What if America Went Completely Dark?

More than a decade ago, a group of snipers shot up an electrical substation in Silicon Valley, striking power transformers and disabling the substation for nearly a month. The shooters were never identified; similar substation shootings, some by neo-Nazis, have taken place since. The longer Christopher Cox studies the American power grid—at aging infrastructure and ongoing transformer shortages, specialized manufacturing and rising demand, the massive energy consumption of data centers and whiplash usage of large language models—the more vulnerable it seems. “Somehow, we’ve made the industrial equivalent of a Fabergé egg the linchpin of our civilization,” Cox writes. “What would happen if someone started breaking them?” The hope of restoring the grid would fade as fossil fuel supplies were exhausted, because so many utilities rely on them to “black-start” their generating units. A 2010 report called “High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power System,” prepared by the Energy Department and NERC, condensed the entire disaster movie that would follow into a single paragraph: “The supply of food, water and fuel would degrade within days. The facile communication of information to the general population would be greatly complicated by the loss of cellphones, internet access and television. The economy would virtually shut down as electronic transactions could no longer be processed. After several days, widespread social unrest and confusion would ensue.” Thirsty, starved, dirty and surrounded by the useless machines we once depended on, we would be lucky if our misery ended at “confusion.” More complex stories about systems in crisis ‘They’re Not Breathing’: Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls “Records of hundreds of emergency calls from ICE detention centers obtained by WIRED—including audio recordings—show a system inundated by life-threatening incidents, delayed treatment, and overcrowding.” The Free-Living Bureaucrat “All over the world, tens of thousands of times a year, some doctor was trying to improve on some unsatisfying treatment for some deadly affliction. And no one was recording what had worked and what had not.” ‘We’re Living in a Nightmare:’ Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town “Ultimately, Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.”