CxD📚'23 #21: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The Grid

This one is about the character of the largest machine in the world, our electrical grid.

I was somewhat gobsmacked at the author’s anthropological approach and how perfectly suited it was to help me understand not only what the grid is, but how it got to be the way it is, and all the ways our lives are now —for better and for worse— intertwined with this beast.

One option we have is to live off the grid; and if that’s your path, then odds are low you’re reading this.

Option two is for us to get our shit together and fast, because pretty much everything depends on the current duct-tape approach not bursting at the seams and collapsing and exploding. The grid is no longer a luxury and many earthling’s lives depend on it. Conversely, many animals would rejoice if it were to combust and give them back their darkness and quiet, but that’s a separate gordian knot.

Perhaps most valuable was the way all the wires and poles and unnoticed-by-me elements of my daily existence emerged from the background to the foreground while I romped through this exquisite reminder of the ways everything is interconnected and often made invisible by my inattention.

A hugely unexpected and edifying pleasure.