NEW YORK — The silence, Charles Hugh Smith writes, is the loudest part. Ask people whether the work being automated was ever necessary in the first place, and they go quiet. Not because the question is hard.
Because it is dangerous. Smith, who edits the blog Of Two Minds, published an essay making this exact argument.
He names two beliefs that, he says, most people treat as sacred. The first: technology drives Progress, and Progress is inevitable. He calls this “The Mythology of Progress.” The second: the desire to get rich fuels innovation, which in turn fuels Progress.
Neither, he argues, is rooted in science. Both are “cloaked in the finery of science to mask their true nature” as belief structures.
The gods of technology and finance are treated as real and powerful. Question them, and you get silence. Because if those gods are imaginary, Smith writes, then “the entirety of Modernity collapses.” So we keep worshipping.
With charts. With spreadsheets. With euphoric headlines.
Smith points to 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 dollars are still needed to dig up and process the fuel, construct the reactors and operate them. “But never mind that,” he 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. The system does not reward things that last.
It rewards things that break, things that need subscriptions, things that generate recurring revenue. This is not a side effect. It is the design.
What this means for families, for patients, for the human side of the economy is left hanging. Smith does not spell it out in detail. But the implication is clear.
If the work being automated was never necessary to begin with — if it was busywork, make-work, work generated by the system’s own inefficiencies — then automating it does not create efficiency. It creates redundancy on top of redundancy.
It creates a machine that runs faster and faster, producing nothing of value. The silence, then, is not just about technology. It is about meaning.
If the work we do is needless, what are we doing? If the economy is a machine that grinds people up for no purpose, what is the point of defending it?
Smith’s essay does not offer a solution. It offers a diagnosis. The mythology of Progress, he says, is a belief system.
It has its priests — the technologists, the financiers, the pundits who write euphoric headlines. It has its rituals — the quarterly earnings calls, the product launches, the stock market rallies. It has its heretics — anyone who asks whether the whole thing is a house of cards.
The silence is the sound of orthodoxy defending itself. Where this leads is unclear.
Smith does not predict collapse. He does not predict revolution. He simply points out that the beliefs holding the system together are not grounded in fact.
They are articles of faith. And faith, as history shows, can crack.
For now, the gods of technology and finance remain on their thrones. The charts still get updated. The headlines still get written.
The work — needless or not — still gets automated. And the question hangs in the air, unanswered, met with silence.
