Electric Technology: Bright Ideas & Obscured Outcomes
Electricity Is In The Air (But Not Our Observations)
I have no problem saying that it is exceptional for me to incorporate my individual experiences in my writings.
This is so because it is unnecessary for me to deliver my own accounts, for technology’s truisms are seldom incapable for speaking for themselves.
But my mind has trusted the thought that referencing one of my recent technological chronicles might be of use here.
Some readers may have heard in the news this past week that strong weather systems were projected to impact the state of California.
Currently residing in Northern California, I, along with others, were faced with being snowed-in as a result of the storm’s contributions.
Local residents will confirm that it is not uncommon for those in this mountain community to suffer power outages, as some, myself included, have also experienced.
Yet local residents will also confirm that a storm is not necessary for power outages to come to pass, for they are certain to transpire here at different times and contexts throughout the year.
For those who do not own a functioning power generator, the absence of electricity can also pose its own set of challenges.
It would probably not be stretching the point to maintain that the loss of electricity will amount to nothing less than the very life of some coming to a standstill.
It is not necessary here to put into detail how the technology known as electricity, in which the planet remains deeply indebted to, altered the course of our culture, from which their could be no retreat.
But this is not to say that there have been no penalties to our culture’s involvement in such a magnificent technology.
In a measure of cultural reflection, I have resolved to articulate a word about electricity— how it moves those who use it, how it alters culture, how some who hinge on technology’s calling might one day come to be rendered ineffectual through its shifting of availability, and how it can pose obstacles to people’s longevity.
I am not suggesting that electricity is bad, or immoral, or that its use should be avoided, or that our culture was better off before the technology’s refinement. Nor are my writings here intended to stand as an essay against the technology of electricity.
I mean only that it can be sensible to cogitate on how technology alters culture, how it creates new conceptions of reality, how its end results cannot be anticipated by even a technology’s creator, and how every technology poses consequences to a culture that consents to adopt them.
And when doing so, one must concede that electricity is not the sole vehicle that can presented these challenges to a society.
Indeed, I do not think it goes too far to claim that, should the average American come to lose their access to tools they perceive as vital to their existence— motor vehicles, Google search, power tools, ready-to-eat processed foods, the internet, microwaves, airplanes, GPS, or electricity— one could reasonably expect the unmasking of their replete dependency on technology to finally be at hand.
Motor vehicles can be a fair illustration of this fact.
I assume it has not escaped the reader’s notice that the vast majority of Americans remain subject to the availability of their motor vehicle to travel to and from their daily destinations, and that most will likely find it considerably trying to get to where they need to go without its aid. The thing to keep in mind here is that many will inevitably be unwilling to entertain the inconvenience that will come to pass, should their technologies become unavailable for whatever reason.
Technology carries with it an often experienced but rarely talked about passage to domesticate those who use it.
And we will find that the same rule applies to electricity, as well as any other technology for that matter, for many who proceed under the assumption that it will always be plentiful in any scenario commonly possess little knowledge on how to go about their lives without its aid, should their access to such a tool be severed.
I think it reasonable to postulate that many in America who might come to experience a blackout for themselves lack an influx of kerosene lamps, batteries, generators, bottled water, emergency food supplies, wood stoves, matches, flashlights, head-lamps or first-aid kits, because they view it is unnecessary to anticipate the shortcomings of such a revolutionizing technology. For the clear-headed, the shaky nature of America’s power grid will inspire further sober contemplation.
“Imagine life without electricity,” detailed Sweco, the European engineering consultancy company, on its website. “Would you be able to get to work, cook, or heat your house? If you live in an urban area the answer is most likely no.” The company added, “Most urban citizens rely heavily on electricity in daily life. The pumps bringing water to apartments and houses are dependent on electricity. This means that the water would seize to flow in high-rise buildings in case of a power outage. On lower floors, water availability will worsen as water towers run out of water. Heating systems are also dependent on electricity, and so are fridges and freezers. In case of a power outage lighting, ventilation systems and other appliances used on a daily basis would also stop working.” As put by the article, “Not only do designers need to consider how devices work, but also what happens if they malfunction.”
