Dystopian 'Silo' gives a glimpse of a degrowth world
“At the heart of modern environmental identity and consciousness is an imaginary and utopian future, easily recognizable in contemporary iconography, of bucolic landscapes with low density housing…”
The Essay
⤵ Dystopian 'Silo' gives a glimpse of a degrowth world
The dystopian sci-fi show Silo is helping Apple TV+ hit all-time highsfor viewership. Based on the Wool/Shift/Dust series from Hugh Howey, Silo’s premise (you learn all the following in the first episode) is that hundreds of years in the future, thousands of people are living in a massive underground silo, basically an upside-down, 144-floor skyscraper (though seemingly much deeper than that) with each floor connected by a winding, open-air central staircase. And what people can see of the surface is via a large wall-screen showing a lethally toxic environment. Serious lawbreakers get sent out side to clean the dust off the video camera before the poison or radiation or whatever kills them within minutes. Here’s how Howey describes the story that launches the series:
Wool tells the story of a people who live in a buried silo. They’ve lived there so long that there’s only legends of mankind having lived anywhere else. The silo is self-sufficient, but it isn’t doing well. People grow restless, but you aren’t allowed to talk about going outside. If you do, you’re banished, and no one ever returns.
Four episodes into a ten-episode season, Silo is a well-crafted, well-acted, post-apocalyptic drama built around several compelling mysteries, including who built the structure and why — and whether the outside environment is truly as dangerous as it seems. But what are the deeper themes of Silo, if any? The interviews I’ve read with Howey suggest the author is telling a universal story about human freedom. He even compares it to The Shawshank Redemption. Although I’m a sucker for that sort of story, it wasn’t until I read the following from Howey that I thought writing about Silo for the newsletter made sense:
The only thing that really makes it to the news is bad news typically, and so I came up with the idea of this world where the only thing you know about the outside world is this screen that filters that view, and what do you trust, what does it do to the people living inside the Silo? Do they become terrified to explore, what does it do to their sense of hope? That, to me, is the character in the story more than the Silo in that first short story, that wallscreen.
Think of that fictional wall-screen as the view of the world presented by the media and Hollywood for the past half-century. What has been the function of that filter? What has it done to us? Have we become more wary of exploration? What has it done to our sense of hope?
I would argue that our view has been one much like the one presented in Silo, a poisoned and polluted world — land, sea, air, and soon space — that is only getting worse. What’s more, humanity’s only hope is one where the rich world lives more poorly — including massive redistribution to poorer countries — and poorer countries must abandon any hope of living as rich countries do currently.
All of which brings me to a deeper theme that struck me as I was reading a wonderful Charlemagne column in The Economist about the writer’s visit to a “Beyond Growth” conference held at the European Parliament in Brussels. This about the “degrowthers” there:
By far the majority at the conference, their aim is to shrink the pie deliberately. Growth damages the planet, and only benefits the rich anyway, they maintain. The idea that emissions can be cut enough while economies keep growing is “a fairy tale” designed to prolong the neo-liberal world order. It is better—necessary, even—to force a diet now, and get rid of any aspirations for growth later. How, exactly? “We need to determine democratically what kind of production we need to be doing,” and nix the rest, one participant advocated. Panels of citizens can advise what is wasteful and what is socially desirable. Any resemblance to some of the more stringent policies of the early Soviet era are presumably not intended.
Look, I have zero evidence that when Howey wrote the first book in the Silo series back in 2011 it was meant to be a metaphor for the degrowth movement. That said, life inside the silo has a lot in common with the world envisioned by the degrowthers. When you think about it, the silo’s denizens live in a world that must seem quite familiar to those in the degrowth movement. Among the key Silo elements from that worldview:
Stasis. Tomorrow is the same as today. Children are likely to follow in their parents’ footsteps, whether as doctors or mechanics. There are no new jobs, no inventions, no discoveries. This is a closed-circuit, steady-state economy and world. There’s no past, no future. A society built around existence rather than aspiration. From Wool: “Perhaps, with enough time in these walls, one could become resigned to things never getting better, or even changing all that much. Or maybe a person eventually lost hope that there was anything worth preserving at all.”
Scarcity. Everything possible is fixed, reused, and recycled. If someone dies, it’s up to family members to bring all their possessions to the recycling office on their floor. It’s a world that seems to be slowly running down.
Central control and planning. Government runs the commanding heights of this socioeconomic system: power, food, IT, water. Entrepreneurship is limited to selling items at small stalls and being a courier up on their stairway. Also, mandatory birth control is explicitly population control.
An energy mystery. The silo’s generator is driven by steam from below. As one character put it, “The steam comes from way down deep. No one knows from where.” When I heard that, I was immediately reminded of the following bit from “ecomodernist” Ted Nordhaus, executive director of the Breakthrough Institute:
At the heart of modern environmental identity and consciousness is an imaginary and utopian future, easily recognizable in contemporary iconography, of bucolic landscapes with low density housing in the foreground, agricultural lands teeming with wildlife and dotted with windmills and solar panels in the middle ground, and magnificent mountains, wilderness, and wild rivers in the background. Somewhere in this world there are cities and lithium mines, factories and sewage treatment plants. But they are literally not in the picture.
Granted, a degrowth world wouldn’t be a subterranean world, but the world of Silo isn’t much different than a civilization stuck on an infinite space voyage, and degrowthers like to think of the world as Spaceship Earth, a closed system with limited resources and no external help.
But that’s not the world we currently live in. Humanity is constantly being helped by the imagination of its future self — scarcity in something today doesn’t mean scarcity tomorrow — as it thinks of new ways to stretch existing resources and combines different ideas to create an endless stream of problem-solving innovations — at least if given the freedom to do so. But that freedom doesn’t exist either in Silo or the world of degrowth. As Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley write in Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet
Superabundance, we believe, depends on two main components: people and freedom. People who are free to think, speak, read, publish, and interact with others generate ideas, and market-tested ideas lead to progress. The more people the planet has and the more freedom they enjoy, the greater the likelihood that new good ideas will be generated to tackle the problems that still remain and those that will arise in the future.
Come to think of it, the theme of human freedom really is the deepest theme of all in the underground world of Silo.