1. Change the goal

Summary of Way

For over half a century, economists have fixated on GDP as the first measure of economic progress, but GDP is a false goal waiting to be ousted. The 21st century calls for a far more ambitious and global economic goal: meeting the needs of all within the means of the living planet.

Draw that goal on the page and – odd though it sounds – it comes out looking like a doughnut.

The challenge now is to create local to global economies that ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials – from food and housing to healthcare and political voice – while safeguarding Earth’s life-supporting systems, from a stable climate and fertile soils to healthy oceans and a protective ozone layer. This single switch of purpose transforms the meaning and shape of economic progress: from endless growth to thriving in balance.

Introductory video

Relevance to digital tech

For the purposes of this exercise we defined this as comments that questioned core business model assumptions and proposed fundamentally new and different approaches in the tech sector to meet sustainability goals. We found 30 comments that fitted this definition.

Comments included:

  • “Move away from attention based goals to results based”
  • “The websites we build encourage ever-increasing consumption”
  • “The idea that we can fix climate with yet another app or more tech”