Hugh Howey's Blog, page 2

New York Event in January

I’m very excited to announce an upcoming appearance at New York City’s 92nd Street Y. On January 14th, I’m going to be chating about SILO with the inimitable Amor Towles, one of my favorite people and one of the greatest writers working today.

Amor knows me a little too well, so I’m probably in store for some embarrassing questions. We will also discuss our very different writing adventures, and what it was like bringing SILO from the page to the screen. This will be a few days before the season 2 finale, and just on the heels of getting seasons 3 and 4 approved by Apple. The timing couldn’t be better!

If you are in the city, come and join us. If you know other people in the city, tell them to come join us. It’s going to be a blast. It starts at 7:30pm, and all the details are here. I hope to see you there!

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A Crumby Deal

David Byrne was once trapped beside me on a plane for over five hours, an ordeal he has probably blocked out of his mind if it ever registered at all. For me, it was a delightful and unforgettable experience. We spent the entire flight talking about the human brain and human behavior, a subject we discovered we both had a passion for that was outside our paid area of expertise.

David was working on his “Theater of the Mind” project at the time — where he combines immersive theater with established psychology experiments. At a conference we were both attending that weekend, he was planning on a live demonstration of a very popular game theory experiment called the Ultimatum Game. It was one I’d read up on many times over the years, frequently popping up in books and other papers about fairness and game theory. The Ultimatum Game goes like this:

One person (The Proposer) is given a sum of money — let’s say $100, which I believe is the amount David used on stage. The Proposer divides this pool of money into two piles however they like. It could even be one pile of $100 and a big pile of nothing. They designate one of the piles as “theirs” and offer the other pile to Subject B (The Responder).

The Responder’s entire role in the Ultimatum Game is to decide whether or not the deal goes through. If they refuse their pile, neither person gets any money at all (it goes back to the folks running the experiment). If the Responder agrees with the split, then both people walk away a little richer.

This experiment was first proposed in the 60s, but wasn’t really performed and analyzed until the 80s. Since then it has become a staple of classrooms and labs around the world, with thousands of variations of the experiment each looking for unique angles (such as: do fraternal twins offer and accept different splits than identical twins?).

In its basic form, where the subjects are unrelated and don’t know one another, offers from the Proposer of less than 30% are usually rejected by the Responder. This means the person accepting the split is choosing to forego any money at all in order to punish an offer they deem unfair. And this is what the Ultimatum Game is ostensibly designed to search for. What is our innate sense of fairness? How much inequality will we tolerate?

In groups that know one another or have frequent contact or relations (a small office group, a family, a fraternity), the Proposer often creates a nearly 50/50 split, which is then happily accepted. Two friends or colleagues walk away a little richer. One of the interesting findings from the Ultimatum Game is that people playing it for the very first time with complete strangers — even if the Proposer and Responder will never see one another or have any contact whatsoever — usually stay within a 50/50 to 70/30 range. First-time Proposers rarely offer anything insulting like 95/5 or 90/10. Having never done or heard of the experiment, their intuition informs them not to push their luck. Perhaps they place themselves (consciously or subconsciously) in the Responder’s seat for a moment and realize that they would reject an unfair offer. Or perhaps most of us, deep down, are generally fair people.

These are the ideas I took away from my reading up on the Ultimatum Game over the years. I found the experiment interesting but not mind-shattering. My thoughts tended to linger on other experiments. Until my flight with David. Until I watched him perform the experiment on stage. I suppose it was just that I had three or four days to mull this one experiment over and over. Because something didn’t sit quite right with me, something about how the experiment is performed and what we read into the results. The problem, I realized, is that we could never truly test the limits of what is actually being studied here. And what is being studied here is not at all what researchers for decades have assumed.

The problem goes back to the original version of this experiment in the 80s, where the sum of money being divided was something like €20. It’s always a small sum, because the experiment only works if you let the Proposer and Responder keep the money. There needs to be actual skin in the game. Experimenters don’t have unlimited resources, and they need to run hundreds or thousands of iterations of the game to get meaningful amounts of data, so the pot size is generally small.

What the Ultimatum Game is measuring, then, is not our innate sense of fairness, but rather what amount of money we are willing to part with in order to impose fairness on others. We are measuring the cost of fairness.

Take a college student at a university (the subject of most psychology experiments, alas). A Proposer offers them a 90/10 split. Ten bucks would buy a slice of pizza and beer and leave enough to tip the cute waiter at the local hangout. But this student isn’t completely broke. They have some cash in the bank, parents who pay their tuition, a part-time job that gives them some spending money. For $10, they could also give a big middle finger to whatever anonymous asshat is trying to walk away with $90. No thank you. They choose to reject this offer, punishing the lack of decorum and fairness. I mean — for $30 they might have been tempted, but they would’ve still be upset. For $30, they could ask the waiter to go see a movie or something.

