写作的春天
This page houses long form writing that Silent Spring would like to share with you. We believe that long form content is a powerful way to convey a message with depth and evidence, as well as providing references and points for further reading. Views are reflective only of the author of the given piece at the point of publication.
Political Essays
This links to Chris' essays which cover a range of topics generally around history, politics, and economics.
Essay of the Month
Why you should learn something new - 30/08/26
If there is one thing common to the human experience today, it is the sense that the world is simply outside of our control. We are continuously presented with a roadmap of the future, forced upon us by the world's richest and most powerful people. One in which our jobs, our public services, our opportunities, communities, our public representatives, and our rights, these are all things that are seen as naturally beyond the influence of regular people. It ties us up into a world of contradictions, one in which we are encouraged to celebrate our democracies in the West, as a point of exceptionalism that sets us apart from dictatorships, often cited as Russia, China, Venezuela and Cuba, all the while accepting that there is nothing we can do to change our governments. Adam Curtis' documentary 'Hypernormalisation' captures this sentiment perfectly, how we are presented with progressively outrageous phenomena, that continuously push the boundary of what we may consider acceptable, until we've reached this point of numbness, where we sell short our own capabilities, our own voice, our own chance and agency to change the world that we live in. I believe that a major part of this process includes both skills erosion and skills displacement in Western societies, which leads to professional isolation, and a weakening of labour against capital generally. In this context, people turn to unusual conspiracies, post-truth extremist ideologies, and fad consumer trends. All we can do is sit and observe, as false-prophets across social media wage pointless culture wars that leave us emaciated, giving up our personal capacity to protest and build community ourselves.
With the above in mind, I believe that 'creating' is a revolutionary act, creating independently, without a purpose for profit, competition and capital, but creating for the innate human satisfaction of expression and connection. Creating does not inherently bestow value upon someone or something, however it is such a uniquely human and special activity, it is a joy everyone should have the right to enjoy and to practice. Furthermore, this act is empowering, it reminds us that we can make systems, we can express ourselves and create new stories. They may not be destined for the Streaming-Monoliths, or a space amongst 10 other films on a streaming homepage, but if only 10 people heard of it and were inspired within my community, and each person went on to make their own films pass them on, we are at 100, then 1,000, so on and so forth. It is true that we won't change the world as individuals, but this is exactly the point. We need to stop thinking of creating things as 'worth it' only if it succeeds in a monopolist/viral sense of becoming the sole thing that changes global discourse. Instead, let's start by talking in the places where we actually exist, at work, at public spaces, with friends and at cultural spaces. So if creating is a revolutionary act, then learning is its pre-requisite, and that is why you should learn something new today.
As children, we are encouraged to pursue our interests, to play and to be curious, and these are powerful lessons that we should take with us into later life. It is why I find it so disheartening when moving into adolescence, our choices are often prescribed by assumptions about what would be economically beneficial, without consideration to our personal enjoyment, purpose, or engagement with the particular topic. There is also the sense that pursuing one passion comes at the expense of learning and developing others. I believe this to be a shame because often when we find our passion, it is not that we are setting ourselves as learning a certain toolkit or methodology, rather we are setting ourselves an objective, through which we will pick up the methods and tools accordingly. I think this is the best way for us in our current historical period to preserve a sense of autonomy and purpose, because if we are objective led, rather than method led, we are better positioned psychologically to adapt and see how our path can change, as well as realising options that we may have to preserve it.
Say for instance, you grow up with a passion for music, you will naturally start with learning an instrument, but if you set this as your only way to engage with music, you may find it difficult to do other things considered important such as writing essays, doing numerical analysis, presentations and negotiating deals. This might lead you to abandon music so you may focus on those other skills. However, I think this is the wrong conclusion because those same skills might be exactly what you need to succeed in music, and not a justification as to why you should stop pursuing it. The reality is that success in any field requires a broad understanding of many things surrounding it. By focusing on one small compartment of it, as an individual, and in isolation, we make ourselves more vulnerable from a skills perspective because we are more dependent upon that one skill working out and providing for us. This is skills becoming redundant has become such an existential threat for people like coders and data scientists because the whole reason, activity, and career, depended upon one skill, and a skill that was chosen mostly as an assumption about something the economy wanted. It is no surprise that people who followed this path suffer from the greatest sense of redundancy and precarity in the modern information economy.
