There’s only one cleaning every few years, though, on average – people might not remember the details of each previous cleaning.
Cleanings are epic events so there is no way they wouldn’t be memorable and they certainly would recall that all that the wipe off did was clear dust and not show verdant greenery.
I think what I meant (and admittedly I wrote this first thing in the morning after waking) was that the augmented world shown via the visors may have been a motivation for cleaning before it became a punishment. Way back before the ‘failed’ rebellion, cleaning may even have been some type of reward, giving the cleaner a chance to experience an idealised vision of what the world had once been 
Anyway, I think it’s also important to remember that being sent out is now a punishment - it’s essentially their only sanctioned form of capital punishment, every life being sacred and all that. People can do strange, illogical things when facing death. That little glimpse of paradise seen through the visor might mentally break them enough to forget how pointless the cleaning is, even if they’ve witnessed it from inside before.
OB
I think you’re demanding too much rationality out of people who (a) may already be drugged (b) are certain they are are about to die (c) are in the midst of the most sacred rite in their society (d) have absolutely no frame of reference for VR goggles and (e) have no idea what is or is not possible “outside”
I can buy that they are cleaning as their last service to the community knowing that people are cheering them on. I can’t buy that they think that they will be showing the community the “truth”.
I think Alison was an exception. She thought there was a conspiracy, that the display inside the silo was a lie, and that she was fighting against “them” by cleaning. She was wrong, but her motivation made sense.
But that’s presumably not what motivates most people. I don’t know whether most people who see the fake outside think “oh, wow, we’re being lied to, as a last act I will attempt to reveal the truth”. Because in that case, a more reasonable thing to do would be to, I dunno, try to scratch words into the hillside, or do something with sign language, or something. Rather, I think they’re just overwhelmed by near-religious stimuli, and take their part in the most sacred ritual of the only culture they’ve ever known.
I’m not saying it actually really makes sense that they would act that way, particularly that they would ALL act that way; but whatever they would do, I think it’s something you should look at through the lends of things like speaking in tongues, religious ecstasy and maybe some forms of hypnosis than in terms of conspiracies and secrets.
The conspiracy idea is probably extremely rare among residents and even those sentenced to clean. Thus, even if they’re terrified and upset at the thought of going outside, the beautiful scene that awaits them would be an incredible and positively shattering (in the best way possible) surprise. I don’t know if they’d be thinking “I’ll clean so everyone can see!”, but they might well be thinking “This is amazing and so much better than I expected, after I clean I can’t wait to go see what everything else looks like”. Or to state differently, they’d be so overwhelmed that they go on autopilot for a minute, which means doing what they’re expected to do.
The woman whose cleaning was recorded on the hard drive specifically said, “this is wonderful, everyone needs to see this”.
So that was her reaction, but maybe not necessarily everyone’s.
But I think we can say that in this world it is everyone’s reaction, at least in living memory. It was stated a couple of times, even by the mayor in the final episode, that some people say they won’t clean, but they always do.
OB
It’s not unreasonable to infer that it was the reaction of three we know about based on why the first sheriff’s wife went to clean and then how the first sheriff said something like “my god, she was right”.
OK, I have the definitive answer from Hugh Howey himself that he posted on reddit.
"The people who go out generally suspect that the outside world is better than it appears. That’s why they are being sent out in the first place. The euphoria of being correct leads to one of two responses:
Clean in order to let the people inside think you are beaten and defeated and so they won’t come looking for you. Because fuck them, they didn’t believe you and sent you out to die.
Clean because even though you think it might be pointless, the giddiness of what you’re seeing makes you hope beyond hope that you’ll get through to them.
You also have tunnel vision at this point, acting on reflex, because the terror of being walked to your death is crashing into the joy of thinking you’ll be saved. No matter what decision tree you go down, it all points to cleaning.
PS: The field of experimental psychology is FULL of people behaving in weird but predictable ways. Part of my inspiration for the cleaning ritual is my not being able to understand why people walk under their own power from death row to the electric chair or the gas chamber. People do something strange when their will is shattered."
So I think I was broadly correct in what the author was trying to convey and I maintain my opinion that it is a weakness in the plot of an otherwise excellent story so far.
Its a similar double-switcheroo to what happens to Winston Smith in 1984, where Goldstein is finally revealed to him as being specifically a mechanism for subjugation, except that he’s allowed to live, but completely broken as a man, powerless to stop living inside the Lie.
I find the author’s answer pretty unsatisfying. Even if you accept their reactions to the scenario as plausible, that still leaves out why they would concoct such an elaborate ruse with high technology when they could simply give them other incentives like “if you clean, your loved ones will get extra food rations” or something. Think about how much prep and technology has to go into this process. It’s such an elaborate way to get such a simple response.
I do also think it’s implausible, though, that everyone cleans because of this ruse. Surely there would be a range of reactions, including “woah, what the fuck is going on, I’m gonna check this out and marvel at this and forget about cleaning for a minute” or “wait a minute, I’m obviously being fooled by something, because I just saw the dusty but mostly clear view out of the cafeteria yesterday and it obviously didn’t show us a living world” - both of which would result in not cleaning. So it’s 1) a super elaborate ruse that would get at best 2) mixed results.
The thing is - his explanation about how people comply with ritual (like death sentence victims walking to their execution) actually does sort of ring true but if you wanted people to complete a ritual because that’s what’s expected, the last thing you’d want to do is to throw a totally unexpected curveball at them at the last second. His reasoning actually undercuts the story rather than supports it.
