power outtage musings

Somewhere around hour 13 of a power outage, I am thinking that it is a good thing that I elected to go with the weird little memory enabled keyboard with its 4 line LCD screen, that can run hundreds of hours on a set of AA batteries. Rather than, say, an expensive laptop which would be running out of juice right now, and no way to plug it in. Of course, the laptop would provide mor by way of diversion, as long as its juice lasted. But then, for my purposes that was just another mark against it.

Technology. It is of course at times like this I ponder my relative dependency on something so unlikely as having electrical current flow right out of the wall. I can’t help but imagine this world if the juice simply wasn’t available, suddenly. This is how it would go, I think. Power outtages, first a few hours and then a few days, and then one time it just wouldn’t come back on, again, ever.

Of course it is an absurd scenario, as I cast it, anyway - virtually all the power I consume here in Minnesota comes from coal and nuclear. Neither of these is going to be running out any time soon. My scenario is for a science fiction novel, the mystery of what happened to a society that lost it’s fast, easy transportation, its virtually instantaneous communication, its vast extended electronic memory.

I imagine the power will come back on. I imagine that it will continue to come one, more or less, throughout my lifetime. When we spin scenarios of social collapse I think we tend to underestimate how massive and entrenched culture is: even Rome didn’t fall or fade so fast. I imagine that if profligate modern culture, of which we are unquestionably the vanguard, retreats in any degree from its habits of cosumption, it will not be some sudden crisis but rather the usual long, slow, confused diaspora, punctuated with laws and social battlegrounds, mediated like everything else by money, not much of a story, at least in the happening. Surely someday they will look back on these days and write many a word about how it all went and why... at least, if they can secure some juice to run the word processor.

this is what is up with this.