Okay, now imagine the same experiment but it’s not college students with full bellies and positive bank accounts. It’s two homeless men down on their luck who haven’t had a decent meal in days. One homeless Proposer offers 90/10. The homeless Responder is just as pissed as any college student would be. It’s a bum deal. But $10 is $10. That’s food in my stomach. That’ll get me through another day. I don’t know when I’m going to see $10 again. Many of us would take this deal.

The failure of the Ultimatum Game is that it doesn’t offer meaningful amounts of money. In practice, it simply can’t. No experimenter could afford to. But where practice is impossible, hypotheticals are useful. So let’s run a different version of the game in our heads, one in which we raise the stakes until college students (and middle-aged college drop-outs like me) feel the same weight of the experiment as the homeless above.

Let’s imagine a pot size of $100,000. The Proposer offers the same 90/10 split, which in thousands of experiments people have been deemed unfair, rejecting a measly offer of $1 or $10. But now it’s $10,000 being offered. Yes, they realize the Proposer is going to keep $90,000. Oh yeah, you bet they are upset at this offer. Why not go 50/50? They tell themselves that they would have gone 50/50. They’d yell at this person if the experiment wasn’t being performed anonymously (much less hypothetically). But ten grand is more than they make in a month after taxes. That’s a vacation. It’s paying off a credit card. It’s two months of living expenses with a little left over to invest. Boy, they’d love nothing more than to punish the unfairness of this offer, but that’s too much money to give up. They accept the offer. Wouldn’t you?

If not, let’s say the pot size is now a million dollars. The Proposer suggests $900,000 to themselves and $100,000 to you. It’s still unfair, but that’s one hundred grand you get to keep. Almost nobody in their right mind would reject that offer.

And yet, in thousands of Ultimatum Games run over the last 40 years, the 90/10 split is rarely offered and almost always rejected. That’s because the price being paid to reject unfairness is tolerable. Raise the stakes, and suddenly the same unfairness is accepted, however angry it makes us. Which leads us to this:

Red and orange represent the top 10% in the US. Combined, they own nearly 75% of all there is to own. The bottom 50% of Americans is represented by that teal sliver which almost disappears around 2008. The top 1% are twenty times as wealthy as the bottom half of the US. Oh, and the gap is both growing and accelerating.

This kind of distribution is seen elsewhere, but it is worse in the US than in Europe. We tend to align more with India, Russia, and China than we do Europe when it comes to how we tolerate income inequality. (It’s worth noting that India has a very powerful caste system that permeates the entire culture. Inequality is not just tolerated there but in many ways enshrined and celebrated).

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*Note that this graph measures income, which is different than wealth. Wealth tends to be even more unevenly distributed than income, mostly due to low inheritance taxes. It’s easier to sit on amassed wealth than to go out and compete in the market for real wages.

Here’s another graph to ponder:

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In the last 50 years, the top 20% of earners have seen a nearly 10% raise, coming at the expense of the other 80%, which have all seen their share of income fall. The middle quintile have seen the greatest erosion. This is the “disappearance of the middle class” you may have heard about. What’s actually happening is the haves and have-nots are growing further apart. You see blame being tossed about, and anger is on the rise, but the blame is difficult to accurately assign. People vote against their own interests. Many don’t vote at all. And no party offers clear and radical solutions to this growing problem.

Historically, things have not gone well when wealth disparity grows too much. Sometimes there are uprisings, as seen in Cuba in the 50s. The disparity in wealth there between those in the city and those in the countryside grew to such a state that revolutionaries like Castro were able to topple the haves and take it all for themselves. Same thing has happened in Russia more than once, and in France and Britain. It’s happened thousands of times and will keep happening, because the structures that create income inequality are both ratcheting and compounding. They go one direction and they feed on themselves.

They go one direction, because power once seized is difficult to relinquish. They feed on themselves because those in power tend to change the rules to gain more power (or they skirt the rules, take advantage of loopholes only they can afford, or get away with breaking the law). Get angry all you want, it doesn’t change anything. It’s human psychology. It’s game theory. And one thing we’ve learned from millions of psychology experiments is that if you change the roles, you get the same results. Let the guards become the prisoners or vice versa, and you get the same behavior. Let the Proposer and Responder switch sides, and it doesn’t matter. If you were a billionaire, you would most likely nudge things — even subconsciously — in a way that rewards being a billionaire. Self-interest is a very difficult thing to buck.

Making things more difficult is that perceived wealth is far from actual wealth. This graph breaks my heart:

There’s a lot going on here. The first thing that jumps out is that folks think being wealthy is a lot more common than it actually is. People assume that earning a million dollars a year is something that quite a few people do, when almost no one does. Fewer than half a percent of the US population earns over a million dollars a year. If you know 200 randomly distributed people, then you might know one person who fits the bill. (Of course, we don’t know randomly distributed people. We know people mostly in our realm of income, which is one of the sources of confusion here).

