In tech the news of AGI, AI agents go rogue, which is nothing more than unsupervised agents, news that keep our nerves on the edge, news that keep in my view investors willing to bet trillions, while the population can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
When I finished the last page of Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy years ago, and also recently finish Season 3, which I found really good, different from the book, with more plots for the protagonist and subplots. Ten thousand people in a hole in the ground, governed by rules nobody remembers writing, watching a screen that tells them the world outside is dead. It sometimes made me remember some resemblance of our current age. And the whole time I read it I kept thinking about meetings. The technology seems very plausible and so that big wall screen.
I feel a chill in the spine thinking that a few people can determine the fate of our destiny. When a few tell us what good looks like for all of us.
For me leadership isn’t the room with the good chairs. It’s not the org chart, the badge, the calendar full of syncs. Leadership is what you do with the information other people don’t have. It’s your actions, your thoughts, your decisions, the small daily choice of what you protect people from knowing and what you make them face. Everything else feels like decoration.
I also feel especially in Europe we as citizens are being undermined, making us distrust our institutions, making us believe that totalitarianism is better than democracy.
<spoilers alert>
In my opinion, Silo is a book about a few people who decided they were qualified to make that choice for ten thousand others, forever, while killing billions, it uses technology as a mean, but is about people actions, pure and simple.
Sometimes I think we are running a smaller, gentler version of the same machine, and I feel many of us are already noticing this and others don’t.
The command bunker you already report to
Start with the architecture. Forty-nine silos, each one packed with generations of people who live and work and raise children underground, entirely convinced the surface is toxic. Then there’s Silo 1. No births. No deaths in the normal sense. Just a rotating crew of the original founders, frozen in nano-cryo-sleep, woken up in six-month shifts to watch the other forty-nine on surveillance screens and decide, from a distance, who gets to keep living.
They never set foot in the silos they run, or outside. They see population numbers, compliance metrics, flagged behavioural anomalies. When a silo drifts from what the data says it should be doing, someone in a warm room presses a button and gas floods the vents, this made me remind of lay-offs. Nobody in that room has to hear the screaming. The system was built specifically so they wouldn’t have to. Distance allow us to create the idea we believe to be right. Distance sometimes allows the flourish of our own bias, beliefs, fears, and excuse.
I’ve sat in that room. Maybe you have too. Not with gas, obviously. With headcount. With a dashboard that shows attrition, velocity, engagement scores, and a red flag next to a team you’ve never actually visited. The decision gets made in the room with the good chairs, based on numbers pulled from a system built to compress a hundred human beings into four columns. Then it gets executed by someone else, on a floor you don’t walk, to people whose faces you wouldn’t recognise.
The founders of Operation Fifty didn’t think of themselves as monsters. And how could them, when a few believe that sacrifice billions is a good strategy to maintain human survivability? Surely they are not the regular empathetic individual.
They thought of themselves as engineers solving a math problem, maybe their own fears, just like today in tech we believe code can solve any problem, how do you preserve the species when the alternative is annihilation. Every decision downstream of that premise felt, to them, like stewardship. That’s the part that should unsettle you. Not that bad people built cruel systems. That reasonable people, convinced they were protecting everyone, built a machine that made cruelty structurally invisible to the ones operating it.
That’s what a wall screen is for. In the show, in the books, every silo has one massive screen showing what the outside cameras see, a grey dead wasteland, updated in real time so nobody questions the story.
Except the lens gets dirty. It always gets dirty. And the people who clean it die doing it, because stepping outside to wipe the camera means stepping into the same air the wall screen says will kill you.
You have a wall screen too. It’s the all-hands deck, the TV, the online streamings. The quarterly update. The carefully worded memo that says “restructuring” instead of “we’re cutting forty jobs because the board wants a better multiple.” It’s not lying, exactly. It’s curation dressed as transparency. And like the silo’s screen, it works because almost nobody gets close enough to check it against reality. The ones who do get close, the ones who ask the uncomfortable question in the all-hands or push back on the roadmap, they’re the cleaners. They go out to check the lens, and something in the org always makes sure it costs them.
