Slow. The Fuck. Down.

The world is sprinting towards something—no one is sure what exactly, but we’re damn sure to go there as fast as possible. The economy demands growth, and if that costs our sanity, our freedom, or our planet, so be it. There are always more planets, right?

Well, no. It would take centuries to evacuate the entire planet, even if we had all the resources. And we don’t: there is not enough oil left on Earth to refine enough rocket fuel for all humans to escape to Mars.

But the economic Moloch machine must be fed its diet of growth and speed. We act as though growth and speed can continue infinitely, but physics and common sense tell us otherwise.

Growth

Sustained growth is unsustainable, not ideologically, politically, or economically, but physically. Earth has about 1,000 years at 1% annual energy consumption growth before thermodynamics makes the planet completely uninhabitable, irrespective of the energy source.

Sure, a millennium is a while away. But annual energy consumption growth has actually been higher than 1%: on average it has been 1.9% between 1970 and 2023. As more nations around the globe develop their economies, energy consumption will increase rather than decrease, even if we include energy efficiency gains. If we continue like that, we have about 500 years left. That makes the deadline for a planetary evacuation extremely tight.

More extreme weather is a direct consequence of rising temperatures, because heat is energy, and that means there is more energy to power extreme weather events. This makes environmental disasters more frequent and expensive to deal with, which may lead to 1.5b climate refugees in the next fifteen years. Civilizations have historically not been immune from extreme weather events. In fact, climate-related events have contributed to the vanishing of many a civilization.

Clouds reflect sunlight back into space and therefore reduce the surface temperature, but clouds are nowadays shrinking, exacerbating climate change. What is more, hot air can hold more water vapour, so that all life is exposed to more humidity; our own limits for thermoregulation are lower than originally thought. As if that were not bad enough, higher temperatures also increase domestic violence, and they even aggravate neurological and psychiatric conditions.

But climate change is not the only problem we face. Even if we came up with a solution for it today, we are consuming the planet’s resources much faster than it can regenerate them. By 2050, we will use three planets’ worth of resources in every year! We are dipping in the stocks of resources that have been built up by our home planet over thousands of years. Our appetite for resources has exceeded the Earth’s capacity since 1970, and yet it does not abate. Oil for rocket fuel is thus not the only resource in short supply: fresh water is about to become scarce.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse. Herman E. Daly (2007)

But why all this growth?

Capitalism relies on growth, because investors demand that their investments yield increasing returns over time. These investments are made with a mix of cash and loans (a.k.a. leverage), which means investors borrow money from the future, expecting that today’s bets will pay off with higher returns later. For the value of their portfolios to move ever upwards, the many failures must be offset by a few massive successes. This need for sustained gains drives companies to expand, as there is only so much to be extracted from the current batch of customers. Growth is thus an essential feature of the global economic and sociopolitical system, which is so complex that control is impossible. Yes, we have built a system so complex we cannot even hope to control it, and yet it determines the livelihood of almost all people.

Economic growth is fuelled by consumption; the economy must always produce more. Resources are needed in all production, even in the case of digital products: materials for smartphones, servers, and telecommunications infrastructure. While technology improvements can mitigate increases in resource extraction somewhat, affluence and population growth boost it in equal measures, especially in developing nations.

To maintain itself and avoid financial disorder and social unrest, our industrial civilization is forced to accelerate, to become more complex and to consume ever more energy. Pablo Servigne et al. (2020)

Production is of course powered by energy. New sources of energy tend to add to rather than replace existing ones: we always need more power. Our consumption of energy grows regardless of efficiency improvements, which is known as Jevons’ paradox. It is less a paradox than a rule; it is only paradoxical because core economic principles are flawed.

Growth at all costs is impossible. We have already crossed six of nine planetary boundaries related to the stability and resilience of Earth. In medicine, there is a word for such growth: cancer. And it’s a disease.

Speed

Unchecked growth is bad enough for the world, but Moloch wants an additional ingredient: speed. Or rather the perpetual need to increase it all the time. Capitalism is the engine that drives acceleration: it forces companies to grow, to expand, and to “innovate”, not necessarily for the sake of improving lives, but for increasing profits.

Technology can and does make our lives better. We live longer, can travel all over the globe and enjoy foods from everywhere at any time, stay in touch with anyone in real-time, and each of us has free access to all the world’s knowledge. That is truly fantastic. But when did we collectively decide that progress means acceleration?

Once a fringe idea, accelerationism argues that speeding up technological progress is the inevitable path towards prosperity. The belief is that technology will always save us from ourselves. Like Batman. So faster is better. Too bad, but Batman is busy doomscrolling on his iPhone.