We overestimate how many wealthy people there are while underestimating how many people are living in poverty. This may be part of why people vote against their own interests. They think moving up to where the rules will one day favor them will be easier than it actually is. (There are other, less flattering reasons that I’ve blogged about here at times). What’s wild is that income inequality is getting worse — and accelerating — all while we are unaware of how bad it’s gotten. We think income is more evenly distributed than it actually is.

Let’s return to the Ultimatum Game. If I offered you $100,000 a year (after taxes, guaranteed), but it meant that thousands of people would get millions of dollars from that same pool, would you accept it? Would the unfairness of the distribution matter to you? Or would you be more interested in how that $100,000 might change your life? I think most of us would take that deal. It’s too much money to pass up on. Equality be damned.

Well, that’s the deal we are all making. And when you cross the threshold and the deal no longer makes sense (you become one of the billionaires), you rationalize your change of heart. The reason you became a billionaire isn’t because you got lucky — it’s because you worked hard (ignoring the fact that most of your non-billionaire friends worked just as hard or harder). There are all kinds of mental gymnastics here that would make Simone Biles blush. And there’s a good chance that any of us would fall prey to them.

I know for a fact that I got lucky and that thousands of other writers out there worked just as hard or harder than me and have just as much or more talent. I was reading about and obsessed with human psychology, biases, game theory, and evolutionary psychology long before I won the lottery, so I had some defenses against the illusion of meritocracy. Yet another way that i got lucky.

But make no mistake, enough people believe in a meritocracy — or want the rules tilted in their favor — to keep the system rigged in a way that will only increase income inequality. This problem will grow and grow. We tolerate it because the crumbs falling from the table way above us are big enough to live on. But that doesn’t make it any less of a crumby deal.

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A Listing Ship

Let’s imagine two hypothetical scenarios:

Scenario A:

In order to have 100% employment, the Government of Earth decides to put all people to work and pay them money, which they will print. The jobs don’t matter, what matters is that everyone is working and everyone is getting paid. The simplest job they can think of is digging holes in the ground and filling them back up. Over and over. They print a bunch of money and hand it out. And of course, everyone starves to death because no one was actually doing anything useful and there’s nothing to spend the money on.

Scenario B:

In order to produce as much as possible and perform every job necessary, humans build tools, automations, and AI to do all the required work for them. Eventually even the work required to design, build, and service the machines. There is 100% unemployment. Everything we need is there for sale, but no one has a job, there’s no money, and so everyone starves to death because they can’t buy the simplest of things, even though it’s all right there.

Neither of these scenarios will ever happen, of course, but what if I told you that the economy we live in right now (and perhaps for the last four thousand years or so) was a push-and-pull between these two extremes? One side is attempting to provide work for the sake of work, without asking much whether or not those jobs are needed, and the other side is trying to produce as many goods as possible while paying the least amount in wages, without worrying about where their consumers are going to come from. And the interplay between these two forces create a very messy, very ugly, very painful balance that is way better than either of the extremes.

That’s the economy. It’s made up of people, and people are batshit insane, which is why any of it works and also why it often fails. Adam Smith called these complex interplays of human psychology “The Invisible Hand.” Modern capitalists just say, “Let the markets figure it out.”

Let the markets figure it out.

But the markets are people. CEOs are people trying to maximize profits, but also people looking to maximize their income. Workers are people trying to maximize efficiency, which is another way of saying making as much money as possible doing the least amount of work. CEOs are pulling us toward scenario B, where everything gets done but you have to deal with as few employees as possible. Workers are asking for scenario A, where someone will please pay them to lean on a shovel. In the long run, both sides are saved from their idiotic impulses by the balancing force of the other. In fact, both sides RELY on the other side being an idiot in the opposite direction.

But what happens when half the idiots start to lean, ever so slightly, in the wrong direction?

That’s what’s happening today, and you can see the effects in a single graph:

Red shows union membership going down. Blue shows concentration of wealth going to the top 10%. It’s easy to focus on the diverging lines on the right, but what’s striking is the convergence on the left. Unions grew and suddenly the idiots from A could lean fully against the idiots from B.

There are many possible reasons for the divergence, but let me suggest one that captures quite a few of them, and we can see it again in a single image:

The first lottery in the US was the New Hampshire lottery in 1964. Other states quickly followed, and the lottery system blew up in the 70s. Of course, the “rag to riches” dream is thousands of years old — but the subliminal advertising of the 70s and 80s was pervasive and deep in ways that only advertisers and psychologists understand. Shows like THE JEFFERSONS and BEVERLEY HILLBILLIES became the most-watched TV every week. SILVER SPOONS was one of my favorite shows growing up. All presented a sudden leap up in prosperity. In churches around the country, which began growing into the mega-churches we see today (again, really taking off in the 80s), the message was: pray hard enough and you’ll get rich quick like me, your pastor.

