My power went out for about 24 hours this weekend. It was during a big thunderstorm, nothing out of the ordinary for our neck of Texas, then the edge of something big hit. I was on my porch and it was like a sudden wave, like the walls of the red sea, and suddenly I couldn’t see anything and the wind blew my front door open. Then it was gone, and everything was just regular rain. Power loss where I live is a semi-regular occurrence as the Houston area is one of the rainiest places in the United States and we do get occasional hurricanes, and we happen to live in a heavily wooded area. It’s part of living in where we do.
This doesn’t seem to stop anybody from complaining, though. Constant electricity is taken for granted in the modern world, and any service interruption, no matter how brief or understandable, is a cause for anger.
My wife is more plugged into normie social media than I am with things like Facebook and Next Door, and she laughed at all the people complaining that the power company was “late” in repairing the damage and getting power restored. Besides complaining about lights not magically turning on inside their homes, they also complained (in my area) about the sound of backup generators, which many people have because (as you can guess) we live in a hurricane zone. They are quite loud, but they do keep your freezer and air conditioner on, and presumably if one is bothered by it he can close the window. Those same people I would guess never thought twice about the fact that they could pop out their personal portable telepathy device and it would function perfectly (even in a blackout!) and allow them to complain to thousands of strangers about the power company’s employees being too slow in restoring their more basic magic while it rains one inch per hour.
This is one of those things about conveniences. Once they become normalized, removing them is upsetting or enraging to the people who are used to them or dependent on them. People will complain when something that is the equivalent of magic fails to work without ever thinking of the incredible ingenuity of the people who designed the technology and the immense labor required to maintain it, especially with something like the power grid or the internet. It’s human nature to complain when the grain dole fails, forgetting all the ships that had to brave storms on their way from Alexandria to bring it to Rome.
Seldom does the common modern man consider the multitude of people in different countries who have to cooperate so that he can have a pencil, much less all the people who had to work in the past, building and refining technologies, so that that pencil could be delivered to him for less than a dollar. Still more we should be awed by the seemingly invisible cooperation that delivers your ability to read this essay.
Someone needed to build a power plant to produce the electricity, which required a fortune of capital to design and build, and an ongoing fortune to operate and maintain. Many intellects had to invisibly cooperate in inventing and refining the technology that allows the power to be produced in a variety of means: burning fuel, or heating water with nuclear energy to make steam and drive turbines, or using damns and hydro-electric turbines. And then there are batteries to store the energy. How many men had to work together to build the power grid to connect the power plant to your home? Engineers to design and companies to build lightbulbs, circuit breakers, receptacles, etc. so that you could turn on a lightbulb. And we haven’t even gotten to the complexity of computers, the internet, and telecommunications infrastructure. Or the roads used to service all these things, and the automobiles that drive on them, etc.
It’s crazy to think that all these things just work – and that the second they don’t, it is worthy of some sort of consternation. When magic is normal, people take it for granted. I get it, too. We rely on freezers to keep food cold, and they require electricity. Most of us live our lives with the assumption the lights will turn on when we want them to.
I enjoy these sorts of disruptions because it puts into perspective how lucky we are to have modern conveniences and technology, and also because they reveal just how much fun there is to have without screens and electric lights. My kids learned how to play Bocchi with my mother, and I got some uninterrupted writing time because laptop batteries exist. I remarked to myself how awesome it was that I could use my new Ableton Push to produce a dungeon synth track, even with the power off.
Of course, I could have written on a notebook or played a classical guitar. The robustness and reliability of old technologies is often overlooked except when they are needed. That is also, as an aside, why I would never get rid of my real fireplace. When it is cold, fire is one technology you can count on to work! I remember knowing people in Central California converting all their fireplaces to gas… Very environmentally friendly compared to wood but also not nearly as lindy, especially considering the way things are going.
That is also why I enjoy physical books and I make sure to publish my own in physical formats. Phones break. They run out of batteries. Access to the internet gets interrupted. Accounts get banned. Kindle readers die. And books, even digital, go out of print. But a real physical object doesn’t just disappear. It’s only maintenance requirement is a dry shelf to sit upon. When you think of something from a favorite book in ten years you can pluck it off the shelf and flip to whatever page you like. In ebook form? You have to open up your app and hope that you can still download it because you originally got it three devices ago. Real books also sit there on the shelf, reminding you of their existence, letting you know with each glance across the shelf they are there, ready to be read or re-read. Not so with some digital file buried somewhere in your kindle library. Physical games provoke the same reaction, by the way. My eyes often settle on my SNES games while there are hordes of games I have on steam that I have forgotten exist. And my SNES games don’t require a download and 10 patches to function.
I’m still very thankful for technology, the people who enable it to continue operating, and the people who push it forward. It allows me to work in incredible ways and reach so many people, but I am just reminded at times that it is good to have access to older technologies as well, and that you don’t need technology at all times to be productive or have fun. In fact, it’s good to have a break every once in a while, perhaps especially when you do not choose to. It keeps you adaptable.
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Every summer our family rents a house at a lake. One year, our rental was a disaster; the owners had so many Glade scented plug ins and dishes that the house was uninhabitable (here's what I collected while trying to air it out: https://imgur.com/a/JhliCvr ) and so we scrambled for a short notice alternative rental. We found an old farmhouse nearby.
The lack of internet, cable or satellite, the analogue switches on the oven, the lack of a dishwasher, the thick wooden beams that comprise the frame, the general cozy atmosphere (probably largely free of EMF radiation) would not, at that time, have been features to us. But we had such a pleasant week that we've returned there annually. That is largely because it is a great opportunity to relearn appreciation for the conveniences of our city life, but we also return because of how peaceful and wonderful the world can be when it's just you, the open windows, the fields, crickets, fireflies, and the cool lake breeze shuffling the curtains. I think that you can live in the quietest and most peaceful corner of your city and never know half the serenity that you find when you're away from towers and luxuries.
It seems to me that we started giving these things for granted once being constantly online became a social prerequisite. And I understand it. Having to deal with a suspension of conveniences when you are required an Internet connection to work or check a timetable for the bus (to do all kinds of activities that are in some way mandatory, that is) can be frustrating.