The tech industry pumps out products that are engineered for addiction. It is perhaps why its customers are referred to with the same word as drug addicts: users. These companies sacrifice our collective mental well-being in return for more revenue and user growth by means of a continuous series of microaggressions that leave the population at large too abused to care and too tired to fight back, which is exactly what corporations want. Apathy enables them to get away with any behaviour to line their pockets.

Our attention is chipped away one notification at a time. It is redirected from what really matters. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, right?!” Moloch demands sacrifices!

We have already made sacrifices: our children. Classrooms are filled with students who are more anxious and depressed than ever: they cannot concentrate, they have trouble with conversation, they are unable to write properly or think carefully, and all because they are addicted to their smartphones. It is absolutely not their fault, though. We have handed them these digital slot machines, where they pull down to release a flashy image or video for a quick dopamine hit.

The tech giants are cultural poison and they know it. They just don’t care, as long as the money rolls in. That is, as long as we are dumb enough to hand them our hard-earned cash as increasingly expendable worker bees who are only ever one greedy executive or mediocre quarter away from being smacked out of the hive to fend for ourselves. Once that happens, we can always turn to the gig economy to become “empowered” for minimum wage, with no legal protections, and without any possibility for promotions. It is modern-day slavery: sure, you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

Anyone who believes corporations or their executives care about democracy or freedom is deluded. Those pesky ideals actually stand in the way of the easiest path to more profits. If that sounds like a conspiracy, fear not. There is no evil genius behind it, no grand scheme of a villain from the movies. It is the simple stupidity of short-term profiteering. The result may be the same, but the mechanism is very different.

Our need for speed is making us furious, fast. We are accelerating towards a precipice of our own making, ignoring all the warning signs along the way. It may sound obvious, but when you are headed towards a cliff, pressing down on the accelerator is not the right solution. Nature does not care about growth, speed, or money. When society, and with it the interconnected political and economic systems, collapses, billionaires’ obscene wealth is worth zero. Their money only has value within the confines of common societal myths, and these all presuppose a functioning society. Their private jets, luxury bunkers, yachts, hedge funds, and digital assets are like the stacks of money in their vaults: inedible.

But why all this speed?

Competition, or rather the fear of competition. Competition is good for consumers: it provides choice and often forces companies to improve their products and services. But competition is a nuisance for executives; to extract the maximum amount of money from consumers, a monopoly or oligopoly is preferable. With an oligopoly, we can at least pretend there is competition when there really is not.

Speed is, in that sense, a proxy for profit: more time to monopolize, though it ends up repackaged and sold to us as disruption. All disruption does is replace old monopolies with newer ones: meet the new boss, same as the old boss. That’s because the system always is the same. It just gets a fresh lick of paint. A new mask.

“But if we do not do it now, someone else will beat us to the market!” We commonly mistake “could” for “should” and turn it into “must”. The truth is, the first company to come up with an idea does not always win the market. It’s about fifty-fifty, so a coin toss. That is not progress, but greed talking.

There is, however, another more insidious reason for speed. Technology progresses so fast that regulation often cannot catch up; technology becomes extralegal. And that is exactly the point. Once you have entered the market, you just lobby clueless politicians to create regulatory barriers to prevent competition.

We are promised more transparency in return for trusting our technology overlords’ intentions, but it is a thinly veiled disguise that hides the fact that they have zero accountability. After all, when was the last time a chief executive accepted responsibility in a meaningful way for massive layoffs because they were responsible for the company’s terrible performance and massive over-hiring in the first place? When did the board of directors fire the C-suite for paying many exorbitant penalties for repeatedly breaching privacy regulations?

As in politics, the problem is that people in power are insulated from their own bad decisions by means of their wealth: they have free (i.e. taxpayer-funded) healthcare with access to the best private clinics, they are driven around in fancy cars by their chauffeurs, they live in gated communities with security guards, their children go to private (boarding) schools, and they can even indulge in a little bit of insider trading with no consequences. They have no incentive to improve a system that works perfectly for them.

But there’s a bigger issue here. We have bought into the myth of speed. And its inevitability.

There is a clear case for slowing down. Speed magnifies mistakes. The entire tech industry is built on the premise of iterating and shipping fast, and fixing bugs later. Maybe. When we rush new technologies into the world, we never ask ourselves whether what we have is good enough.

Engineers say: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And there is wisdom in that. If something works fine, leave it be. Most of the time, there is a reason for its design, even if nowadays we do not remember why.