I’m not telling you this to make you feel like a founder in a bunker. I’m telling you because the machinery of distance is seductive precisely because it feels responsible. Data-driven. Rational. Nobody in Silo 1 thought they were choosing comfort over people. They thought they were choosing survival over sentiment. That’s the trap, a calculated one. The distance doesn’t feel like cruelty from the inside. It feels like discipline. And this is what most of us tend to do, distance ourselves, the same way we see wars from the TV, children starving...it feels distant...
Good and evil is local
Here’s the sentence that’s been sitting in my chest since I finished the trilogy, good and evil is local.
Local to whoever’s standing closest to the decision, holding whatever piece of the picture they’ve been handed.
To Senator Thurman, sitting at the top of Operation Fifty, launching a pre-emptive strike that kills billions is a local good. In his closed loop of reasoning, he’s the one person willing to make the unbearable call so that something of humanity survives. To the ordinary resident of a silo three hundred years later, obedience is a local good too. Keeping your head down, reporting your neighbour, never asking what’s outside, that’s what keeps the air flowing and the lights on. Curiosity, in that world, is the evil. It threatens the only stability anyone’s ever known.
Nobody in that system is holding the whole picture. That’s not an accident. That’s the design.
A board approves a lay-off because the fiduciary math says it’s the responsible choice, and from where they sit, protecting the company for the employees who remain is the local good. The VP who executes it tells themselves they fought to save as many roles as they could, and from where they sit, that’s true, that’s a local good too. The manager who delivers the news to a person they’ve worked beside for six years does it as gently as the script allows, and that gentleness is the only good available to them in that moment. Every single person in that chain can defend their own local morality with a straight face. And the person on the other end of it loses their income, their routine, maybe their sense of who they are, and nobody in the chain has to hold that weight alone, because nobody held the whole decision. The system distributed the moral cost the same way it distributed the labour.
This is why “I was just following the process” survives every scandal, every inquiry, every postmortem. It’s not a dodge. People genuinely believe it, because the process was engineered to let them. Silo 1’s leadership didn’t need to be monstrous to run a monstrous system. They just needed to never see the whole thing at once. Fragmented responsibility is the oldest trick in the book, and it works precisely because morality, left to its own devices, is local. It measures against what’s in front of you, not what’s three floors down.
I think this is the actual job of leadership, the part nobody puts in the deck, refusing to let the fragmentation do your moral work for you. Forcing yourself to see the whole silo, not just your floor of it. That’s expensive. It means you can’t hide behind “I only approved the budget, I didn’t decide who got cut.” It means the local good you’re comfortable with has to answer to the global cost you’d rather not look at.
Most leaders don’t do this because most systems are built, quietly and on purpose, to make it unnecessary. You get to be good at your job and never once confront the full shape of what your job does to the people three levels removed from you. That’s not a leadership failure. That’s a leadership feature, engineered the same way the wall screen was engineered. Somebody decided that was easier for everyone at the top, and they weren’t entirely wrong. It is easier. It’s just not leadership.
The comfort of the cage
The people in the silos aren’t just controlled. Eventually, they come to prefer it. Just look at how some of us are attached to their phones, online presence, being busy all the time.
Generations pass. Nobody living remembers the surface, remembers grass, remembers a sky that isn’t a lie on a screen. The Pact, written by a few, the set of rules governing daily life, stops feeling like a cage and starts feeling like the shape of the world. When someone breaks it, when someone expresses the wish to go outside, the people around them aren’t horrified on that person’s behalf. They’re horrified at the disruption. The wish to leave reads as a kind of madness, a threat to the only stability anyone has ever known.
By the time Juliette the protagonist in the TV series starts asking real questions, most of the people around her don’t want the truth. They want the silo to keep working the way it’s always worked. Freedom, when it’s finally on offer, doesn’t look like relief. It looks like risk. And risk, after enough generations of engineered safety, reads as violence against everything you’ve built your life around.