Hold that thought while we return to the hypotheticals above.

When the capitalists from B make fun of A, they point to make-work unions and inefficiencies. These are folks like my dad who used to point to construction sites at all the folks standing around, leaning on a shovel, while one person worked. “Inefficient,” he’d say. Paying people who weren’t actually doing anything drove him crazy. In a dream world all the things would get done without paying anyone. Another fun example from this group is one I used to parrot: there was a time when electric trains had steam engineers onboard. The union contracts stipulated that every train must have a steam engineer, and even when the rail companies made the switch to electric, they were forced to honor those contracts and pay someone to sit and do nothing. As absurd as this sounds, we do it today with teachers who can’t be fired but are so bad at their jobs they now get paid to sit in a room and scroll through social media all day. Scenario B folks love trotting out this example because it triggers an emotional reaction that draws folks into their orbit.

Here’s how the push and pull of A and B work in the economy, and how it affects people: Bob, a Hollywood CEO looks at his meager earnings and tries to figure out how to make more profits. Profits drive up the stock price and Bob’s pay package, so doing this is good for the company, the shareholders, and also for Bob and his family. One easy way is to acquire another company that is doing the same kind of work. After the merger, Bob can lay off people who were leaning on their shovels a bit too much, get everyone working a little harder, and combine the profits of two companies into a bigger stream. Even the semblance of doing this can drive up the stock price and get Bob a big bonus. And it gives Bob something to do! Makes him feel like a CEO. Everyone wins except for the people who are laid off, but they’ll go find other jobs and even they will be fine in the long run.

Rinse and repeat. Publishing houses get winnowed from the hundreds down to five. Disney owns Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. Mass layoffs, mergers, unpaid overtime, strenuous work conditions are the invisible hands of scenario B, all tugging in one direction. These are the hands of ultimate efficiency. What about scenario A? What are they doing to push back?

The workers in scenario A, let’s remember, are trying to get paid more while doing less. These are the forces that got us a 5-day work week (and are now winning 4-day work weeks in places like Iceland, New Zealand and elsewhere). These are the forces who would strike if work conditions got too inhumane or pay didn’t keep up with the cost of living. Entire industries would be shut down in order to get better contracts (we just saw this with port workers, and my industry did it last year in the Hollywood strikes). Non-union workers do this in an invisible, distributed way every time they refuse to take a job for low pay or negotiate a higher salary. Millions of little decisions add up, but big change usually comes from big, coordinated efforts.

Here’s where things get really fucked up. The folks in scenario A have been convinced to fight on behalf of the scenario B people. Middle class folks are no longer pulling for what’s in their best interests; they are now pushing the CEO hype. So we’ve gone from push-pull to push-push. Shit’s getting really pushy over here. Scroll up to see the union graph to get an idea of how powerful and pervasive this shift has become.

Of course, these undermining efforts have always been attempted, but nobody nailed them quite like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They didn’t just rule the 80s, they became symbols for the decade where “Trickle Down Economics” entered common parlance. The idea of trickle down economics is you give corporations big tax cuts, and now they can use that extra money to hire more people, expand their businesses, grow the economy. It all trickles down to the workers. Except … it doesn’t. It never has and it never will.

Because that would require CEOs to wake up one day and decide to move to scenario A. They’d have to hire people to dig holes and fill them and be happy with that. Employing more people would suddenly be their #1 priority. Spending more money on wages would have to drive them. But it isn’t. It doesn’t. They are pushing in the opposite direction. CEOs will never hire people who aren’t needed; shareholders would lose their minds if they ever said otherwise.

You know what does necessitate more hiring? A 4-day workweek. Or sales going up because you have more customers. How do you get more customers? Have more people out there with more money to spend. If that sounds like a chicken and egg problem, it is. But there’s an easy way to get this going in a positive direction and two easy ways to screw it all up.

One easy way to screw it all up is to print money and hand it out to folks. This drives up the cost of goods, because everyone is suddenly a little richer. If we gave every human a million bucks today, would we all be richer? Kinda. But you wouldn’t go to work for $15 an hour with a million in the bank, would you? And that coffee shop would be insane to continue charging $5 for a mug of joe when the owner knows every customer has money burning a hole in their pockets. So prices jump up IMMEDIATELY. Wages take longer, because of contracts and the annoyance of quitting / looking for a job / negotiating with the boss.

The other way to screw up the chicken and egg problem is to have money pool up and not get used. It works like this: A CEO gets a big $40,000,000 bonus one year. They decide to invest some of this in art, which they store in a free port warehouse. They park a bunch in the stock market. They buy a lot of land. They get a car collection and a few extra homes. Some of these actions create a little work (someone builds a home, sells a car, gets an art commission, uses capital from stock price increase). But a lot of that money sits idle, doing nothing. It pools up. There are oceans of this money pooling up, no longer circulating through the economy. More and more every year.