Product management in tech companies is to blame. Product managers are the most fad-obsessed people, right after executives. They believe and proclaim that people always want more new stuff. It is how they justify their continued existence. They are also told to talk to customers. Few do. Fewer still actually listen.

Look at physical buttons in cars. Customers and safety experts have been complaining about touchscreens for years, pretty much as soon as they came onto the market. Now Hyundai and Volkswagen are bringing back proper knobs. This was obvious to everyone except executives: it’s hard enough to hit the right buttons when you’re sitting down on the sofa in a well-lit room, now can you imagine how difficult it is when you’re driving and supposed to be paying attention to the road rather than a screen?

We just had to optimize the car’s experience for engagement. Optimizing products for engagement means users retain better. No wonder! You measure addiction, and addicts stick around. Their usage of technology is not healthy, but it does not matter.

Companies push through their own agendas because their technologies have been made in their creators’ images, where free speech, in the tech bros’ dictionary, is defined as anything goes unless they personally do not approve of or benefit from it. Where free speech used to mean the freedom from government censure, they have warped it into the right to say anything to anyone (unless it affects the brobber barons or their vulture capitalist buddies negatively). By doing so, the broligarchs have declared themselves not responsible for whatever awful things people say online. They provide the megaphone and audience, but their hands are deemed clean. And we have somehow accepted that as society.

Their massive platforms are, consequently, atrocious by design: paradises for paedophiles and people with perverted fantasies, lacking in humanity and empathy with industrial-scale bullying, rife with misogyny, filled with disinformation, while providing both the means and encouragement to seek an abundance of likeminded people (i.e. men) who boast intolerance as a virtue. The last item, and a key to “network effects” in platforms, is known somewhat humorously as the toaster-fucker problem.

The digital world is designed for engagement, where every tap is engineered to trap us in a cycle of perpetual distraction. This technology is driven by a toxic rush to do more, faster. Our culture has consequently been primed for rapid responses and immediate decisions. The seemingly enlightened idea of silent reading in meetings is a perfect example of this notion: it assumes that decisions can and should be made on the spot, especially by those higher up in the hierarchy. Consensus must be reached without much deliberation or debate, let alone dissent, because—you guessed it: speed. The phrase that goes with this setup is Disagree and commit, which is newspeak for My way or the highway. It has nothing to do with intelligence and everything with power. This abusive power is the foundation for speed and growth at all costs.

In the rot economy, growth and speed are must haves. Table stakes, in the language of the profession, which coincidentally comes from poker and demonstrates, yet again, the obsession with addiction. We must therefore always add features, never subtract, even if they make no sense. We ought to assume that every novel feature is a waste of time until we have solid evidence from primary market research it is not and actually solves a problem customers want to have solved on their behalf. Most ideas are worthless, but because people treat their ideas as precious gems, they cannot let go. And that causes enshittification, where apps that used to be more than acceptable erode into intolerable, unusable sources of digital microaggressions that leave customers frustrated, because the lack of real competition has made all alternatives vanish. The only choice we are left with is among stool, poop, and crap. Well, shit!

Wikipedia is a perfect counterexample to big tech’s engagement ethos. It offers humanity’s knowledge for free to anyone with an internet connection. If you wish to know something, it is there to be read without distractions. As such, it does not track your interests or whereabouts. And no login is required either.

Transhumanism

Silicon Valley has shaped the world through technology, inspired by pretty much every dystopian novel and movie. They never ask whether their transhumanist dream of immortality through technology is even desirable, shared, or ought to be pursued at all costs.

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Susan Ertz, Anger in the Sky (1943)

Whether you agree with St. Augustine that true happiness requires immortality or Bernard Williams who believes immortality would be unbearably tedious, the fact is that immortality removes urgency, or in the words of Jorge Luis Borges in The Immortal: “Death makes men precious[.] Any act may be their last.” Without deadlines people tend to procrastinate.

Oddly enough, climate change and resource depletion provide the world with deadlines. Just none the tech bros and their investor pals care about. Their actions are clear: investments in climate tech have gone down for three consecutive years with less than one-tenth of all VC money going to it, even though more money is invested overall. Most of that money goes to AI, with the majority towards generative solutions. Note that so far more than $100b has been thrown into the metaverse pit and more than $50b into crypto and blockchains. Only 5% of all investments go to energy.

Arguably, AI might assist in developing solutions to climate change and/or resource depletion. The metaverse or crypto are completely frivolous technologies, though. They are the fuel that burns our planet to the ground. Faster.