The company further notes that, “Production facilities, such as power stations producing electricity and heat, wastewater treatment plants and industrial plants face multiple challenges during power outages. Production losses can result in substantial financial costs, and pose a threat to safety. For example, production plants handling chemicals requiring high temperatures and pressures is an imminent threat to the environment and personal safety when power is lost as equipment fails. Infrastructure would also be affected by power outages. Traffic control systems and fuel distribution networks would stop working. Water would flood the streets due to inefficient and completely missing pumping. Ploughing and cleaning of the roads would also be out of order, which would result in large scale problems during the winter time.”
But as it happens, some in culture have already been impacted by our collective dependence on the technology known as electricity. On June 16, 2019, a massive blackout, attributed to a failure in an electrical power grid, struck South America, leaving tens of millions of people without power in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, subways and commuter trains came to a halt, as did elevators and water pumps. One citizen in Argentina, Eduardo Gralatto, informed the Agence France-Presse of his good fortune in finding two empty buckets he happened to leave on his patio, which came to be filled with rain water. “We’ve gone back to the Stone Age,” he told the news outlet.
Of course, this is not to say that there are none who have gone lengths to prepare themselves in the face of technology’s demonstrable frailty. I mean only that the idea I am describing is sound for every technology- that most are inclined to forego contemplating technology’s failings because they are not accustomed to questioning tools or mindsets that are so weighty in fashioning their worldview and that which play such an enormous role in their culture’s development.
For those who see little worth in debating technology’s deficits, it may be useful to envision the difficulties owners of a Tesla electric vehicle might face following their inability to access ready amounts of electricity from a charging station in the event the power grid gets knocked offline. Or the average American, should they be deprived of their steadfast attendant, the Internet. Or the common motorist, should they be forced to arrive at an unfamiliar destination without GPS technology.
And yet, in the face of the wide-reaching dependence our culture has on electricity, it is factual that those in the past were able to see clearer than many today the technology’s true contributions to culture.
As put by Ernest Freeberg in his book The Age of Edison: Invention of Modern America, “Of course, men and women who lived during the dawn of the electrical age were not naïve and uncritical enthusiasts for the inventions that were transforming their lives… in what Mark Twain dubbed this ‘Gilded Age,’ many sensitive critics cast doubt on their culture’s growing faith in technological progress, complaining that the new machines trampled on ‘imagination and poetry’ and seduced people into mistaking material wealth and power for true ‘human peace and happiness.’ The great prophet of Concord had his doubts about where all this was leading, warning that the new tools of modern industry had some ‘questionable properties.’”1
As it happens, the electric industry that would emerge in the late-nineteenth-century would indeed fulfill its vow to energize culture.
To understand more, we might look to how electricity deeply altered public discourse through the advent of novel mediums of communication.
According to Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness, “To no one’s surprise, it was an American who found a practical way to put electricity in the service of communication and, in doing so, eliminated the problem of space once and for all… [Samuel Finley Breese Morse’s] telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified American discourse.”
The media theorist further documents that, “But at a considerable cost. For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make ‘one neighborhood of the whole country.’ It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse… The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”
The author further remarks: “As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge’s famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into ‘one neighborhood,’ but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.”2
Freeberg adds, “As Americans worked to realize all of electric light’s possibilities, many also saw that the light was creating them- changing their relationship to the natural world, shaping the rhythm of their days, and transforming their culture. This new regime of intensified light energized some and exhausted others. Doctors warned that electricity’s light disrupted sleep patterns, creating a new generation of frenetic but feeble and nearsighted Americans.”
But even these afflictions would surely have been the least of the worries produced by electricity in the late nineteenth-century. “Among the industry’s recent setbacks was the embarrassing matter of having recently burned down a large section of downtown Boston. On Thanksgiving Day 1889, overheated wires at the Boston Time Electric Company spread flames through a building packed with flammable dry goods. By day’s end, the fire had reduced much of the city’s business district to ashes, killing two firemen and destroying millions of dollars’ worth of property. Only a week before, the Boston Herald had declared the city’s downtown buildings fireproof, but they had proven no match for electrical workmanship…”
The humanities professor goes on to note that, “The most shocking of these many New York fatalities had occurred just a month before the Boston fire. A telegraph lineman, John Feeks, was clearing dead wires s from a pole when he touched one that had evidently crossed with a powerful arc-light wire. Though he died instantly, for over half an hour his body remained high above the street, trapped in the net of telegraph, telephone, and fire alarm wires. As comrades struggled to free his corpse, thousands of New Yorkers gazed up, watching flames shoot from the lineman’s mouth and nostrils and roast his hands and feet.”
