Charles Hugh Smith has been writing about the cracks in modern economic faith for years. But his latest essay lands at a moment when those cracks are getting harder to ignore. The blog editor behind Of Two Minds is asking something that makes people uncomfortable: What if the work being automated right now was never necessary in the first place?
Smith identifies two quasi-religious beliefs propping up the whole system. The first is what he calls the Mythology of Progress — the idea that technology inevitably drives progress.
The second is the belief that the desire to get rich inevitably drives innovation, which then drives progress. Neither, he argues, has a scientific basis. Both are dressed up in the language of science to hide their true nature as belief structures.
The gods of technology and finance are treated as real and powerful. Question them, Smith writes, and you get silence.
Because if those gods are imaginary, then the entirety of Modernity collapses. So the worship continues. With charts.
With spreadsheets. With euphoric headlines. Smith points to a concrete example: the promise of thousands of modular nuclear reactors that will power super-abundance.
Not a single one is functioning 24/7 reliably, safely and cheaply. Vast amounts of money are still needed to dig up and process the fuel, construct the reactors and operate them.
“But never mind that,” Smith writes. “The gods have promised that technological Progress is unstoppable and inevitable.” The deeper problem, Smith argues, is baked into the system itself. Durable, low-maintenance, low-operating cost technologies are not as profitable as planned obsolescence or extracting monthly fees from owners.
This is not an accident. It is the logic of the system.
This matters now because automation is accelerating. Jobs are being eliminated. Entire industries are being reshaped.
But if the work being automated was never genuinely productive — if it was busywork generated by a system that prioritizes extraction over usefulness — then the automation of that work does not create efficiency. It just eliminates the people doing the pointless jobs. Smith’s argument challenges the assumption that technological progress is automatically good.
It challenges the assumption that the market naturally rewards useful innovation. Neither assumption, he says, holds up under scrutiny.
But scrutiny is not welcome. The gods demand faith. The silence Smith encounters when he raises these questions is telling.
It suggests that people sense the fragility of the belief system. They know that if the gods of technology and finance are imaginary, then the entire structure of modern life becomes hard to justify.
So they do not ask. They just keep working. They keep automating.
They keep worshipping. Smith’s essay is short. It does not offer solutions.
It does not propose alternatives. It simply asks the question and notes the silence that follows.
That silence may be the most honest response available.
Sources
- Economics of Human and AI Collaboration: When is Partial …
- Knowing When to Automate Versus When to Simply Skip a Task
