for a sustainable society? What role do commons, both digital as well as physical, play when it comes to inclusion, equity and mitigating climate change? How can different actors in society frame digital technologies from the normative perspective of Sustainability? These and other questions have been discussed at a recent ideas conference of the TU Berlin on digitalisation and sustainability – “digitalisation” being a very German-English description for the increased use of digital technologies throughout society and their economic, social, political and ecological implications.
Specific emphasis was laid on the notion of “decoupling” of ecological impacts from economic growth – a phenomenon that is at the heart of heated debates between green growth advocates and the degrowth community. When it comes to digital technologies, a relative decoupling appears to be a rather normal outcome. What is necessary for really achieving ecological goals e.g. mitigating climate change and reducing human impact on planetary boundaries, however, is sufficient absolute decoupling: the more GDP increases, the less environmental harm is done. This is a tall order for any technological solution to ecological non-sustainabilities. What is more likely is the occurrence of rebound effects, the phenomenon that reductions of consuming natural resources or energy are equivalent to cost savings and thus lead to new growth opportunities through spending the money elsewhere. At the same time, digital technologies are not virtual, they are solid as metal. Actually the use a lot of metal, precious metals and rare earth metals in particular, while at the same time demanding ever more electricity for running sophisticated calculations for blockchain and other new technologies. The very real backbone of the digital economy might become a much greater threat to ecological sustainability than its ability to act as an enabler for more resource and energy efficiency.
The most thought provoking keynote in this perspective came from Lorenz Hilty, University of Zurich. As a computer scientist he argued that the basic principle of digitalisation, that of the universal machine, is actually sustainable to the core. Charles Babbage was occupied with this idea in the 19th century, to construct a universal machine for calculations, but it took until Alan Turing’s work in the 20th century to lay the foundations of what we now call the computer. This basic principle is the separation of an ever increasing material base from the realm of ideas and creation. To Hilty, this basic principle encompassing modularity, reconfiguration, longevity and low material consumption, could have been the foundation for a true sustainable economy. However, through externalities, information asymmetries and short-term preferences (i.e. the short-comings of markets without proper regulatory guidelines), this basic principle has been corrupted: software that could in principal last forever is now a wild chase between updates, strengthening consumer lock-in effects, thus disenfranchising consumers from having a real choice. Hilty was very clear in his conclusions: digitalisation as it is done today is not an enabler for decoupling; on the contrary, we have been hijacked on the way to Sustainability towards potentially increasing un-Sustainability.
In my view the road ahead is then clear. In order to utilise the sustainability potential of digitalisation, formal and informal frameworks are needed: hard regulation when it comes to circular economy laws, producer responsibility and ecological product design; soft norms and values centred on Sustainability guiding both technology development and application. Especially the connection of the digital economy and the circular economy has to be stressed: there is a finite amount of certain precious and rare earth metals in the ground, their extraction has significant environmental and social side effects – think about the countries they are extracted from and their political regimes, as well as the geostrategic need to ensure access to them – and thus demands cradle-to-cradle approaches in their use. And here we will likely see a minimum scale for economic feasibility (= the need for scaling up), but also a maximum scale for ecological sustainability (= the need for dematerialising product ownership as much as possible). Finally, for making digitalisation sustainable and have something like a “Digital Sustainability” or “Sustainability 4.0” emerging, digitalisation has to be understood as a social phenomenon first and foremost, as a central element of an economy of empowerment along the lines of prosumerism, sufficiency, and aspects of the commons economy. If we have, at the core of digitalisation, the universal machine, then this harks back to Ivan Illich and his “Tools for Conviviality“, where industry produces tools for self-production and repair, empowering people to be more than just consumers and fully realise their autonomy in inter-dependence with each other and their natural environment.
To paraphrase Horkheimer: Those who want to talk about digitalisation should also talk about the circular economy and sufficiency.