After surviving a recent hurricane, the importance of certain amenities is now abundantly clear. Anyone who has ever been sick as a dog lying in bed sweating bullets and praying for the sweet release of death can tell you that good health is far too easy to take for granted. For many technogeeks, electricity is the same way. In daily life we allow it to become expected as a vital background process. After all, it only demands attention on the rare occasions that service is improperly rendered. Should the flow of electrons burp we squint and snarl as our battery backups click into action and beep furiously for the sweet nectar that gives them purpose. For us, electricity is more than the greatest of all enabling technologies; it is the very reason the world is worth saving.

Last year here in my part of Florida, we felt the wrath of two major storms; Frances and Jeanne. Together, they really did a number on us. It just so happens that we were really lucky that time as our house only lost power for about ten hours; hardly enough time to grow bored with a Gameboy Advance SP (w/fully loaded 512M flash card) and the latest copy of Wired. In the aftermath of those storms, I was shocked by the damage wrought. It dawned on me that by virtue of living in the subtropics, I live in a place replete with a wide variety of trees. And it took about six months before I stopped noticing the injured beauty of the world around me.

Four days ago, Hurricane Wilma knocked out power for more than 6 million people. This time my city came through it a little better, but personally we weren’t as lucky in terms of power. Still lucky, just not luckiest bastards in the world this time. Wednesday morning we joined the half of that enormous figure whose power is currently restored. Strangely, at the time we were one of only four houses on the street to get juice; and we still have neighbors running generators!

Had it not been for the generosity of a close family friend, we would’ve spent Monday and Tuesday night fumbling around in the dark clutching our precious flashlights at the thought of doing virtually anything important. It almost goes without saying that being displaced is a helluva lot better than being literally disempowered. And it isn’t lost on me that few people in our situation have the option of taking such refuge. Anyway, this time around it isn’t the fallen trees and widespread wreckage that has me rocked. Instead, I find myself in awe of my dependence upon on electric power. As a technogeek, the overwhelming majority of my physical possessions are of the corded and/or battery-powered variety. For some inexplicable reason everything else (except collectibles and mementos) tends to end up in the trash.

So for people like me, electric power is much more than a necessity that we depend upon. It does more than enable our happiness. It does that, but it is also a form of happiness itself; one that we internalize through our belongings. John Locke proposed that we have a natural right to own property. But in the modern era from which technology and geekdom is flourishing, the proportion of property that is useless without electricity is increasingly skewed. My own state of nature encompasses rabid technolust, and yet… who besides my brethren ilk would agree that electric service is a right no less inalienable than happiness itself?

People like me are often fans of post-apocalypse movies the same way that more common types are often fans of horror. Zombies I can handle, just bash out the brains. Ghosts? Whatever. Collapsed energy infrastructure? No!!! For us, that is the ultimate nightmare scenario. As enthusiasts for technology, everything we love the most about modern life depends upon our ability to take petroleum for granted. As futurists for it, all of our hopes for the human experience hinge on the presence of a cheap and abundant energy supply. We don’t lie in bed at night afraid of terrorism or avian bird flu or whatever else the media is hyping. We’re more concerned about things like peak oil… oh, and self-replicating gray goo.

I’m not about to start recycling or stop buying Styrofoam cups. With the exception of fire-safety and the courtesy not to litter, I don’t believe in all that blah-blah-blah about personality responsibility for the environment or anyone but the rich or elected officials having an iceberg’s shot in hell at changing the course of history in any significant way. And if I did feel a need for hope more than the need to take advantage of what little technology that those who came before me have made possible for me to afford, then I would waste my money on something like lottery tickets; not organic foods and 100% recycled toilet paper.

What I’m aiming to keep from this experience is a perfect memory of what it feels like when the lights go out and there’s no telling how many days of darkness are ahead. When the lights are on and other matters are depressing me, I want to remember how fragile the “real world” actually is. The next time that the lights go dark I don’t want to feel as though my worries weren’t as grounded as they should have been.

The moral here is that wise technogeeks must stay in touch with just how much they appreciate the little blinky LEDs that surround them. For all our ranting and raving, for all our rabid fandom and sullen brooding there is no hardship of powered life worthy of either the height of zealotry or the depth of despair. After all is said and done, at any moment it could be gone in the blink of a digitally enhanced biologically augmented human eye.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2005 at 5:48 pm and is filed under hurricane, weather, electricity, geekdom, technolust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.