this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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Things like apps, media, or art can be more valuable without taking any more resources. Plus through greater efficiency, the same resources go much further. But it's often easier to grow by just consuming more, so companies to that since they don't really care. The sad thing is, I think we can have limitless growth if it's slow and deliberate and conscious of it's impact to the planet. But the current system doesn't incentive that, instead everyone is flooring the growth pedal to catastrophic effect.
They take energy and memory on the local devices and in the cloud. Uploading and downloading also does. Better software often needs better (new) hardware. The developers take office space and hardware and energy. Do you want me to go on?
The bigger question for my is why growth is supposed to be a good thing. With all the technology, we could work less but on the whole, we work more.
But better ones don't require any more resources than worse ones. So you can increase value with the same resource consumption.
The development of better ones does and so does design, advertisement, ...
R&D resources are usually small compared to the efficacy improvements they allow. You don't need advertisement. Though to achieve sustanability , you'd also need a very long life on products and almost complete recycling.
The topic is growth. There is no growth in sustainability. For your company to grow, you need new features, new customers, ... People say this is achievable without resources, I doubt it. That's what I'm saying.
You don't need more customers, you could deliver greater value to those customers
Example?
I try to use my phones as long as I can and I ran into situations where I couldn't update or install apps because my phone didn't meet the requirements
Fuck vendors who do not publish kernel sources.
Games, but games can also just be better and more optimized on the same hardware. It's just easier to throw more silicon at the problem, and we don't incentive caring about the planet enough.
Interestingly, better computer hardware is often actually less physical matter. What's valuable about computers isn't the amount of material, it's the arrangement of matter. That applies to both hardware and software. A phone and that same phone smashed have the same number of atoms. That phone and an equivalent from 10 years earlier are pretty close in number of atoms. My monitors and TVs today are a tenth as many atoms as the ones I had years ago.
Buying a phone every year is still about five times the matter of buying a phone every five years. Also: it is quite cynical to count atoms while children work in cobalt mines. The question of resources is more complex.
The matter from previous phones can just be recycled. We don't really do it now because we're nowhere near the growth limit OP was hypothesizing, but if it really came to it we'd mine our landfills instead of mountains.
Talking about children is changing the subject, important as that may be. We're talking about finite materials.
By definition limitless growth is impossible. It just doesn't work.
Economic growth is an accounting measure, and so it can definitely be limitless.
That's a hypothetical
No, that's literally the definition of growth (the variation of GDP from one year to the next, the GDP itself is defined as the sum of gross value added). We can make growth out of thin air if we want, it's a purely accounting metric.
I sell you a pebble for a $1000 and you sell it back to me and we created $2000 of growth without anything physically happening.
You missed the point. Everything you are describing is hypothetical. Cash and dollars are physical, but "value" and "growth" that you have described are hypothetical.
I'm not sure what you mean by "hypothetical", these aren't hypothesis, these are their definition. And their definition means they are limitless, just as the definition of "beauty" or "numbers" make them limitless. They aren't bound by the physical world.
(also dollars are equally abstract, currencies exists as human convention, having $1 billion more in your bank account is just a few bits flipped in a database)
If you have infinite supply of something, it ceases to be a scarce resource with any intrinsic value. Literally nothing in the universe is infinite.
At the scale of mankind, the universe is effectively infinite. The sun has another billion year to go and outputs so much energy it's virtually infinite to us.
Limitless growth of what? Limitless growth of time past is inevitable for example. Wealth can grow with increased comfort, so I guess to come to maximum wealth you'd need to achieve total human fulfillment. I hope you can agree we've got a long long way to go till that.
That's just another way of saying we should just keep on doing capitalism the way we are now.
Happiness, or human fulfillment, whatever you want to call it isn't a state you just reach.
Exactly, that's why you can always improve, which is usually reflected in increasing wealth.
You're completely missing the point. Happiness, or whatever name you want to give it has very little to do with how much money you have.
But again, infinite growth is not a thing in a finite system. That is a fact, not an opinion.
You think money can't buy happiness? Somehow some rich people manage to still be miserable, but most poor people would be free to be much more happy with more money.
Infinite growth of what? Is infinite growth of happiness possible?
People need to meet their most basic needs, doesn't have to be through money. We've just set up society to work that way.
Capitalism in particular, is an incredibly stubborn idea that's difficult to throw away. And we've rigged the system to make it difficult (almost impossible) to give up.
Hell, the U.S. is notorious for trying to overthrow governments around the world who don't subscribe to capitalism, and the U.S. governments way of thinking.
Oh yeah, you could distribute resources differently. Money is just very effecent at matching supply to demand. Something like a UBI could retain that while decreasing inequality inherent to the increased efficiency.
There was an argument that marketing is the ultimate example of creating value without using raw resources by making an existing item more valuable.
Marketing takes human labor at the bare minimum.
It also consumes human labor when people absorb the marketing. This is an externality not accounted for in the cost of marketing, it is large, and it makes resources unavailable for more productive tasks.
Marketing is the distribution of information. Its value is not just a trick or something. You can argue we're over valuing it, but it's definitely extremely valuable.
I am saying the costs that are not accounted for, namely the effort spent by every not buying a product consuming an advertisement, is extremely high and outweighs the value of products sold. Moreover, there is no clear reason to think the persuasion of people in mass is good based just on selling more products. Finally, if a person is only persuaded to buy a different brand of product the value is effectively only the small marginal difference between brands.