Political and class consciousness is something that has been more or less absent from the career path/trajectory of those in the information economy. This means that the proletarian segment of this industry has virtually no political character, embraces its own precarity, and as the era of AI dawns upon us, they more often than not, acknowledge their own redundancy and accept it as inevitable. Job cuts occur with a savage ferocity, and those whose lives are devastated as a result, have no allies to call upon, or comrades in the workplace with which to present any resistance. Unionisation in these industries is either unheard of, or reserved to small niches of the workplace who are more often than not treated as outsiders, fanciful and idealistic pariahs that are not aware of the realities of the workplace. I consider the lack of political awareness and engagement within this industry as particularly tragic, because they are the underpinning of the modern information economy. Their power and importance is without comparison, as its influence and benefit spreads all across the world and throughout every sector. Everyone's lives has been enriched by the internet, and its potential to provide space and bring communities together is remarkable, however it has been privatised, sanitised, and stripped of its potential by the capitalist class. The dawn of AI has accelerated this by doubling down on the pre-existing nihilism present in the sector, now most discourse is limited to 'how can we replace people now?' And the workers themselves accept this narrative, believing that they are replaceable and that there is nothing that they can provide against this backdrop.
I mention this as I myself have worked alongside coders and data engineers and have found them to be amongst the most intelligent, capable, and intuitive people I have met. However, I have noticed that unquestionably, they are completely unaware of their own power and importance in this world. I have spoken with people who's individual absence would collapse a business, or they themselves know how to single-handedly collapse a business through their intimate understanding of its workings and how its services are delivered and provided. It is nothing short of incredible that these people are so unaware of the practical realities of their own power and skills. This outcome is the result of an absence of political and ethical factors from being involved throughout the education and practice of the information economy workforce. Furthermore, I believe the capitalist class is aware that this workforce IS a threat to them, whether the workforce realises it or not. This is why companies so ruthlessly make redundancies and cuts to this particular workforce, either through ham fisted redundancies that assume one person can match the work of ten, or through outsourcing, the Neo-imperialist action of exploiting the developing world and driving wages down. Coders and data engineers are the greatest victims of these practices because it is necessary to keep this segment contained, isolated, and without proper compensation for its work. The psychological assault upon them is a necessary act to prevent the emergence of a class consciousness which can produce a more prosperous, fair, and innovative culture and economy around the internet.
To those of a political/creative/operational background, I would encourage you to learn at least the basics of coding and web development. The internet is the underpinning of the modern era, and it is remarkable how despite its importance, a proper understanding of it has been considered irrelevant for our education and daily life. Similarly, for coders and engineers, I encourage you to learn the basics of some creative activities, writing, music, or read into activism and trade unions. As an industry, you have been largely divorced from the traditions of organisation that have produced community, protection, and fair compensation. You are deserving of fair treatment and security as work as any other profession, but if you do not fight for it, nor can you imagine the alternative, then those decisions will be made without you, by higher management and shareholders, the decisions made will not be ones that pay due consideration to you.
Our productive and creative lives are the bedrock of solidarity. We naturally find solidarity along social cleavages, such as between ethnic discrimination, gender and sexuality, nationality and faith groups. These provide a powerful means of defence, but with the challenges that we face in the world, we need more. Without uniting our creative and productive forces behind our communities, we will surely dissolve and crumble at the pressure of the dominating classes in society. We can march and we can demand, but in reality, we can only make serious pressure if we can withdraw our creative and productive forces from the system. In this respect, engineers and the coding sectors have the greatest potential not only to defend themselves, but also to become one of the greatest allies to progressive causes the world over.
Meta employs thousands in Kenya to review the content of its Smart Glasses products, these are people who single handedly could collapse the hideous rollout of an ethically rancid product. Similarly, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft and more tech giants all rely on the human coding knowledge and IT maintenance of people in the imperialist core, and the global south. The threat of AI, is not that it quite literally can replace people, but that it is a convincing psychological threat to deter the coding and information economy from organising and threatening the capitalist class. People in this sector hold some of the most powerful keys to change in the world, despite that, they are overworked, threatened with precarity, and appear divorced from conversations around social and economic change. For them, and us who come from backgrounds outside of the information economy, we have so much to learn from one another, it is between that exchange of experience that we can not only imagine a kinder and more sustainable world, but also realise what the practical tools are that are required to build it.