Freeberg adds: “For late-nineteenth-century city dwellers, the sky overhead became increasingly ominous, thick with wires that might pour down a man-made lightning bolt without warning. ‘The overhead system,’ one medical journal declared, ‘is a standing menace to health and life.’ Every week the papers ran stories of this very modern form of sudden death. A Memphis man tied his mule to an iron lamppost that had been accidentally electrified; the powerful current knocked the screaming mule off its feet, and when its owner came to the rescue he leaned against the post himself and was instantly killed. An Italian fruit vendor in Greenwich Village slipped while cleaning the roof of his shop, touching one of the dozens of electric wires converging there. He probably died instantly, but a horrified crowd gathered to watch his corpse sizzle, as long flames shot from a wire lying across his neck. Fearing their own electrocution, the police dared not go near until an electrician arrived to cut down the wires… Children playing in the streets fell victim quite often, as they enjoyed the sport of reaching for dangling wires or climbing on street poles. The old wires just tingled but the new ones killed.”
The book goes on to document the extensive and startling devastation the electric light came to have on animal and insect populations.
Others have made note of how the technology of electricity has helped in impairing our efforts to improve our health and longevity in the more modern world.
”With the availability of modern sources of fuel and energy, wood, the previously universal fuel, had been displaced, and the historical source of dietary minerals- wood ashes- had been abandoned forever,” noted Dr. Joel Wallach in his book Epigenetics: The Death of the Genetic Theory of Disease Transmission. “People had been using plant minerals or ‘wood ashes’ as their source of dietary minerals since the beginning of time and the taming of fire. Then, at 3:00 PM in the afternoon, Monday September 4, 1882, everything changed. This was the moment in history when Thomas Edison pulled the switch and fired up the first commercial electric generating plant in the world. The event took place on Pearl Street in New York City on the bluff overlooking the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. While electricity sources contributed to the rapid advance of industry, the use of electricity as the source of fuel for heat, cooking, and light eliminated the individual families’ traditional source of supplemental dietary minerals that was found in wood ashes! Sears catalogues touted the availability of electric stoves and the advantages of kitchen cleanliness compared with the dusty, dirty, wood stove and the need to take the wood ashes outside every day. As wood disappeared as the universal fuel, the general health of the industrialized cultures declined, as no one thought or even considered for one moment how to replace the lost source of nutritional minerals.”3
And while the streets of New York need no longer be fearful of poorly constructed electric infrastructure that might kill or destroy, the technology still presents its own unique list of challenges.
As I have said, my intent here has not been to make an argument against electricity, for it has not escaped my mind that I would have not been able to compose this paper and disseminate it as effectively without the assistance of electric technology.
But it is still factual to say that technology always bears consequences that are important to take into account. I have chosen to speak of them because it seems that such realizations are rarely contemplated in highly-technological or otherwise decadent associations.
In our modern society, such a situation calls to my mind the phrase that electricity is “in the air,” which, I think, is especially descriptive of our prevailing culture.
My hope is that electricity, and technology in general, might one day soon lie within view of our culture’s resolute considerations, that its past mistakes might be kept within view, that we can say with confidence that even our culture’s most prized tools are a sure mixture of both benefits and drawbacks, and that we might grasp how one culture can view electricity as a helpful service to the world while another can see it as a destroyer.
For it is well to remember that alongside technology’s bright ideas always come obscured outcomes.
Ernest Freeberg, The Age of Edison: Invention of Modern America, P. 7, 13-14, 180-182
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness , P. 64-65, 67
Dr. Joel Wallach, Epigenetics: The Death of the Genetic Theory of Disease Transmission