After the Silo: Book Review

Books require collaboration with memory. With something like a movie, the details never need to leave short-term storage. Narrative elements don’t require any memetic stickiness or staying power. Characters and situations are brought before the mind, and then hours later are allowed to fade. Episodic television might require more long-term recall of details, but I think it reasonable to say that books generally sound off at a deeper frequency, with more distance between the summits and the troughs.

Books are also built more to withstand revisiting. They expand, rather than shrink, the more we water them with our attention, blooming into all kinds of unexpected significations.

Slanted

My online income streams have pivoted in the past year towards non-native speakers of English, and a written style that favors clarity and readability over literary style. This will not be the case with book reviews like this one. I will speak sideways, at metaphorical or neuro-divergent angles. Be warned. If you want easier reading, I recommend my sample chapter from my forthcoming book, Improvised Learning.

The Silo

It’s been a while since I read the Silo series, by Hugh Howey. Even longer, now, than when I wrote those words¹. Memory, though, can be an interesting lens, seeing what it is you most remember.

This review will be in two parts, the first intended for people who haven’t yet read the series, and the second for those who have and won’t mind spoilers.

Silo depicts a post-apocalyptic world where the entirety of the human population lives in an underground facility. Howey does a good job creating characters that provoke speculation on the psychological effects of living in a literally closed society.

The books are science fiction, though, and not allegory, so one carries into the experience expectations that the story would also suggest speculation at the level of technology or world-building. The dystopia should be one you can imagine happening, not just as a psycho-drama or exercise in symbolism. That is where the books fall short.

A friend in Chicago, with whom I was discussing this distinction, brought up the graphic novel and movie Snowpiercer, which is enjoyable as sociological allegory, despite being completely unrealistic.

In Snowpiercer, the remnants of humanity survive on a frozen world as passengers on a continually moving train. Those in the back cars are the suffering proletariat kept in thrall by the bougie engineers and conductors, and stage a bloody class revolt by taking the train, one car at a time.

Silo is like the train from Snowpiercer rotated 90 degrees, the vertical axis replacing the horizontal, with the front of the train, where the upper class live, lining up with the literal upper floors of the underground bunker.

There is a city being built in the desert of Saudi Arabia, at the bequest of Mohammad Bin Salman (the despot commonly believed to have ordered the bone-sawing of the journalist Jamal Kashoggshi), that is a perfectly straight line. This linear city, part of “Neom”, a speculative venture of oil-huffing capital, is a case study in geometric or financial abstraction imposed on the contours of a pre-existing physical and cultural landscape.

Note that, for the purposes of the thematics of this review, I am opposed to all linear, Euclidian, pre-determined trajectories, those that don’t acknowledge gravity, the Earth, shared humanity, and so on. Vertical integration needs to be tipped sideways, toppled into the transparent horizontal ocean of the sea of shared and open knowledge.

“I can’t just write novels,” I told my brother a week or so ago. “I can’t just play games. There has to be some kind of a return to the actual, a looping back to reality.”

Escapism is only worth it if, after the escape, we return armed with weapons that work against actual monsters. I advocate the curve, the drift, the return.

SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT

There isn’t just one Silo, but several.

The different closed societies, with the exception of their “mayors,” don’t know of each other’s existence.

Let me free associate with the title for a moment. The silos in the novel are nuclear missile silos, although (despite the terrifying scene with nuclear explosions) the real threat is airborne, engineered, flesh-eating nanites.

As one of the characters points out, they are also analogous to grain silos, in that they are meant to store human genetics, to be re-released into the world once the skies have cleared. That was one of the places where the science doesn’t make any sense: the big reveal at the end is that only one of the silos is designed to survive, which would be disastrous from the point of view of population genetics, and illogical in terms of resource allocation.

The heroine, Juliette, traverses the space between the silos, first above ground, and then through tunneling. Ignorance of the other silos existence is one of the main tools the dystopian ruling class uses to keep the population in check.

There’s a recent documentary, and endless commentary online, about how micro-targeted ads on facebook and elsewhere are creating information bubbles, fragmenting populations into ideological tribes incapable of communication or empathy. Terrence McKenna called this the “balkanization” of reality.

Looking for my next job, I’m struck by how difficult lateral moves are, how isolated from one another the career tracks have become. Sometimes I regret not staying in my lane, leveraging my degree for a traditional academic employment, but other times I see myself like Juliette, struggling to forge paths between occupations. I may have had a lot of shitty jobs since I left academia for my own “cleaning” mission (it is a death sentence to merely express a wish to leave), but at least they have been different.

The Screen

Howey wrote Wool, the first book of the series, ten years ago. It was originally self-published, which might explain my fondness for it.

The sheriff of the Silo, Holsten, whose wife had been sent out to “clean” the lens of the world-facing camera outside, also expresses a wish to go outside. His wife had uncovered some kind of a conspiracy about the IT department, something about them manipulating screens.

When he goes outside, Holsten sees, rather than the toxic wasteland they have been fed from the camera, but rather a vibrant paradise, with blue skies and waving grass. The silo is surrounded on all sides by a gentle slope, like an ant nest. The higher-ups have been lying, Holston thinks, about the world being uninhabitable. He happily cleans the camera lens, and then starts walking up the hill, taking off his helmet when he runs out of oxygen.

