“This is precisely the book we have been eagerly awaiting. The author rejects the dangerous ideologies of growth‑mania and the (non‑) solutions offered by digital technologies, proposing instead practical and viable strategies for building a sustainable, harmoniously coexisting planet.” — Bram Büscher, Wageningen University

“This book could not be more timely. The author provides a well‑considered overview of the pressing issues surrounding digital technology and degrowth, revealing how the current trajectory of technological expansion comes at the cost of ecological extinction.” — Melissa Gregg, University of Bristol

★ A brand-new work by C. Thafer, author of *Digital Media Ecology*, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University in New Zealand and Co-Director of the Centre for Political Ecology!
★ A sobering critique that dismantles the myths of “technological omnipotence” and “growth at all costs”! This book profoundly reveals how, under the relentless logic of endless growth, the unchecked expansion of digital technologies is exacting an ecological toll, sounding a stark warning against today’s frenzied technological surge.
★ This book represents a cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary fusion of post-growth and digitalization—a forward-looking roadmap that is both critically incisive and practically actionable! It ingeniously integrates the degrowth paradigm with digital technologies, proposing an alternative to capitalism’s model of infinite accumulation, exploring how genuine abundance can be achieved through restraint and sharing, and, from devices and infrastructure to platforms and culture, offering a fresh vision for sustainable development.

How can digital technologies help address the ecological crisis rather than exacerbate it?
This book outlines a bold vision for a more equitable and greener digital future. Drawing on degrowth and post-growth paradigms, it challenges the capitalist model of endless growth, emphasizing limits, sharing, and radical abundance. Taifel explores practical, actionable ways to redesign devices, platforms, infrastructure, and digital culture in order to advance social justice, ecological balance, and well-being.
By linking sustainability with critiques of surveillance capitalism and data colonialism, this research is of critical importance, demonstrating how technology can support a just transition rather than deepen inequality.

Si Tafel
Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Massey University in New Zealand, Co-Director and one of the founding members of the Centre for Political Ecology, and a doctoral supervisor in the Department of Media and Creative Communication at the College of Humanities.
He is an academic specializing in the social and environmental impacts of digital technologies. This includes examining how hardware and software exert a wide range of effects on both human societies and ecosystems, affecting not only end users of digital technologies but also those whose labor or livelihoods are shaped by global supply chains—chains that underpin digital culture and generate substantial waste.
He is the author of the monograph Digital Media Ecology: The Entanglement of Content, Code, and Hardware (Bloomsbury, 2019), and has co-edited works including Plastic Heritage: Contamination, Persistence, and Politics (Athabasca University Press) and Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene: Living with Nature (Lexington Books). His articles have appeared in journals such as Media, Culture & Society, Convergence, and Cultural Politics.
In addition, Si Tafel engages in filmmaking and photography, and has participated in media activism projects like Indymedia, Climate Camp, and Hacktionlab.
Before moving to New Zealand, he lived in Bristol, UK, where he pursued his PhD at the University of Bristol and taught and conducted research at the Centre for Digital Culture at the University of the West of England.

Part One: Why Do We Need a Post-Growth Digital Future?
1. Growth and the Ecological Crisis
2. Computation and Capitalism
3. Why Solutionism Cannot Solve the Problems of the Anthropocene
4. Conceptual Tools

Part Two: Realizing a Post-Growth Digital Future
5. Devices
6. Infrastructure
7. Platforms
8. Digital Culture

Conclusion: Radical Digital Abundance and a Just Transition
References