Digital Degrowth: Radically Rethinking our Digital Futures

by Neil Selwyn

We are fast approaching the point of “peak digital”, with the continued mass production and excessive consumption of digital technologies set to become a key driver of climate crisis, ecological breakdown and ongoing societal instability.
 
Digital Degrowth is a call to completely rethink our digital futures in these fast-changing times. It explores how degrowth thinking and alternate forms of “radically sustainable computing” might support ambitions of sustainable, scaled-down and equitable ways of living with digital technologies. Neil Selwyn proposes a rebalancing of digital technology digital degrowth is not a call for simply making reduced use of the digital technologies that we already have – rather it is an argument to reimagine digital practices that maximise societal benefits with minimal environmental and social impact. Drawing on illustrative examples from across computer science, hacker and environmental activist communities, this book examines how core degrowth principles of conviviality, autonomy and care are already being used to reimagine alternate forms of digital technology.
 
Original and stimulating, this is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, sustainability studies, political ecology, computer/data sciences, and across the social sciences.

176 pages, Paperback

Published August 4, 2025

About the author

Neil Selwyn is a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He has worked for the past 25 years researching the integration of digital technology into schools, universities and adult learning. He is recognised as a leading international researcher in the area of digital education - with particular expertise in the 'real-life' constraints and problems faced when technology-based education is implemented. He is currently working on nationally-funded projects examining the roll-out of educational data and learning analytics, AI technologies, and the changing nature of teachers' digital work.