The idea of the blackout, of the total blackout, is frequently used in literature and film. The loss or interruption of the power supply is the 20th-century version, secularized and passed down through the imagination of societies born of the Industrial Revolution, of the idea of night on Earth, more typical of book religions. It is an eschatological image: we will know that we are at the end of everything because total darkness will spread over the Earth. At the time of Christ's death, the sky turned black. Also at Noah's Flood, etc. The end of the world, of course, is usually in reality the metaphor for a warning, or a diagnosis. Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley (the author of Frankenstein), has a novel titled The last man in which she imagines, from the 19th century in which she lived, a 21st century in which Western society has been ravaged by a terrible plague, and where survivors must live in the dark. Cinema, which is an electric art, has imagined a world without electricity in countless dystopian, action, and science fiction films. In the subgenre of cyberattacks, let me mention the immeasurable Die Hard 4 (here, Die Hard 4), in which Bruce Willis slaps his way out of total chaos caused by a gang of digital terrorists looking to party.
With the internet and communications shutting down and returning, it was even more difficult to try to put some mental order into the fragmented and confusing information that was arriving. Without any clear idea as to the cause of the blackout, some authoritative sources speak of a systemic error in the Red Eléctrica network. systemic It contains political and institutional resonances, but if we list them we will still be stuck in speculation and conjecture.
And there's no need to even talk about speculation and conjecture, because from the first second they have run wild. The always well-informed ranks of anti-vaccines, climate change deniers, chemtrails and the birds that are actually surveillance cameras were immediately activated and everything was filled with theories that relate the blackout with the death of Francis, with the announcement of the conclave to announce the next pontiff, with the Koldo case or with Begoña Gómez. Those who know about drought pandemics. There is always, after all, the voluntary blackout, like the one Boris Vian tells us about. The fog, all of Paris, down to the last corner, is invaded by a fog so thick it makes it impossible for anyone to see anything. The fog is also an aphrodisiac, causing all the Parisians to surrender to a massive, blind orgy. When the fog finally lifts, without even having to say anything, everyone gouges out their eyes.