Economists refer to the rate that money moves through the economy as “velocity.” When money moves, you get a healthy economy. When it pools up, you have problems. The more it moves, the more people benefit. If you give middle class and poor people money, they spend it. Almost all of it. It moves back into the market. The chicken and egg problem disappears because there’s always another egg and more chickens. Velocity of the money supply might be one of the most important things for a healthy, equitable economy, but it’s difficult to measure and rarely mentioned. (It’s often expressed as a ratio of GDP to money supply, each of which is also hard to measure and not as sexy as S&P GO UP).

Let’s set economics aside for a moment and talk politics. When folks went to the polls this November, they based their vote on many different factors, but the one that may have had the biggest impact is the feeling of getting left behind. Costs have gone up and wages have lagged. Largely because we’ve been printing money and handing it out during a global pandemic. The results were predictable. Prices shot up. The political fallout should also have been predictable: For the first time, every democracy revolted against its current leadership. You can see that here:

Here’s how to read the above graph, which tells a very important and clear story. Dots ABOVE the black line show how much parties in power increased their vote share from the previous election. Dots BELOW the line show how much parties in power lost vote share. It’s a measure of WE AREN’T HAPPY LET’S TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT. In a century we’ve never seen such global levels of “try something different.”

This wasn’t a move from liberal to conservative. France and the UK went the other way. This was a move from what-are-we-doing-now to anything-else-please. Of course, the irony is that the problems caused in the US were caused by the guy we just voted into office (he insisted his name be printed on the checks that caused the inflation). But that doesn’t matter to the invisible hands. The economy is all psychology, and let me remind you that this is a balance between two groups of idiots leaning on each other.

The tragic and dangerous reality is that we are now mostly all idiots arguing for scenario B. We are my dad, wishing someone would fire those people who happened to be on their 5-minute break when he drove by. Or were waiting for the pipes to be shut off before they resumed digging. Like my dad, we see the patterns we already believe in. Drive past a busy construction site, and there’s nothing to anger us and get our attention. No bias to reinforce. Keep moving, nothing to see here.

We’ve become anti-union in a time when we need them more than ever. We’ve become anti-strike when they are proven effective. We shrug at CEO pay hitting absurd levels, because we also drive past LOTTO billboards with billion-dollar payouts. It all seems arbitrary and fair, right? And hey, it could happen to us someday. Look at Trump and Elon. It happened to them. If I simp for them online, maybe they’ll notice me and pull me up along with them. I could buy an imaginary cyber currency at just the right time and be rich AF. That will be me one day. I don’t want future me to pay lots in taxes. Government is dumb and inefficient and would waste my money.

That’s my dad. Like Elon, he had cherry-picked examples of government waste. And when the savings and loans fiasco broke out, or Enron collapsed, or Bernie Madoff raked it in, or another recession wiped out millions of families, those were the exceptions. That’s how bias works. Exceptions on one side are THE RULE and on the other side, we don’t talk about them.

Well, we should talk more. About economics. About the history of labor and capital balancing one another out. About the bullshit stories that group B has sold of efficiency, waste, deregulation, the dangers of socialism, the promise of getting-rich-quick, and the allure of trickled wealth. One side has done a much better job of talking about these things, and it’s got too many idiots leaning the wrong way. As someone who has spent a lot of time on boats, let me tell you that this rarely ends well.

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Welcome to Your Silo

Fifteen years ago I wrote a story about all of humanity trapped in the bubble of an underground silo where all their news of the outside world was delivered through a single screen, and that screen showed them death, destruction, and all the things to fear.

With this single view to go by, the inhabitants of the silo go a little mad. People aren’t supposed to live like this. Revolution brews. Folks begin to doubt what they are seeing. There are some with hope so deep in their bones that they wonder if the world can be saved, and these people want to go out to see for themselves.

I won’t spoil the rest.

I will spoil the mystery of why Trump won and Kamala lost, and it has everything to do with my dad. My father was an amazing guy. One of the first to help anyone in need. Incredibly generous. Sharp as a tack. Big heart and big brain. Both of which turned to mush on a steady diet of conspiracy theories passed off as news.

My dad listened to Rush Limbaugh every day, religiously. Fox News played in the house 24/7. Bill O’Reilly, Hannity, all the rest. Whatever these men said was his reality. Muslims were going to take over the world. Gangs from Mexico were invading. Hillary and Obama were corrupt and evil and probably doing bad things to kids. Every phone call with him strayed to these topics and there was no way to penetrate his defenses with even a semblance of reality. My father disappeared and a hate-filled husk took his place. It was so bad that we couldn’t go to the best Mexican restaurant in town anymore, not because it was Mexican (he ate at the other place), but because Obama ate there once on his way through town. Not kidding.