I think the obvious answer here is that the author/showrunners are trying to create a lot of fakeouts to the audience to make them wonder wtf is going on and make them come back. It’s manipulative. If a mystery shown to the audience doesn’t make sense in the context of the story world, it’s a storytelling failure.
The fact that they did a main viewer augmented reality fakeout when the power went down points more to “haha, let’s keep the audience guessing with shit that doesn’t make sense and hope they infer it’s mysterious and cool” than any cohesive storytelling.
I get that these are based off books, so they’re not going to pull a “Lost” where they have no idea where they’re going and are just stringing people along, but the sort of manipulation of the audience with gimmicks like this feels very similar.
I think you’re conflating two issues:
(1) Would the situation (including the cultural norms, their psychological state, and the VR) induce someone who had been sent outside to clean
vs
(2) What motivates society to be set up that way in the first place, and does it make sense for them to spend that amount of effort/technology on the VR headsets, yada yada
If you’re complaining that (2) makes no sense, well, I can’t argue with that, we know basically nothing at this point about what motivated the people who built the silos (and could it have been aliens or super-advanced AIs?), or why they set up society the way they did, etc. Maybe we will learn more later, maybe not. And it does seem plausible that the people living in the silo, even the ones with genuine authority, don’t understand the motivations behind the rules, don’t really know the full truth, etc. So even if it is objectively a waste of spacesuits/tape/VR headsets for almost no gain, it still makes sense for them to continue to do what they’ve always done, because that’s what the rules say.
As for (1), I think that it’s close enough to plausible, particularly if you throw in the societal conditioning and the near-mystical importance of the cleaning ritual, that I’m happy enough not to argue about the percent difference between “yes, this might induce someone to clean” and “this would result in a 100% cleaning rate”. If that really bugs you and if you want to insist that it shouldn’t be 100%, well, I can’t really argue, obviously up to you how much that interferes with your enjoyment of the show overall.
(That said, I definitely also agree, as I mentioned earlier, that the power-up-after-blackout fakeout was cheap and unjustified.)
In the reddit AMA the author said that in the book the scene was only on for a split second and most didn’t really notice. While he overall is overjoyed with the tv adaptation, he didn’t like that particular change.
There were a couple of other things that he answered that may be minor spoilers.
Q: Is life different in the other silos?
He said that it is but it wasn’t clear to me if we find this out explicitly or if it’s how he imagines things in this world
Q: Do we find out what happened to the outside world?
Yes we do. Making this a longer text…
He said that the writing for Season 2 is complete and filming is half way done.
Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS FROM THE BOOKS.
Question 1. Silo #1 is the “Command and Control” silo. Life is completely different there. Some of the other silos are already dead.
Question 2. (Not as big of a spoiler, in fact, this is just IMHO). We find out and I think it was even alluded to in the first sentence of the first book. It’s really kind of goofy.
These explanations work at cross purposes. If we’re to assume that the holy cleaning ritual is so important and ingrained into people, then you shouldn’t need the augmented reality Earth to trick them into cleaning. And the reverse, if you think you need the trick, then the ritual explanation doesn’t make sense. It’s actually counterproductive - if their default path is willingness to clean, and you throw a total curveball of a green living world at them, that may disrupt their plans to clean for long enough that they die without doing it. It’s not a cohesive view if you suppose that you both 1) need to trick people into cleaning but that they’re 2) motivated to clean anyway because of the sacred ritual aspect of it.
It’s clear from the actual content of the show that they don’t think people will clean because of the ritual - the idea that people will swear they’ll refuse to clean and then do it anyway contradicts the ritual explanation. So it really makes no sense for the author to make it when his own content shoots that down entirely.
I don’t think this is a “okay, so all options don’t quite add up to 100% but that’s okay” situation so much as “these factors work against each other and really don’t really point towards a cohesive in-world plan that makes sense” situation.
From a storytelling perspective, there’s justified mystery weirdness where the audience thinks “oh wow something crazy is going on and this is going to be great when it’s all revealed and makes sense” and that actually happens, and unjustified mystery weirdness which is just “let’s just make shit seem crazy and throw false clues and red herrings at the audience until their interest in how this crazy story is going to resolve gets them coming back” and then the audience just gets manipulated and strung along.
The show Lost was basically 100% of the latter. They never had any idea where it was going and they were just stacking weird shit on top of weird shit with promises (explicit and implicit) that it would pay off for the audience if they stuck it through, but it was all bullshit. It’s way easier to write “wow, what the hell is going on, this is all so weird and interesting” mystery, than it is to actually resolve it, which is the hard part.
So I know there’s a series of books and I could just read them and find out, and other people may know that there’s stuff that will be revealed that will make this all make sense, but the writing so far feels very much like the “let’s just throw weird mysterious shit at the audience to keep them coming back even if it doesn’t really make sense” latter style of mystery than a cohesive story that makes sense from an in-world perspective type of mystery.
I hear what you’re saying, and I’m certainly not saying that you’re just talking nonsense or anything. That said, I think you’re excluding a fairly large middle.
There are two extremes:
(1) “made things up as they went to seem cool and mysterious and then either forgot about them or provided clearly post-hoc bullshit explanations” (Lost)
(2) “everything is meticulously plotted out and plausible and all the answers are satisfying and make sense” (very few top notch shows)
But there’s also Silo:
(1.5) “Everything is planned ahead of time, there are reasons for everything… but sometimes the reasons are a bit hand-wave-y. But at least they’re internally consistent and mostly not just on-the-fly see-cool nonsense. Except for a maybe a few dumb moments now and then.”