Monday, April 28, 2025, will be etched in the collective memory as the day the Iberian Peninsula went dark. At 12:35 p.m., a massive power outage paralyzed essential services, halted trains, left hospitals running on emergency generators, and suddenly silenced our practically inexhaustible digital hyperconnectivity. Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, which seeing what was already happening in other places We had days to assimilate that confinement could come, this time, with this type of electrical pandemic of duration relatively short, everything was sudden: the fiction of the apocalyptic series became reality without warning, and we all felt directly the vulnerability of depending on the light, and without the light the network fell, and with the network, the network in its broadest sense, and the very analogical nature of carrying a twenty euro note made twenty euros much more valuable than everything we can have in bank cards, transport cards, access cards... which for a few hours were of little use other than building castles.
The first reaction was disbelief, followed by an instinctive search for explanations. At first, everyone looked to see if it was a domestic problem, but going outside and seeing neighbors doing the same thing confirmed the magnitude of what was happening. This time, as if it were some kind of digital pandemic, we all became infected at the same time, at 12:35 on Monday, April 28th. Suddenly, what had seemed funny to us a few days ago—the famous "kit "survival" of the European Commissioner for Crisis Management – became a real need that was no longer so fun not to have.
But the interesting thing is that, without online tutorials or anything digital, we all activated a kind of "kit of psychological emergencies" much older and more effective: calm, common sense, empathy and solidarity at a level that even the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, highlighted as extraordinary. Those of us who could went out, talked to our neighbors, shared resources, a few euros in coins to pay at the bar, external cyberattack or if we don't need anyone to attack us, we already do it very well on our own. And yes, we rediscovered that human connection is our best support infrastructure, a network that does not fail and that, in the disconnection from the human to which this society of immediacy is leading us, is rebuilt with no more technology than that of support between people for at least.
We saw, or heard on the battery-powered radio, how police and volunteers brought elderly people in wheelchairs up to the twelfth floor, media outlets set up loudspeakers so everyone could hear the news, citizens offered water and food to those who had been left on the train "in the middle of nowhere," which showed that they weren't into anything, nothing, generative or anything that didn't work with technology that can't be plugged into anything.
If only we'd lost power but social media had been working, we would have spent hours discussing the situation and sharing memes, despite the chaos. But this time, the lack of communication was almost total, which increased the confusion but also forced us to seek each other out directly, knowing that we would have access to technology again, but also knowing that at any moment we can disconnect from the digital noise without anything happening, or perhaps to make a lot of things happen.
Perhaps our underlying problem is not so much an addiction to technology that generates "nomophobic" anxieties (the fear of not having access to a mobile phone connected to the Internet) and increased by the feeling of not knowing what was happening to our loved ones and everything that matters to us (the famous FOMO, or fear of missing out, here more real than ever for a few hours). Rather, what we all, in one way or another, have and hear during the hours of disconnection, or half-connection, was a kind of "addiction to immediacy" intimately linked to our cell phones. We weren't just pained by the fact that we couldn't communicate with our loved ones, but by the fact that we couldn't do so when we wanted and how we wanted.
The great blackout has reminded us that digital well-being depends on a much more basic, modest, and hitherto invisible foundation: a kind of "electrical well-being." –which is obviously just literary license, or not, if we think about how we feel on Monday.
Without electricity, our digital life melts like candle wax, and we're left with the bare essentials (which don't need to be cooked on the stovetop) that we sometimes overlook in our daily lives. But we've also discovered that we're more resilient and supportive than we thought, and that being so not only helps others, but also, and a lot, helps us. For a few hours, we understood that, yes, technology is wonderful, a miracle, and that no one would want to return to the 19th century. But we also understood that reducing screen time for a few hours not only doesn't hurt as much as we think, but it certainly gave us opportunities to do things that also allowed us to feel connected. likes, and all without electricity, battery or connection.
Surely, in a few years, we'll all remember where we were on Monday, April 28th, when everything went dark. And yes, okay, we had zero energy for a few hours, but together we earned a ten in humanity. Let's see if we can keep that grade from dropping too much, now that we have immediate connection with the whole world again.