My wife has been hearing from friends and family who voted for Trump, and the things they say and believe remind me of my dad. Trump will help with crime, which is out of control. He’ll deport all the illegals who contribute nothing to our country and do all the aforementioned criming. Kamala would’ve been as bad for the economy as Biden has been, which is the worst in the world. All our cities are burning and being abandoned, except by the homeless.

Nevermind that crime is down, every sane economist sounded alarm bells over Trump’s tariffs, that immigrants (yes, even illegal ones) contribute far more in taxes and GDP than they consume (and commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans). That our economy has recovered faster than any other developed economy in the world. Or that our cities are amazing and where the vast majority of us live. None of that matters. Reality doesn’t matter. It’s what’s on the screen.

Michael Tomasky at the New Republic gets it. His article here is a must-read. The thing to understand is how little understanding there is going around. And I don’t think it’s as nefarious as many try to swing it. Liberals are just as susceptible to conspiracy theory. What’s really at play here are evolutionary forces, which include: xenophobia, seeing patterns where there are none, the allure of forbidden knowledge, in-grouping and out-grouping, and the myriad biases that reward fear and delusion over sound thinking. (Our paranoid, skittish ancestors out-survived and out-produced the ones who stopped to ponder whether their fears were rational).

We had a meeting recently with some cast and crew and producers for the SILO TV show, and one of the things that came up was how germane and prescient the story seems, in light of what we’re living through now. But I wasn’t writing about the future. I was writing about my past. I was at ground zero when 9/11 happened. I watched and felt the planes enter those buildings and saw them topple right in front of me. And then I watched the conspiracies flourish in the aftermath. Disappearing planes. Helicopters setting off remote, controlled explosions. The Jews did it. The hatred of anything Muslim (or even resembling it; Sikhs and Hindus were now targets).

The fear of world-ending WMDs. The need to go to war in Iraq. This was around the time my dad began emailing me stories about how Muslims were having more children than Americans and eventually we would all be Muslim. Very much like the great replacement theory trending now. Fox News became the most-watched TV channel across America. Daytime radio beamed conservative voices in all directions. Anything not espousing these views was liberal media, which had its own echo chambers, bubbles, and silos. The two worlds didn’t see, understand, or hear one another (go read THE CITY AND THE CITY for a neat metaphor of this).

There’s a second theme in my novel WOOL that doesn’t get as much attention, but plays an even bigger role in the plot, and it’s the idea that revolutions occur roughly every twenty years or so. It’s a pattern you can see in our own history, and I used the series of novels to wrestle with why this was and whether that chain could be broken. My own theory about this pattern is that each generation hits their teens and twenties and thinks their ideas are brand new and that no one has ever been this outraged/enlightened/special/downtrodden, etc. They weren’t around for the last revolution and so they repeat the same mistakes. Hormones (especially testosterone) and undeveloped frontal lobes likely have more influence here than we care to admit. There are people voting now who weren’t alive when 9/11 happened. Heck, there are voters who were too young for their parents to play Trump’s Access Hollywood tapes and so didn’t know that was a thing!

Don’t get me wrong, racism and misogyny are very real and are playing a big part of our election cycles. But they are being stoked by a media that profits from our fear and paranoia. It’s a flywheel and a ratchet, both. Spinning out of control and only in one direction.

If there’s any hope, it comes from my father as well. A few years before he passed away, I took him with me to Africa and we sailed across the Atlantic together. We were at sea for 45 days or so, without any news, just a deck of cards, some books to read, lots of time talking and staring at the horizon. My father gradually came back. Later, as he was dying of cancer (the literal kind), he told me that our sailing trip was one of the highlights of his life. He specifically said how great it had been not to think about politics, to clear his mind. Sadly, he had just as quickly returned to his news bubble when he got home and that metaphorical cancer took hold.

I learned so much from my father, many really wonderful things. But also some sad things. The saddest is how fear and bad news pervert the mind. I lost my father to Fox News and rightwing media, and we lost this election to it as well. Rush has morphed into Joe Rogan. Rightwing radio has turned into Twitter. Russia gets this better than we do and happily pours gasoline onto the fire. Liberals, meanwhile, go into unaware bubbles of MSNBC and Threads and think everyone sees the same world they do. But we don’t. Here’s your spoiler: there’s more than one silo.

For anyone interested in understanding the world we live in, there’s no better book on the topic than THE RIGHTEOUS MIND by Jonathan Haidt. I can’t recommend a book more highly. Please give it a read.

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New York Comic Con 2024!

The biggest annual comic con is back in the city this weekend, and it’s better than ever. Shay and I went for a walk through the halls yesterday, diving into the cosplayed throngs and checking out all the incredible booths. There’s more to see than you can squeeze into a weekend.