I’ve watched this happen in rooms with fluorescent lighting instead of concrete. You inherit a team that’s been managed by fear or by absence for years, and the first thing you try to do is open a door. Ask them what they actually think. Tell them the real numbers instead of the sanitised version. Invite dissent instead of punishing it. And you’d expect relief. Sometimes you get it. More often, at first, you get suspicion. Silence in meetings that used to be silent for a reason. People who’ve been trained, not by malice necessarily but by years of accumulated small punishments for speaking up, to treat the open door as a trap.
That’s not laziness, I suppose. That’s not a culture problem you fix with a Slack channel called “radical candour.” That’s the Pact, working exactly as designed, long after the people who designed it are gone. The system taught a population that compliance was safety and curiosity was danger, and the system doesn’t need anyone actively enforcing that any more. The population enforces it on itself. That’s the most efficient control mechanism ever built, and it doesn’t require a single gas valve. It just requires enough years of the wall screen being the only version of reality anyone’s allowed to see.
There’s a second half to this that I think is even more dangerous, and it’s the part of Silo I keep circling back to. Silo 40, the one community in the network that figures out the surveillance, cuts the gas lines, goes fully independent. They survive by becoming exactly what they were rebelling against. Hardened. Militarised. Willing to make brutal calls to protect what they’ve built. The founders would spent five hundred years trying to breed a population incapable of resistance, and the only ones who made it through intact were the ones who became a different, harder kind of control system entirely.
I think about this every time I watch a team or a founder come out of a genuinely toxic environment and swear they’ll never run things that way. And then, three years later, they’ve built something just as airtight, just dressed in the language of empowerment instead of command. The rebellion against control has a way of curdling into a new control, because the thing that let you survive the first system, the vigilance, the refusal to be caught unprepared again, doesn’t know how to switch off once the threat is gone. You built armour. Armoy doesn’t take itself off just because the war ended.
This is the part I don’t have a clean answer for. If you cage people long enough, freedom stops looking like the goal and starts looking like the threat. And if you fight the cage hard enough to get free, the fighting itself can become the new cage. I don’t know a leadership framework that solves that. I know you have to name it, out loud, to the people you lead, or it runs itself in the dark the way it always has.
Refuse is a verb too
Zoom out past the org chart for a second, the exact same architecture runs at a scale most of us never stop to notice.
A state that wants to break a rival bloc without ever crossing a border doesn’t need tanks. It needs three pressure points, and none of them require a single soldier.
First, it erodes the sense of security. Question a nation’s sovereignty loudly enough, doubt a defensive pact often enough, and people stop planning for next year. Investment slows. Families delay the decisions that build a future, because building a future assumes there’s ground under it. Second, it manufactures mistrust, not of one leader but of the whole idea of leadership. Convince a population every politician is lying and every institution is rotten, and you don’t need to win an argument. You just need nobody left who believes winning the argument would change anything. Third, and this is the cruellest one, it takes something healthy, ordinary complaints about the price of oak flooring or fuel or a government that’s slow to fix a road, and pumps it up past the point of proportion until legitimate frustration curdles into hopelessness.
Read those three back. Erode security. Manufacture mistrust. Weaponise cynicism. That’s not a new invention. That’s the wall screen. It’s the same three-step machine Senator Thurman ran on ten thousand people from a bunker, except this version doesn’t need concrete walls, because the fear does the containing on its own. You don’t have to lock someone in a silo if you can convince them the world outside is already gone.
Here’s what I think most people get wrong about this kind of pressure. They think the target is the government, or the military, or the grid. It isn’t. The target is you, specifically the version of you that stops believing your own choices matter. A population that feels unsafe, distrustful, and cynical doesn’t need to be invaded. It defeats itself from the inside, the same way a silo full of people who’ve forgotten there was ever a surface will defend the walls that trap them.
Which means the most effective form of resistance was never going to be military. It’s psychological, and it’s small, and it’s available to every single person reading this before their coffee’s gone cold.
