Silence in the Always-On Economy
The sound of zero utility
The Quiet After the Urgency (The High Cost of Transactional Availability)
The phrase haunts me because it is a perfect diagnostic tool for a broken culture: “When my time is no longer available, you respond with silence.”
It exposes the lie beneath the perpetual, humming anxiety of the startup world. We are told we are a team (a family, even), but the moment you stop being the immediate, available resource (the person who can put out the fire, or jump on the three-hour late-night debugging session, or craft the perfect last-minute marketing copy) the contact drops to zero.
The silence isn’t just an absence of sound (it’s the absence of recognition for your non-transactional worth).
The Problem of Reactive Design
In my years spanning infrastructure, product, and leadership, I’ve seen organizations design for maximum throughput but minimal humanity. We create systems, both technical and operational, that only activate on demand.
In the old days of the Internet (back when we were fighting packet loss on leased lines instead of scaling global microservices), the network was designed around its most expensive resource: bandwidth. Everything was throttled, buffered, and carefully managed. Today, in the modern distributed environment, the most expensive resource is no longer network bandwidth or compute cycles (it’s focused human attention). Yet, we still design our communication platforms (like Slack or email) to treat that attention as a cheap, infinite resource (constantly pingable, constantly interruptible).
When the signal light is on (when you are visibly solving a problem), the feedback loop is instantaneous: appreciation, questions, praise, more requests. But when you switch to strategic, heads-down work (the kind of deep focus that actually builds long-term value, the kind of work that requires you to be unavailable), the organization suddenly goes quiet.
The silence tells you that the relationship was not built on shared purpose (or mutual respect for your expertise) but on your immediate, reactive utility. You were a server, and when you went into maintenance mode, the client requests ceased.
The Future of Work and the Agentic Shift
This phenomenon is becoming even more pronounced as we move into the era of advanced automation. If we, as human workers, allow our value to be defined purely by instantaneous response and repetitive problem-solving, we are racing toward redundancy. These are precisely the tasks that future Agentic AI systems are designed to handle: monitoring the situation, evaluating options, and taking appropriate action (autonomous decision-making without constant human hand-holding).
As Kate O’Neill writes in her piece, Agentic AI: Beyond the Hype – What It Really Means for Businesses and Workers (a piece that rightly focuses on the human element of these changes), the core challenge around agentic AI isn’t about algorithms (it’s about power and human agency). If machines can handle the transactional noise, then the only sustainable value for humans lies in the strategic, empathetic, and boundary-setting work (the work that is inherently unavailable for constant interruptions).
We must stop seeking validation in the volume of the noise (the number of pings) and find strength in the quiet that comes from focused, high-leverage contribution. We need to train our organizations to value the preventative fix over the heroic firefighting (and to respect the necessary silence that allows deep work to happen). If the only time people talk to you is when they need something, then the silence is not a consequence of your unavailability (it’s a warning sign about your environment).
Big thanks to Domonique Townsend and Tiffany Hardin for inspiration behind this post.