If that all sounds hard to believe, we must look towards the motives: money. Unfortunately, the return on investment for climate tech is not immediate and therefore not as exciting as meta-hellscapes filled with pliant chatbots and cryptocurrencies. Growth is also limited: if we solve the planet’s problems, we do not generate more revenue; we merely avert disaster. Until the next global crisis, that is.

And in the meantime, we can use technology to squeeze artists out of a living and automate what need not be automated at all and actually is a crucial aspect of our humanity: the arts. But at least it’s fun. While it lasts.

What to do

Instead of chasing immortality, we ought to be redirecting funds and technology towards our collective survival.

Precisely because technology is now moving so fast, […] present-day politicians are thinking on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. […] Government has become mere administration. It manages the country, but it no longer leads it. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2017)

Politicians and executives have no intention to alter the global political and economic systems. The former lack the vision for the future, whereas the latter only have notions of a dystopian algogracy that serves their own selfish and foolish ideas. That means the best leverage points of our global systems are out of reach, at least peacefully.

Without systemic change, all we can do is resist. We must resist to provide the system’s feedback loops with the feedback it needs to accelerate towards a future only the so-called elite care for. Remember: predicting the end of the world when you are speeding towards it is complicity, not prophecy.

While we obsess over fleeting digital (t)wins, our planet suffers. Thinking fast without thinking slow leads to bias; bias towards speed and growth. Why? Because we are told to venerate both by the people who are fine with erasing the rights our ancestors had to sacrifice everything for to obtain, just to make a few extra bucks. Worst of all is that we seem to voluntarily step into the jaws of the Moloch machine to be swallowed whole, and we do so with our best smile, because we might get a few worthless likes out of it on the way down.

Enough.

What we need is to slow down on purpose. To be deliberate, thoughtful, and intentional about our choices. Isaac Newton taught us that a body in motion remains in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Nature’s limits are the ultimate force that will stop all forward motion for humans—and all animals that are stuck on the planet with us and have no say in the matter. Like most of us. If we do not slow down voluntarily, nature will. And it ain’t gonna be pretty.

Slowing down is not about stopping progress. It is about choosing the future we want, collectively and deliberately. It is about directed technological progress. It is about a future that values people over profits.

To do that, we first must reject the false narrative that speed is inherently good and that indefinite growth is sustainable. The second step is to realize that we do not have the luxury of time to change course. We have a deadline set by nature. Third, we must force people who drive this mess to be accountable. That may be harder than it sounds. We must demand legislation that bans dark patterns in app design. Even if one might argue that tech companies did not set out to create addicts on purpose, the side effect of their quest for more engagement is indistinguishable from malice. Advocate for antitrust enforcement to prevent or at least break up existing monopolies. Because if we do not, we are not merely losing time; we stand to lose everything.

Slowing down might be the only way to break free, to rebel against a society that values speed and growth without caring about the consequences. We must stop treating growth as an axiom of our economies. We must stop celebrating speed as success. We must stop seeing nature as an adversary that can be mined mindlessly for more money. We are a part of nature, and we do well to remember that nature can live fine without us, but not vice versa.

In tech, friction is a dirty word. To resist the incessant acceleration towards a dystopian nowhere, embrace friction. A world without it is, however, physically impossible. Just like indefinite growth is.

So, rebel against the implicit exhibitionism of digital echos and read a printed book instead. That way, no fresh data is generated about your habits. Data that can and will be used against you, in a court of law or normal life.

Sit with an album—listen from start to finish, without algorithmic interference. Go to a museum and stare at the artworks on display, resisting the urge to take a selfie that must be shared immediately. Watch a movie with your full attention. Share a meal with your family without the distraction of your phone. Walk or cycle around the city quietly without headphones. Not every minute of every day must be monetized, as otherwise “rest becomes luxury taxed by your own conscience.” Stop being available 24/7. This isn’t a nostalgic plea; it’s a call to reclaim the space and time for deliberate thought and presence.

In the digital world, download a browser that respects your privacy, install an ad blocker, and look for alternatives to big tech where appropriate. Think about whether Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Discord, and what have you really enrich your life or have become a trap you are unable to escape from. Once you realize you are stuck, you can try and break free. It may not be easy or even feasible, but you can try and reduce your exposure to tech companies’ abusive behaviour for your own sanity and everyone else’s.

The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. […] It is not easy to be free, to flee the plague, organize encounters, increase the power to act, to be moved by joy, to multiply the affects which express or encompass a maximum of affirmation. Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues (1977)

Switch off the autopilot and reclaim your time. Reclaim your attention. Reclaim your life. You only have one. And it’s short.

Slow. The Fuck. Down.