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10:32

(In »The free and open Internet versus the ecological apocalypse«)

The progress myth is closely linked to expansionism, the banal faith that phenomena such as capital accumulation can expand in all eternity without any negative side-effects for itself. But all network-dynamical systems that are driven by the myth of their own growth do of course collapse sooner or later – which the American brain researcher Jeff Stibel shows in his book Breakpoint – under pressure from the consequences arising from a quantitative expansion without qualitative consideration. This is because the network per se does not contain any critical stop function that militates against its own quantitative expansion, but instead it is driven by the deification of the same, that is, by the progress myth. What environmentalism tries to do is to install such a crucial stop function within global capitalism before it destroys its own fundamental conditions: the existence of a planet that is suitable for human survival at all. And thereby everything else as well.