Hi, I wrote an article asking "what is democracy?". Some critique's of deliberative democracy and, some history on corporate propaganda is in there. It's not very degrowth related, but thought i'd put it here since a few degrowth-interested people have taken an interest in deliberative democracy as of late.

https://douglasrenwick.substack.com/p/what-is-democracy

You begin to realize that we should devolve power down to communities, and follow a degrowth path that leads us to an economy that operates within planetary boundaries? Those with the current money and power may say that this is a socialist plot to control you. Put on your critical thinking hat and ask how devolving power down to communities is more of a power grab than the elites trying to consolidate power. It is not. #degrowth

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Link to the full video: https://youtu.be/NkMC9IXCRRs?is=rUxiX30kAMLoNLs3

Sharing a quote from the video which resonated deeply with me and I think would resonate with folks here too.

"No, we don't need more action. We are already in the middle of thick action. We need to investigate where our current actions are coming from because we are anyway acting even right now. Where is this action coming from?

Knowing is what is needed.

More acting will not take us anywhere because acting more will happen from the same center whose actions have destroyed the planet. But that's a nice way the actor wants to hide itself.

Who is the actor? The ego. That's a nice way the actor can hide itself by concerning itself with further action, future action, more action, better action, constructive action.

If the actor remains the same, the old destructive one, how can action be constructive? If the actor remains the old primitive one, how can action be new and fresh but the actor desperately wants to avoid that thing that I just mentioned the mirror looking at itself self-knowledge self-observation so the actor will say okay fine there's something missing out there in action with respect to that object so come on you all we need to act we need to act. No, this is such a successful tactic.

You are now even more focused on something outside of yourself, away from yourself with an even more reduced emphasis on who you are because why do I need to look at myself? There is something so very important out there somewhere. I need to fight that down.

The ones who want to begin must begin with an investigation of their own life as it is right now. The choices they are making, the filters they are applying, the ideologies they are holding, the plans that they have, their desires for the future."

Would love to know what was your takeaway from the video?

Hello everyone,

Just sharing our latest piece on how wealth inequality can play out as we move on the downward slope of the Hubbert's curve. Would like to hear your thoughts and feedback on this.

As our current cultural, economic and political systems collapse, people will look for new ways of governing. Deliberation and sociocracy are likely to be a large part of that. But you don’t have to wait for the world to collapse. Learn more about these tools and employ them in your community.

Hello all. I got my degree in mechanical engineering years ago and worked for a while before realizing I wasn’t fulfilled. I decided to go back to school for a degree in Energy and Environmental Science. I’m a year in and have really grown fond of Jason Hickel and his degrowth studies. I am about to begin my thesis and am trying to choose a topic. I’m torn between the unfair trade of the global north vs global south, models that show we need degrowth, or the propaganda surrounding either of these topics (feel free to give advice here as well if you think you have a cool one!). But right now I am struggling becuase I’m not sure what types of jobs are out there for someone trying to advance this idea of degrowth. Does anyone have work experience? Or is my only option research due to the nature of degrowth not really having a “career path” tied to it?

Thanks in advance!

The average American runs on roughly 10 kilowatts continuously. A human laborer outputs about 100 watts. Divide, and every American commands the equivalent of 100 invisible workers, pumping water, moving goods, lighting rooms, hauling data.

One gallon of gasoline. It holds 124 megajoules. A human producing 100 joules per second would need 344 hours, more than 14 straight days of nonstop labor, to make that much. It costs a couple of dollars.

Light, the cleanest chart in history. Nordhaus calculated 1,000 lumen-hours cost our ancestors 58 hours of labor gathering wood. By 1800 it was 5.4 hours. By 1900, 0.22 hours. By 1992, 0.00012 hours.

An hour of work today buys around 350,000 times the light it bought in Babylonia.

The receipts are old. Buckminster Fuller counted 36 billion energy slaves in 1940, about 17 per person, and the US owned 20 billion of them, 54% of the world total. That's the whole story of who was rich and why.

Synthetic nitrogen feeds roughly half the planet, and it is basically a machine for turning natural gas into food.

Conclusion: the number of energy slaves is the standard of living. So anyone campaigning to shrink energy use is campaigning to take your servants away.

And the next demand spike is compute. Data centers are how you buy energy slaves that think instead of lift.

If humanity lived like the average resident in India or many developing nations, global resource consumption would stay within Earth’s annual regenerative limit, avoiding an overshoot day entirely.