Power Outage, Inner Power
April 28th will be remembered as the largest blackout (so far) in European history. Power went down in the whole of continental Spain and Portugal, taking more than 20 hours to come back in some areas. It has been blamed on technical causes, although the Audiencia Nacional (National High Court) has opened an investigation for possible cyberattack. Whatever the cause, however, we can see it as a symptom of something deeper and more far-reaching.
When I was growing up, at the end of Franco’s dictatorship, small blackouts were frequent. The only outcome used to be that you were left without TV (black and white) or that, at nightfall, you had to light candles (some were ready). Landlines kept working. We relied much less on electricity. The Internet didn’t even exist (except as a military project) and it would be decades before the word ‘cyberattack’ was coined. More than half a century later, blackouts are unusual. But when they happen, as with this “Great Blackout,” they create a helplessness that was previously unheard of.
One would have imagined that this was not the road to progress.
The more sophisticated a technology, the more fragile it tends to be. My grandfather drove a truck and knew how to repair most breakdowns. When our tools were simple, you knew how to mend them yourself. Today, tools are amazing, but only specialists know how to fix them.
Technological progress makes life easier, but it also makes us more vulnerable. Today we have more information and more power than ever before, but we seem to be more lost. Everything points to a technological progress that is more and more incredible, in the strict sense that it is becoming less and less credible.
The philosophers that have pondered about technology conclude that it is not a simple tool that we use. There comes a moment when technology escapes our control and takes hold of the wheel. From then on, alas, we are the ones being used by technology. Jacques Ellul wrote in The Technological Society:
Everything happens as if the technical system grew by an internal, intrinsic force, and without any decisive human intervention.
Reflecting on the growing imposition of mechanistic and dehumanizing visions, psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist writes in The Matter with Things that we are in the grip of something bigger than us that tells us that it has our interests at heart in order to better control us.
On the afternoon of the day after, April 29th, El País (the Spanish equivalent of the New York Times) ran an article with the title “Spain Returns from the Stupor of the Blackout and Abandons the Analog Age […].” The implication was that we had now entered, finally and irreversibly, into the Digital Age.
I have read widely in history, but I had never heard of an “Analog Age.” Dictionaries define analog as a way of conveying information (“analog thermometer” and “analog television” are two examples I found). However, is conveying information all that matters in life? Anyone with a soul knows that human life and history cannot be reduced to the transmission of information. If this piece you are reading is any good, it will be because it does much more than convey information.
Jaron Lanier calls cybernetic totalism the subtle totalitarianism that reduces “all of reality, including humans” to “one big information system.” When we integrate data in a coherent way, we have information. When we integrate different types of information and put them in context, we have knowledge. When we integrate different types of knowledge, we have wisdom. But wisdom is no longer spoken of today.
I type “Analog Age” in Google and I get this:
The “Analog Age” refers to a period characterized by physical representations of information and mechanical processes, contrasting with the digital age which uses electronic data and computers. This era was defined by technologies like vinyl records, printed books […].
According to the prevailing technolatry, vinyl records and printed books belong to the past (note the past tense: “was defined…”). Today, anyway, the vast majority of book readers prefer to read on paper (a few decades ago, it was vainly proclaimed that books were doomed). As for vinyl records, they are making a comeback (in the US their sales are growing more rapidly than those of other music formats) because they offer better sound quality than CDs and streaming music.
The talk about the “Analog Age” can only be done from an irrational faith in the total and lasting triumph of the “Digital Age.” From the belief that everything — including currencies, IDs, therapies — must be digitized. But during the Great Blackout, in most cases you couldn’t do your shopping or get a taxi ride if you didn’t pay in cash.
The so-called “digital transformation” entails an erosion of what have been the rules of the game of human existence since the beginning of time: it displaces the properly human ways of acting and being in the world, and replaces them with their robotic or technocratic counterparts. It covertly imposes a technocratic totalitarianism in which people are more controllable, more manipulable, more vulnerable, and less autonomous.
How come we are being forced to digitize everything, when blackouts cannot be ruled out? In a recent article in the Guardian, the head of the school of engineering at Cardiff University stated that blackouts “can happen anywhere,” anytime. And he added:
Despite today’s high standards of reliability, low-probability but high-impact blackout events can still happen. These networks are not designed to be completely blackout-free because achieving such a level of reliability would require investment far beyond what is economically feasible.
Isn’t there something quite peculiar about a world that relies more and more on electricity and yet cannot guarantee its supply? This does not look like a road to progress.
Incidentally, it is not impossible for human life to flourish without electricity. Plato and Aristotle, Bach and Mozart, Leonardo and Goethe, never in their lives saw a phone, a screen or a socket.
Nowadays, though, every new technology is uncritically embraced simply because it’s new. And if it has adverse effects, we dogmatically believe that they will be solved by technological progress itself.
Back in 1950, philosopher and theologian Romano Guardini wrote in The End of the Modern World (Das Ende der Neuzeit):
Modern man believes that every increase in power is simply “Progress,” advance in security, usefulness, welfare, life force […].
And concluded that
The bourgeois superstition of believing in the intrinsic reliability of Progress has been shattered.
By 1950, after the Second World War, when it became clear that technology could empower inhumanity, the idea of history as an irreversible path of progress had begun to shatter. Indeed, the idea of linear progress would have been incomprehensible to most human civilizations, including Ancient Greece and the Renaissance, which sought to return to the models of classical culture. After the mid-twentieth century, thinkers such as Arendt, Jaspers, Tolkien, Huxley, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, Guardini, Mumford, Schumacher, Ellul, and Illich, much as they disagreed on other issues, were all deeply concerned about the path the world was taking.
The modern world dreamed that it was sailing on the ocean of History, aboard the ship Progress, toward a shore of Prosperity and Liberty. There were storms, we lost our way, but in the long run, Progress would deliver. Now we are not so sure. We find ourselves in turbulent waters, as if we were in rapids. The dream seems to be turning into a nightmare. We are left with one main option: to wake up into a wider consciousness, to come to our senses, to rediscover the here and now, and to realize that the ocean, ship, and shore are such stuff as dreams are made on.