Refuse to panic. Not because the threat isn’t real, but because panic is the actual weapon, and recognising a headline as a deliberately engineered pressure point strips it of the power to move you. Refuse the easy cynicism. Criticising your own institutions is healthy, it’s the entire point of a functioning democracy, but there’s a difference between demanding your leaders do better and deciding in advance that nothing they do will matter. And refuse the isolation. The people running this kind of pressure campaign are counting on you feeling alone with it, scrolling through a feed that’s calibrated to make you feel like the only clear-headed person left. You’re not. Your neighbour is standing in the same fog, wondering the same thing.
This is citizen leadership, and it doesn’t look like a title or a podium. It looks like pausing before you forward the video that made your chest tighten, and asking who benefits if this makes you feel hopeless. It looks like supporting the shop on your own street instead of assuming the whole economy is already lost. It looks like disagreeing with someone about politics over dinner and still passing them the salt afterward, because proving you can disagree without dissolving the relationship is the single hardest thing to manufacture through a screen.
I keep coming back to this line: the power to decide the outcome still rests with the population. Not the generals. Not the algorithm. The people choosing, meal by meal, conversation by conversation, whether to believe the wall screen or walk toward the door anyway.
Who gets to open the door
Here’s where I land, and it’s not a clean place.
Whether the wall screen is running a silo, a company, or a continent, the counter-move is the same one, small enough to fit in a single word. Refuse. Refuse the version of the story that asks less of you. That’s not a leadership tactic. It’s the leadership.
I don’t think the job of a leader is to build a better wall screen. A kinder one. A more transparent-sounding one. I think every leader I’ve ever respected, and every leader I’ve failed to be, comes down to one question, are you willing to tell the people who report to you that the door was never locked, even when that costs you the authority that came from them believing it was?
Because that’s the real trade. Silo 1 didn’t survive on cruelty. It survived on the population believing there was no alternative to the arrangement. The moment someone credible says out loud, this isn’t actually the only way, the whole structure is under threat, not because the structure was ever physically unbreakable, but because it was psychologically load-bearing. Take away the belief that the cage is the only safe place, and the cage stops being able to hold anyone against their will.
Most leadership training teaches you how to run the silo better. Cleaner dashboards. Smoother communication. A wall screen with higher resolution. I don’t think that’s wrong exactly. I think it’s beside the point. The actual leadership act, the one that costs something, is standing at the airlock and telling people the air outside might not kill them, knowing that some of them will resent you for saying it, because you just took away the only certainty they had.
I keep thinking about the sentence I wrote to myself after finishing the trilogy: no one is in a position to dictate people’s lives, and chaos is inevitable. I used to think that sentence was a warning about founders and dictators and people with too much power. Now I think it’s a warning about anyone who’s ever confused stability for kindness. The wall screen isn’t cruel because someone wanted it to be. It’s cruel because it’s easier than the alternative, and easy things get mistaken for right things if nobody’s checking.
I don’t have a tidy way to end this. I don’t think Hugh Howey did either, honestly, given how hard the ending resists being a clean win. Juliette gets her people out and immediately has to decide whether to go back for the ones still trapped, knowing the ones still trapped might not want saving, might see her as the threat, might have built their whole sense of goodness around staying exactly where they are. Perhaps the end of the series will end Silo 1 and Silo 40 survivors go apart and leave the ones still in the surviving silos to their own luck...and maybe those that came out of those silos years or centuries later, might found out that long ago some managed to set free and decided to abandon them instead of saving them...what would they do, I’m not sure but might be one that could make things even worst, in terms of human survival.
So here’s the question I’ll leave you with, and I don’t want you to answer it out loud, at least not yet.
What wallscreen are you maintaining right now?
The quarterly deck, the all-hands script. The small shiny one. The thing you’re not telling your team because the truth would cost you the version of stability you’re currently getting credit for.
Who is that screen actually protecting. Them, or you. Or nothing else.
About the Author
Diamantino Almeida is a tech leader, coach, and writer reshaping how we think about leadership in a burnout-driven world. With over 20 years at the intersection of engineering, DevOps, and team culture, he helps humans lead consciously from the inside out. When he’s not challenging outdated norms, he’s plotting how to make work more human, one verb at a time.