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Hannah wrote: "I am not steeped in the current literature enough to feel eligible to remark on this, but I do really enjoy reading your articles on this subject. I am firmly in a “degrowth” camp but at the same t..."Yes, exactly! All of the gatekeeping processes you describe, the bean-counting involved in means testing for eligibility, etc., not only is an imposition of wasted hours on the people who have to navigate it, but the gatekeepers themselves have bullshit jobs that soak up resources. A huge share of labor and money goes into the kind of guard labor, money accounting, and front-line supervision that's only necessary because hierarchy and wealth inequality create conflicts of interest.
Oh I’m really relieved to know I’m picking up on parts of what you’re discussing then, phew.Since I live out west, the reality that all of these expensive processes are ultimately stored in data centers - that eat up water and energy, and out here with hydropower, water rather is energy! - just adds one more material parameter to all of this hyperactive processing they call GROWTH but I call WASTE haha!
Absolutely. And the AI just enshittifies stuff that was working fine.
I do kind of want to share one story that for me encapsulates some fantastic modern nation state-capitalism-waste stuff in a digestible form, I wonder what you will think of it?
In my state, there are childcare subsidies for low-income families. We’re eligible. It usually takes about 25 hours a year for me to apply. I have to use several different software platforms and take time off work to call and wait on hold for hours. I do always obtain the goal of getting approved, but it’s a slog, and required several third-party software platforms/data centers etc to make it possible. Once I get the subsidy, I then have to do additional paperwork at the childcare center. In order to maintain our eligibility, I have to use a smart phone (remember - you have to be low income enough to qualify, but you also have to have a working smart phone to stay eligible) to sign in and out on site every day. When my kid accidentally broke the camera on my phone, I had to go out and buy another smart phone with a working camera…in order to stay in the good graces of the subsidy. The childcare center had to hire additional administrators to process all the data collected by people like me and submit it to other third-party platforms so that the childcare center stayed in good graces with the state.
Point being, when I hear people suggest that degrowth means austerity; or when I see how liberals tend to defend institutional waste because the right has taken over the term “waste”; even if those institutions are mired in waste, it’s just not what conventional liberals think it is. I see the waste in this story I mention as all this in order to maintain too-complicated relationships to third party private industries, all in order to support the extensive, expensive means testing that is mainly to keep more people out of the subsidy program. Where are the kids and caregivers in this situation? They are almost totally drowned out by the absurd complexity of it. That’s just one example; we can all probably think of a zillion others.