Degrowth Ideology as LARPing

How internet weirdos convinced themselves backbreaking manual labor is good

Degrowth is a fringe ideology focused around the idea that economic growth is a destructive force that must be curtailed if we’re going to prevent climate change and ecological catastrophe. Degrowth is a profoundly stupid idea. It’s the antivax movement of political economy - you forget how bad the previous world was and come out against modernity because of that. I won’t spend that much time spelling out why degrowth is stupid, but here are several good explainers if you really want to dive into those arguments.

What I do want to talk about is why, despite being a facially insane idea, degrowth is so attractive to a certain kind of terminally online person.

---

Earlier this week, a Dutch PhD candidate wrote a long, viral thread in defense of degrowth ideas. This was mostly viral in the sense of ‘everyone sees the tweets because people dunk on them repeatedly’, but our hero didn’t back down. He kept posting through it, adding more examples and more evidence that degrowth is good. The portion that went the most viral was about washing clothes:

This is an absolutely deranged vision for the world, but it makes sense if you understand the social context it springs from.