The big twist is that when he removes the helmet, he breathes in the reality: the world was toxic after all. The big screen, the one the silo used to look out, was accurate. The screen of his visor had been the lie, the manipulation, the plot that the his wife had uncovered.

The pacing and patterning of the series, I feel, is a only somewhat successful attempt to match and heighten the effect of this original reversal. The narrative creates a mood of paranoid tension, of uncertainty, a pervasive epistemological anxiety that is enjoyable when you encounter it in fiction, but terrifying when you notice it in the larger world. We expect the smaller screen to be manipulated, the VR helmet we put on voluntarily to enjoy the game, but we can still trust the larger screen, the talking heads on television, right?

Dystopian Fiction in the Time of Virus and Insurrection

"WOOL is a story about humanity living indoors because the air outside might kill them," Howey tweeted near the start of the epidemic.

"It was supposed to be fiction."

A lot of strange things have happened in the past year, when we were forced into our own metaphorical silos, forced to perceive reality through screens, which we can be sure are manipulated, but not to what extent.

Qanon conspiracy theorists stormed the capital. In keeping with Hugh Howey’s novel, a lot of the battle over the perception of outside reality centered on the same question: how dangerous, really, was it to go outside? How much can established authority be trusted?

I imagine the rioters facing criminal charges having a similar epiphany as Holsten before he dies: it was the larger screen, the accepted frame, that was relatively true. This little screen, my closely whispering virtual helmet, was lying about the lie, in order to manipulate me.

The one image that kept occuring to me, both when the riot was happening and then later, learning about how heavily police, military, and psy-ops were embedded in it, was the great pyramid in Tenochtitlan, where the Aztec kings would, every morning, sacrifice a human, to make sure that the sun god would rise again. No sacrifice, no sun, that was the deal (that they made up).

The MAGA crowd were suckers, but they were also a sacrifice. Their blood poured down the steps of the pyramid, but it was because the king had demanded they come, and offer their necks.

GME

It’s January 28th, the day I planned to get this posted, and send out the Newsletter to which it will be linked, but I can’t help talking about what’s happening with Gamestop stock.

Look up the details on your own, but know that at the time of writing I didn’t know if the so-called “squeeze” of Melvin Capital and the other hedge-funds that had shorted the stock will happen, or how high the reddit army will be able to drive it. The stock went today from 468 to 125$. I bought 4.2 shares a couple days ago at roughly $138.

In figuring out what the best play is, I have to look at screens, and figure out what is real, and what is manipulation. The talking heads say that Wallstreetbets is manipulating the market, that the future of Gamestop is a toxic wasteland.

The retail investors are saying that the big screen is a lie, that the air is fine, come outside, take off your helmet. Their little screen will whisper secrets, and make you rich, and stick it to the vulture capitalists.

Most of the GME stocks trades by individuals have happened on platforms like Robinhood, which apparently are backed by Citadel, the goliath investment corporation that also has ties to Melvin Capital, the hedge fund holding the shorts. As of this morning, in what people with a brain are calling a clear act of market manipulation, Robinhood, TD, and many other investment platforms made buying more GME stock impossible.

To protect you, dear investor, from volatility.

For what it’s worth, I’m not going to sell until it is verified by a credible outside source (they have lied once already) that Melvin Capital has covered their positions.

To be honest, the potential gains from the stonks don’t interest me as much as the implications for what is true, and what kinds of sources of information you can trust. Those who believed a small, vocal internet community advocating an unlikely, counter-cultural conspiracy theory were idiots (Qanon), and also savants (reddit investors).

Whatever the truth is, I will always bet on this: it’s complicated.

Long Game

This is the first book review posted to this site, which is hosted for free on Github.

The irony is that publishing content on a free site is, at this point, easier than doing so on a paid hosting platform. You see, open source enthusiasts want you to succeed, while commercial enterprises want you to kind of succeed, but with the feeling that in order to really succeed, you need more money.

It could be, too, that I have more motivation to learn about software and technologies that are open source. I recently learned that Django, the python web hosting framework, was developed in Lawrence KS for a local Entertainment website. They made the code free before it was cool to do so, and since then the code has taken off like Gamestop.

Here is what I remember thinking was unrealistic about Howey’s series: that the planners for the Silos, the engineers of a self-contained post-apocalypse, wouldn’t recognize the need for as much genetic and social cross-pollination between the surviving tribes as possible.

Another massive spoiler is that only one of the silos—determined most fit by some metrics of command-and-control–is meant to survive. This means that the planners had built in 90% inefficiency, which considering the bottlenecks a world after nuclear blasts and nanite plague would be facing, would be even more suicidal than their attempt to end most of human life on Earth to begin with.

I need to explain all of this further in more posts, more book reviews, but our society, as a post-industrial neo-liberal dumpster fire of inequity and late-stage capitalist grift, is running at more than 99% efficiency, because the opinions and actions of anyone not obscenely rich don’t matter.

It’s as if we’ve collectively shoved a knitting needle up our nose and self-lobotomized all but a random 1% of grey matter, handing that entitled clump of neurotic neurons nearly all of our executive function.

Regardless of whether or not Wall Street will truly ever let average investors play by the same rules in their sick little games, there is something to be said for trying to seize and democratize the means of information distribution as possible.

The reason I’m writing these book reviews, and books, is to put some noise back into the signal, which means putting signal into the noise. The cognitive potential of social organisms needs to be facilitated, not dampened and manipulated.

1. first draft was probably in March or April of last year. ↩