8,000 People Agreed the Economy Needed to Shrink. The State Was Delighted to Help. Where Is Everyone?
Photo: M.O. Stevens, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Revolutionary Reality Checks | Actual Life Under Communism
At its peak, the Degrowth Economics Collective Discord was a genuinely impressive thing. Eight thousand members across thirty-one channels, organized with the kind of taxonomic precision that suggested its moderators had a lot of free time and strong opinions about folder structure. There was #theory-and-praxis, #post-gdp-futures, #voluntary-simplicity-wins, and a channel called #no-more-steel that had, at various points, hosted some of the most detailed anti-industrial arguments this side of an academic journal.
The state read #no-more-steel with particular interest.
Then it sent letters.
The Proposal That Worked Too Well
To understand what happened, you need to understand what the Degrowth Economics Collective actually believed — or at least, what they posted about believing, which is not always the same thing.
Degrowth, as an economic framework, holds that infinite industrial expansion on a finite planet is a fantasy with a very bad ending, and that wealthy societies should deliberately contract their material throughput: produce less, consume less, work less, extract less. It's a coherent position with serious academic backing and a robust literature. The Discord's members engaged with that literature enthusiastically, often between the hours of 11pm and 2am.
What they perhaps did not anticipate was a Bureau of Labor Allocation that had also read the literature, found it compelling, and decided the most logical implementation was to redirect degrowth advocates toward the sectors of the economy most in need of the kind of principled, motivated workers who understood exactly why industrial output needed to be managed carefully from the inside.
The assignment letter cited the community's own pinned manifesto back at them, paragraph by paragraph. It was, several members admitted, hard to argue with.
The destination: People's Steel Consolidation Plant 3, a facility that produces structural steel for public infrastructure projects and operates on a continuous production cycle. The logic, per the Bureau, was elegant: who better to manage responsible industrial output than people who had spent years theorizing about it?
The move-in date was a Tuesday.
247 Out of 8,000: A Demographic Breakdown
We obtained the Bureau's intake records for Plant 3's Degrowth Cohort, as the facility administration has taken to calling them, and the numbers are illuminating.
Of the 8,000 Discord members who received assignment letters, 247 reported as directed. The Bureau's follow-up team is, at time of publication, still working through the remaining 7,753 cases. Several patterns have emerged.
Approximately 1,200 members appear to have quietly deleted their Discord accounts within 72 hours of the letters going out, suggesting either a principled rejection of the assignment or a deeply unprincipled attempt to become harder to find. The Bureau notes that account deletion does not affect letter delivery.
Around 900 members filed formal objections citing health conditions, prior commitments, or, in 34 cases, the argument that their specific form of degrowth advocacy was "more theoretical" and therefore better suited to a consulting or advisory role. The Bureau has a channel for that too. It's called the plant's safety compliance office, and it has one opening.
Roughly 400 members submitted counter-proposals suggesting they could better serve the movement's goals through content creation, podcast production, or continued Discord moderation. These proposals were filed under "reviewed" and the individuals were added to a secondary assignment list for a cement batching facility in a different region.
The remaining 6,000-plus are, as far as anyone can determine, simply not responding to correspondence. The moderator team's pinned message in #general, last updated nine days ago, reads: "hey everyone please just reply to the letters, they're being really reasonable about it, I promise it's not as bad as it sounds — Kieran"
Kieran is one of the 247. He has been there since Tuesday. He describes the work as "genuinely clarifying."
Inside Plant 3: The Ones Who Showed
The 247 members who reported to People's Steel Consolidation Plant 3 are, by several accounts, an interesting group. They range in age from 22 to 51. The largest single professional background, prior to assignment, was "content creator," followed by "graduate student" and "part-time barista / full-time theorist," which is not an official occupational category but appeared frequently enough in intake forms that the facility administrator has started using it.
Kieran, 29, formerly the Discord's head moderator and the author of its 4,000-word founding manifesto ("Toward a Smaller Tomorrow: Why Everything Must Contract"), works in the facility's output monitoring division. His job involves tracking daily steel tonnage against production targets and flagging deviations. He is, essentially, a growth monitor — except the goal is sustainable throughput rather than maximum yield.
"It's actually fine," he told our correspondent, with the careful tone of someone who has recalibrated their expectations significantly. "The work makes sense. I understand why it matters. I just — I thought I'd be doing more of the thinking part."
When asked if he misses the Discord, he was quiet for a moment.
"I miss the #cozy-anticapitalism channel," he said. "We had a really good vibe in there."
The Pinned Messages Nobody Is Reading
Back in the Discord — which still has 6,000-plus members, most of whom appear to be lurking in a state of anxious inactivity — the moderation team's pinned messages have taken on an increasingly plaintive quality.
A sampling, in chronological order:
"The Bureau is actually being pretty chill about this, just reply to the letter" — Day 3
"Okay for those of you saying this violates degrowth principles — the plant's output targets are BELOW current market rate, so technically" — Day 6
"I know some of you are waiting for a legal opinion. There isn't going to be a legal opinion. Please just reply" — Day 11
"The cement facility letters go out next week for non-respondents. Kieran says steel is better. This is not a threat this is information" — Day 14
The #no-more-steel channel has been archived.
A Note on Theoretical Consistency
The Bureau of Labor Allocation's spokesperson, reached for comment, offered the following statement:
"We found the community's proposals thoughtful, well-researched, and actionable. We acted on them. We remain available to discuss implementation details with any member who reports as assigned."
When asked whether the Bureau found any irony in the situation, the spokesperson said they were unfamiliar with the concept in this context, but that Plant 3's Q3 output numbers were, in their words, "very encouraging."
The economy is not shrinking.
But it is, at least, being monitored by people who care deeply about the issue.
Actual Life Under Communism reminds readers that theory is most persuasive when tested against practice. Plant 3 has openings. The letter knows where you live.