If you’re attending this year, I’ve got a panel on Sunday at 11am with a signing set to follow. Bring anything you want me to scribble in. And whenever you’re able to go, make sure you head down to Artist Alley and the author section known as Writers’ Block. Elinor Taylor has a booth with her books and the books we’ve written together. I may have even signed a few. Since we live on opposite sides of the pond, these may be the only copies with both our signatures for quite some time.

But hey, don’t buy them because they will be priceless artifacts in the after times. Buy them because they are amazing stories with twists and turns you’ll never see coming! Seriously, I’m so proud of these two little treasures we made together. Go give Elinor some love and check out her other books. She’s absolutely brilliant.

It’s Saturday and we are diving back in! Hope to see you there.

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Some Days it Hits You

I walked up to my wife today with tears streaming down my cheeks, trying to get the words out. She doesn’t see me like this often, so of course she was worried. “I’m okay,” I told her. Then tried to explain what was going on.

I had my laptop in my hand, an email open on the screen. It was an invitation to a “Fuck Cancer” party for a reader who is about to start a very brutal treatment. She’ll be in the hospital for the next four to five months, pretty much in isolation because of how weakened her immune system will be.

A friend of hers let me know about the party because apparently I’m one of her favorite writers. She takes my books to her doctor’s appointments and to previous treatments, returning to WOOL especially for strength and hope. And yup — tears are flowing hours later as I type this out. Forgive the typos. World blurry and all that.

I still think of myself as a reader who enjoys dabbling in the writing world. Getting emails like this — and there have been way too many of them over the years, often with cancer as the damned antagonist — is way beyond humbling. It staggers me. Thinking of the suffering someone is going through, the seriousness of their fight, the beauty of their lives, the love of their families, and that somehow some world I made up has brought them some semblance of joy, hope, strength … it’s a lot to digest.

I spent time with some readers this weekend at DragonCon, and I also ran into some of my favorite authors, a few of whom made me want to become a writer. I heard myself say, “You’re one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer,” and then an hour later I’d hear someone tell me, “You’re one of the reasons I wanted to become a writer.” It’s a mind-fuck, being in the middle of a chain of inspiration like this. I forget the impact our words can have; I only remember the impact others’ have had on me.

I’m not sure I could have written a single thing had I known that people might carry it with them to chemo. Or that they’d teach the novel in a WFA program. Or that someone would ever think of me as their favorite author. It’s a bit much. And yet … I’ve been on the other side so many times. Reading has sustained me through hard years. Books kept me company when I was alone at sea. When I was in a school that didn’t really fit me. Before I found my tribe. Days when I needed an escape.

Here’s to everyone out there whose words are lifting someone up or whisking them away. Keep writing. Keep telling your stories. One day it’ll hit you too.

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DragonCon 2024 Schedule

If you’re looking for me at DragonCon this weekend, here are my panels and signing times. I’ll have quite a smattering of books for sale directly if you don’t have anything to bring.

FRIDAY

Books to Inspire: What Works Have Inspired Our Panelists
1pm (Embassy Hyatt)
Description: Our panelists discuss the books that have inspired them to become writers, to continue to be writers, and perhaps influenced their writing styles.
Panelists: Les Johnson(M), G. S. Jennsen, Robert E Hampson, Storm Humbert, Violette L Meier, Hugh Howey

SATURDAY

So, You Want to Write about the Apocalypse?
11:30am (Westin Hotel)
Description: Our panel of professional writers discuss their techniques for successfully writing stories set in the Apocalypse. Learn what it takes to build a richly detailed world where survival challenges, moral dilemmas, & the remnants of a collapsed society drive the plot & character development.
Panelists: Robert E Hampson(M), Andrew E.C. Gaska, Nathan Ameye, Griffin Barber, Hugh Howey, Alison Tracy

Writers of the Future: Story Prompts, Short Fiction, & Winning the Contest
1pm (International North Hyatt)
Description: How do you become one of the 12 winners to be published in the annual anthology? Writers of the Future judges discuss the Contest, tips on story prompts, and short fiction. Then in the 2nd half, enjoy Q&A with the judges.
Panelists: Jody Lynn Nye, John Goodwin(M), Robert J. Sawyer, Hugh Howey, Nancy Kress, Orson Scott Card

Book signing! Bring your own or get something from me.
2:30pm – 4:30pm (Galaxy Press Booth in the Main Hall)

SUNDAY

Writing the Dystopian
1pm (Embassy Hyatt)
Description: How do you approach Dystopian Fiction? Where do you start…or where do you end? Our panelists will talk about what it takes and about their favorite examples.
Panelists: Hugh Howey, D.J. Bodden(M), Delilah S Dawson, Richard Kadrey, K.T. Hanna, Jack Skillingstead

Book signing! Bring your own or get something from me.
2:30pm – 4:30pm (Galaxy Press Booth in the Main Hall)

Text to Screen: The Experience of Adaptation with Hugh Howey
5:30pm (Marriott M302-M303)
Description: Getting your work out to the public is a unique experience, so imagine when someone wants to adapt it for a new medium. Author Hugh Howey shares his experience in regard to both Beacon 23 & Silo. What is it like to watch your darlings be transformed?
Panelists: Hugh Howey, Kelley Harkins(M)

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WOOL Special Edition!

