SUNDAY, 18 MAY 2025

The recent blackout that plunged Portugal, Spain and parts of France into chaos made me think of some of my favourite Beefheart lyrics (from the track, Flash Gordon’s Ape, on the album, Lick my Decals Off, Baby): ‘It makes me laugh to hear you say how far you’ve come//When you barely know how to use your thumb//So you know how to count to one.’ Although it seems that people generally reacted with forbearance and good humour during the blackout – it was spring after all, and a lovely day, at least in Lisbon – sophisticated modern societies were reduced to helplessness, so heaven knows what might have happened if the outage had lasted much longer.

I’ve read engineers and scientists explain that any resilient system must have a level of redundancy built into it, so that if the system fails, the collapse is never total and things can keep ticking over at a sub-optimal level until it is fully up and running again (clearly crucial in nuclear power stations). Now I’m not a scientist and I’m certainly not an engineer, since my way of thinking, with my lack of precision and exactitude, my impracticality, my love of metaphor and allusion, my preference for what used to be called fuzzy logic, and my liking for generalisations, is almost the opposite of what is required in a good engineer. Plus, most important of all, I’m useless at those tests where you have to mentally move shapes around in your mind. So any bridges I managed to build would crumble to the ground at the first sign of strain.

But when I look at the world we have created, I see a system without much built-in redundancy. I notice this on a tiny scale when the tourist town in which I live is subject to a power cut, which happens a few times each year, usually because construction workers have managed to cut through the wires yet again. Then there are people who cannot buy the basics from the local mini-marts because they don’t carry enough cash (and the ATMs have stopped working), and even if they do have cash, the shops cannot sell their goods to them because everything is computerised and the assistants have no way of recording what is sold or what the price is. As we rush towards creating a ‘cashless society’, and some countries like New Zealand are close to this I’m told (even buying a newspaper or a cup of coffee is done by pressing a cellphone against a screen), I can’t help but wonder if we shouldn’t rethink our enthusiasm for ditching notes and coins.

Then there’s all the stuff which is immediately vital and potentially life-and-death and reliant on electricity, such as traffic lights that don’t work and elevators that jolt to a halt halfway between floors with panicking people inside them and subway trains stuck between stations, their passengers eventually forced to use the batteries on their cellphones to light their way through total darkness to the next station. Larger and highly vulnerable institutions such as hospitals, of course, will have back-up generators, but, since one of the main drivers pushing for greater efficiency by sacrificing redundancy is cost reduction, this will only happen in institutions where a blackout is almost certain to lead to tragedy. It doesn’t make sense for a mini-mart to have a stand-by generator for the handful of occasions when the electricity fails (although after one such occasion in the town where I live, advertisements plugging basic generators went up in the streets almost at once).   

Ironically, as I sit here typing this, my wifi has just gone down for the first time in months, and I’m due to teach online in an hour. God loves his little jokes.

In the blackout that’s just happened in southern Europe, rumours immediately started to fly that it had been a cyber attack. I have to admit that this was my first thought when a friend from Portugal sent me a message with the news – his phone was still working at the time despite the lack of electricity. The governments involved have ruled out a cyber attack, but of course many people prefer to believe the conspiracy theory. Whatever the truth, the fact remains that modern warfare is no longer just about sending in the tanks, nor even threatening to rain down bombs, but removing the electric blood that flows through the veins of a contemporary society, then standing back and letting the chaos do its dirty work.  

So while we laugh at those people in Montana with their bunkers full of cans of beans, toilet rolls and bottled water, plus of course an arsenal of guns, maybe we shouldn’t just dismiss them as paranoid nutjobs. They have at least realised something which the vast majority of us prefer to close our eyes to: our civilisation is built on the flimsiest of platforms and might crack in as little as a week if the juice is switched off. Everything relies on electric, from the food we eat, to the heating or the cooling of our apartments, to our financial transactions, to the way we communicate, to the things we do to pass the time. We are birds imprisoned in a hi-tech cage with lots of shiny baubles to keep us amused.

But the roots of this lie in economics, not technology. And ultimately in us. There is no need to rush into the world that we are building in the interests of an economic system based on rabid consumerism and dependent on endless growth. Nor are we innocent victims in all of this. If we have a fragile system that is hanging by a thread, it is not because this is inevitable; it’s because we choose to have it, and we value having twenty pairs of shoes or the ability to eat raspberries out of season more than we value our basic security, probably because we lack the imagination to picture the whole thing grinding to a halt and the anarchy that would rapidly ensue.

There is a point, perhaps, at which extra, tighter efficiency becomes inefficient; there certainly seems to be a point at which it becomes perilous. Empires may eventually crumble on the battlefield as the barbarians move in, but not before they have grown weaker from within and ripe for picking. I’m not talking here about the right-wing’s favourite trope of moral decadence sapping our manly fibre, but the fact that our systems gradually become too intricate and advanced to adapt and respond to change, as seemed to happen to the Incans and the Mayans. Arguably, the European colonialists were merely the benefactors of their decay and took advantage of the weakness that was an ironic consequence of these cultures’ strength.

The glories of Greece and the wonders of Rome didn’t prevent the Dark Ages, while the central and south American civilisations couldn’t survive despite their pyramids and canals, their profound knowledge of astronomy, their range of incredible calendars, and their high level of cultural and technological sophistication. We are so addicted to the concept of progress in the post-Enlightenment west, and the belief that science and technology will always rescue us from our folly, that we struggle to imagine that the same thing could happen to us. Perhaps older, cyclical concepts of history are more realistic than our belief in endless progress, and there will be no scientists as cavalry arriving in the nick of time to save us all. Beefheart was right: we like to think that we are such a smart and superior species, but we don’t know how to use our thumb, so we can’t even count to one.