Today’s the ninth anniversary of the Northeast blackout that left around 55 million people in the dark. I was comfortably nestled in Northern California back then, and honestly blackouts weren’t much to sneeze at in the rural area that I grew up in. But in NYC, where lights never turn off, by all accounts it was surreal, kinda freaky, and a pain in the ass. Sure, it’s always good to have candles and board games in the cupboard for when the lights go out, but as the 2003 blackout proved, what do you do when all the elevators, trains, and streetlights shut off in a city of eight million?In post-apocalyptic fiction, video games, and now major network dramas, people tend to envision a post-electricity future as one of chaos. Without our phones, refrigerators and alarm clocks, we’ll all regress into violent tribes fighting over cans of vienna sausages, or something like that. But even if our infrastructure crumbles, and we don’t know how to build new power plants without the help of online guides, would we really be completely helpless, or would we just have to jump back a few centuries and restart?OO.ready(function() { OO.Player.create('ooyalaplayer', 'Q0N29hNzrv-M_wSITnvaY5fdSIkRh4M2'); });Please enable Javascript to watch this videoTo see if we could, artist Jamie O’Shea of the organization Substitute Materials set out to build his own communication network from scratch. In a project titled “Immaculate Telegraphy,” O’Shea tested to see if the telegraph, the base form of man’s electronic communication, could have been developed at any point in human history with just the materials he found lying around the New Jersey wilderness. As we found out in 2009 when we joined O’Shea in the middle of his work, the telegraph could theoretically have popped up at any number of periods throughout history, which makes Samuel Morse’s achievement all the more fascinating. But in light of the blackout, it’s also hopeful: If a guy wandering around Jersey could build himself a telegraph, perhaps we wouldn’t all be doomed to becoming Cormac McCarthy-style cannibalistic foragers whenever we can’t turn on our TVs.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
Advertisement