This is my first time seeing the new special edition in person, and it looks amazeballs! My goodness. Thank you HarperCollins for all the hard work you put into this. I’m a very happy book daddy.

Should be available for purchase soon. More to come! ;)

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Silo Season Two!

Lots of announcements and reveals coming your way from San Diego Comic-Con this weekend! If you’re in town for the con, come by our panel on Saturday at 4pm in Ballroom 20.

Rebecca Ferguson, Common, Graham Jost, myself, and a surprise guest that is going to make a lot of readers very, very happy. Moderated by Adam Savage. It’s going to be a blast.

There’s also a tattoo parlor in town where you can get some Silo-inspired temporary tattoos. And plenty of places in town to go make them permanent.

Lots more soon…

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Arriving Early with Assholes

To make sense of today’s blog post, you’ll need to first go purchase and read Kevin Kelly’s magnificent book What Technology Wants. And really, you should be reading that instead of coming here anyway. It’s one of those marvelous books that reshapes how you see the past, present, and future.

You’re back? That was fast. Now that you’ve read the book you know its central premise, which is that technology moves in a predetermined direction, built up from the prerequisite technologies that came before. Which is why almost every innovation is co-invented around the globe almost at the same time. And importantly for this blog post, it’s why our narrative that certain individuals are the ones who push humanity forward is false.

I want to argue that not only is the hero narrative of technology false, it’s also dangerous and counterproductive.

First, a reminder of a few examples from Kevin’s book. Calculus was co-invented separately. The theory of natural selection occurred to two people on opposite ends of the earth within mere decades of each other. Powered flight was a race so narrowly won that it is still in dispute!

The “inventor” of a thing usually comes down not to who first made or discovered a process, but who was the loudest about doing so, or who the media seized upon for being the most quotable, photogenic, shocking, absurd, etc. Ransom Olds invented and patented the assembly line, but Henry Ford not only refined it — he had better quips. And now the assembly line belongs to Ford in our popular imaginations.

The inventions that follow this pattern are so numerous that it might as well be all of them. Go research anything you know to be invented by one person, and you’ll begin pulling a very tangled thread. Even the most famous examples, with clear patent histories, are never what they seem. Every American school kid learns that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. You either memorized that or you got it wrong on a quiz at some point. Only some know that Eli got the idea from a slave named Sam. Fewer still know that Sam got the idea from his father. And nobody on Earth knows where Sam’s father got the idea or how many others were working on it concurrently.

The point is that our desire for hero worship and our sweeping tales of lone inventors changing the world is absolute nonsense. It’s garbage. Anyone who talks as if General Relativity would never have come to light without Einstein doesn’t know the first thing about how things come to light. They also probably don’t know about David Hilbert. All they know is how wonderful a story it is that a kid who failed his math classes (not true) and couldn’t get into college (also not true) worked in a patent office and came up with a theory so amazing that no one else could ever have thought of it (latter part definitely not true). It was a bonus that he had crazy hair and was immanently quotable.

All this brings us to a kitchen table where I’m sitting with one of the brightest minds and biggest hearts I’ve ever known, listening to how Elon Musk is one of the most important people who ever lived, because electric cars would never have existed without him. Not only was this conversation disappointing and wrong, it highlighted something for me as we pushed back and forth. Even when it’s accepted that Elon acquires companies rather than inventing anything, the same folks suggest that Elon’s antics are worth it because he makes progress quicker than we otherwise would.

This point I gladly grant. And looking back at the most colossal assholes of human history, they do have a tendency to get where they are going faster than people who are saddled with compassion, empathy, values, or an adherence to truth and laws. Cheaters, indeed, get ahead. Cutting corners shaves time. All of this is true.

But is it what we want?

Going back to Kevin’s book, we know that electric self-driving cars powered by a green grid are a technological certainty. How and when we arrive at that point are open for debate and modification. The current system that we’ve settled on is to reward jerks like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for berating employees so that they might squeeze a little more juice out of them. By giving into our inherent hero worship and the very wrong narrative of how things are invented, we feel beholden to those who cut corners and break laws. We are blind to the fact that we could build different incentives and arrive at the same place just a little bit later while rewarding better behaved humans.

But nope. We’re in such a rush and have such a confused idea of how things are made, that we’d rather arrive early with assholes. And we only have ourselves to blame.

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