⤵ Dystopian 'Silo' gives a glimpse of a degrowth world

Sometimes gloomy sci-fi can teach a valuable lesson

Quote of the Issue

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.” - Abraham Lincoln

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The Essay

⤵ Dystopian 'Silo' gives a glimpse of a degrowth world

The dystopian sci-fi show Silo is helping Apple TV+ hit all-time highs for 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?