When I was a kid and couldn’t sleep, I would read late into the night. My parents, concerned that I was staying up too long, began unplugging my reading lamp from the wall to limit my options and, I suppose, bore me into rest. This didn’t usually work very well.
Once, in the pitch black of midnight, I tried to plug my lamp back in. I found the socket by feel and let my finger guide the prongs into the wall. A connection happened, the shock threw me back, and every light flickered. My parents were furious and also relieved I was not seriously hurt. But I could have been.
A lot of power flows through the walls of our homes. It courses around us almost all the time. Out of sight, perhaps, but it wouldn’t be quite right to describe electricity as invisible. It gives us the visible—the lights in our rooms, the power that brings our dark screens back to life—but it is really only in those moments when it jumps out of the outlet and into our various devices that electricity comes into view.
And yet we live in a world built for and by electricity. The current flows ceaselessly around us, just below the surface, waiting for someone to add a new circuit to the network.
It’s easy to forget that the massive circuit—the power grid—that we plug into does not simply occur naturally or operate limitlessly. It’s only when things fail that we’re forced to remember. When a blackout happens, we remember all at once that the grid needs to be maintained by countless people whose labor, in turn, also requires access to electricity. When electricity rates jump, to account for massive drains caused by air conditioning or new data centers, we remember that the grid can only support so much demand. And when countries are invaded in the name of securing apparently vital energy resources, we reckon with the reality of a modern world whose infrastructure is irredeemably extractive and electric.
It’s no wonder more and more people fantasize about a life off the grid. The dizzying recognition of the interconnected human attempts at mastery that enable charging a phone or feeling your way to the restroom in the middle of the night, guided by the glow of a nightlight, can and often does lead to a sort of primitivist nostalgia. Solar-powered battery packs and gasoline generators are the promise of a grid for one, untangled from the world. But even a generator comes out of a factory powered by the sum total of human industry by way of the grid. The hum of the wires in the wall is the murmuration of the global human endeavor.
Hearing it ever so faintly, I remember that we remain entangled. In the middle of the night, in Nietzsche’s loneliest loneliness, the soft light of my lamp connects me to the labor of billions. I could not do this without all of you.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
