The first quarter of the 21st century has given us more communication media than we can imagine, all digitalised on the world wide web that spans our globe. While the planet and its ecosystems are in turmoil for half a millenium of ecological exhaust.

The Degrowth movement exists to critique the human-made systems of destruction. In a joint effort, researchers, journalists and librarians, practitioners and activists explore and defend lived realities for a more sufficient economy with more appropriate technology that accounts for all life on Earth.

Meanwhile, new exhaustive exploitation machines are put into use to algorithmically “enhance” the lives of people. These machines are part of the infrastructures that regulate our everyday. The increasing centralisation of “market power” within the hands of a few commercial players and the decreasing democratic control of their design leads to a world in which neo-feudal rent seekers define the Standards.

In their infancy, the Internet and the Web were a place of libidinous exchange between pseudonymous alter egos. Now, a few billion users later, massive systems are put into place to support large-scale consumption of “content” on “platforms”, our new agoras. The platform provider enacts their house right through moderation with documented policies. The platform consumer has no say in shaping these policies nor in enacting moderation decisions and is at the goodwill of the house lords.

The alternative is to do it yourself.

Let’s take the reasons that once led to the creation of Indymedia, for example. During the early anti-globalisation movement, it became apparent that alternative narratives do not easily find their way into the mainstream. The advent of the Web called for experimentation and serendipitious discovery of new kinds of autonomous, civic media that invite for a diversity of voices.

Fast-forward two decades and the recentralisation of information distribution off from the Open Web into Apps and Messengers shows its effects in the real-world. Alternative media to provide mutual access to information are once more marginalised into precarious existential conditions, while the communication silos seem to only reinforce homogenisation.

Degrowth Media offers itself as a community-owned platform to counter this development. We are in process of finishing the preparations for the launch of democratic degrowth media by the end of the year.

Today there are this degrowth.media/ and an invite-only experiment with a social network on the open web at degrowth.social/.

Watch this space in the near future for more announcements about how we address the space of non-commercial civic media for public good.