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Debe priorizar el cuidado y la conservación de las infraestructuras sobre la innovación, y promover valores como la inclusión, la justicia y los cuidados por encima del beneficio económico. Debe buscar la supervivencia de todos sobre la excesiva comodidad de unos pocos.

La ciudad no puede aspirar a deshacerse de sus habitantes para que todo sea perfecto. Su función es optimizar para el bienestar de millones de humanos en todos los estadios de su vida, incluyendo los menos productivos.

Hijo mío, la Santa Madre Iglesia está a la derecha, pero Jesucristo siempre estuvo a la izquierda

de tanto ver la ambición en el espejo cuando me afeitaba en las mañanas, había terminado por aprender a reconocerla cuando la veía en los demás

Un mal uso tan arraigado que es habitual tachar de luditas a los que rechazan las tecnologías extractivas como si fueran las únicas tecnologías posibles, o solo fueran posibles cuando están alineadas con la ideología de la eficiencia del control de masas.

«La tecnología es la interfaz activa de los humanos en el mundo material —responde Ursula K. Le Guin cuando la acusan de hacer ciencia ficción sobre humanos en lugar de sobre máquinas—. Pero la palabra se usa mal constantemente para referirse únicamente a las tecnologías complejas y especializadas de las últimas décadas, levantadas sobre la explotación masiva de recursos naturales y recursos humanos».

como todos los ingleses trataba mucho mejor a los animales que a los humanos

Este modelo de Estado, que Deleuze y Guattari describen como «sobrecodificado», es el régimen de esclavitud que Lewis Mumford llama «la Megamáquina», un déspota incontestable, omnipresente pero abstracto, que solo atiende por contestador automático y cuyos «términos de uso» sustituyen a la legislación sin pasar por el Congreso. Es un golpe a la democracia disfrazado de progreso, eficiencia y comodidad.

tramitar los servicios de carácter público con herramientas de extracción de datos transforma la relación entre la administración y lo administrado, deformando su función. Convierte a la ciudad en una simulación en la que las tecnologías son las protagonistas y los habitantes son puntos de un mapa, atrapados en procesos de optimización diseñados para la explotación de datos.

And once we are liberated from the growth imperative, we will be free to focus on different kinds of innovations – innovations designed to improve human and ecological welfare, rather than innovations designed to speed up the rate of extraction and production.

If we lived in a different kind of economy – an economy not organised around growth – our technological innovations would have an opportunity to work as we expect them to. In a post-growth economy, efficiency improvements would actually reduce our impact on the planet.

a wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended

This even applies to seemingly immaterial innovations like Facebook’s algorithms, which contribute to growth by allowing advertisers to get people to consume things they otherwise wouldn’t. Facebook isn’t a multi-billion-dollar company because it allows us to share pictures with each other, but because it expands the process of production and consumption.

There’s an important lesson here. The notion that continuous efficiency improvements will somehow magically lead to absolute decoupling is empirically and theoretically baseless. (…)


This is why we see that, despite constant improvements in efficiency, aggregate energy and resource use has been rising for the whole history of capitalism. There’s no paradox; it’s exactly what economists expect. Rising throughput happens not despite efficiency gains, but because of them.

Under capitalism, growth-oriented firms do not deploy new and more efficient technologies just for fun. They deploy them in order to facilitate growth. The same is true at the level of the whole economy. Ask any economist and they’ll tell you: efficiency improvements are good because they stimulate economic growth.

When we innovate more efficient ways to use energy and resources, total consumption may briefly drop, but it quickly rebounds to an even higher rate. Why? Because companies use the savings to reinvest in ramping up more production. In the end, the sheer scale effect of growth swamps even the most spectacular efficiency improvements. (…)


She dared not touch him lest she worsen his humiliation by any semblance of pity. (…)
So she talked along, woman’s babble, saving him from having to make any answer or misread any silence, until he had got over the crisis of shame (…)
But even so she did not feel she understood his shame, his agony of humiliation. Perhaps only a man could feel so. A woman got used to shame.

La lección de Ciudad del Cabo no es que la gente responde rápidamente a las multas, sino que la estrategia más eficiente para mitigar la sequía es convertir a los ciudadanos en accionistas de la bolsa de agua municipal.

But perhaps more immediately, the problem with geo-engineering is that it is ecologically incoherent. Solar radiation management is only a partial response to the crisis we face. It would do nothing to slow the pace of ocean acidification, or deforestation, or soil depletion, or mass extinction. And this brings us to the next point.

Geo-engineering represents dualism taken to astonishing new extremes, unimaginable by Bacon and Descartes, where the planet itself must be bent to the will of man so that capitalist growth can continue indefinitely. The fatal flaw of geo-engineering is that it seeks to solve the ecological crisis with the very same thinking – the very same hubris – that created it in the first place.

It’s worth pausing to reflect on the growing fascination with geo-engineering. What’s interesting about it is that it embodies the very same logic that got us into trouble in the first place: the idea that the living planet, rendered as mere ‘nature’, is nothing but a set of passive materials that can be subdued, conquered and controlled.

Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.

Even if we doubled or tripled the output of clean energy production, we would still make zero dent in global emissions. Growth keeps outstripping our best efforts to decarbonise.

“Yes. Go on,” he said, and she went on, pondering the indifference of a man towards the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must be not far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached

As a child in Atuan, Tenar had learned how to learn. As a stranger in Gont, she had found that people liked to teach. She had learned to be taught and so to be accepted, her foreignness forgiven.

in time nothing can be without becoming.

in time nothing can be without becoming.

hay un segundo obstáculo más grande y pesado para la adopción de las medidas más simples hacia una reparación medioambiental: la devolución de tierras, la gestión racional de los recursos y la reducción de la industria agroalimentaria son la mejor esperanza para el planeta pero la peor amenaza para el capitalismo. Y, como decía Fredric Jameson, es más fácil imaginar el fin del mundo que el fin del capitalismo.