See e.g. Jane Bennett, “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout,” Public Culture 17, no. 3 (September 2005): 445–466.
Tim Sablik, “Electrifying Rural America,” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (First Quarter 2020), ➝.
Gretchen Anna Bakke. The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).
On the positive side, Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (New York: Viking, 2009); on the Hobbesian side, see David E. Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010).
Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?, directed by Hy Averback (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,1968).
Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729; RS Bear, 1999).
As the natural experiment of the eruption of Mount Tambora demonstrates. See Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) and my A Year Without a Winter (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018).
Johannes Feldman et al., “Stabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet by Surface Mass Deposition,” Science Advances 5, no. 3 (July 2019).
For a discussion with the authors of the latter proposal, see “Sea level rise: West Antarctic ice collapse may be prevented by snowing ocean water onto it,” Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (blog), July 18, 2019, ➝.
As Holly Jean Buck argues in After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy Repair and Restoration (London: Verso, 2019), the apparent inevitability of this option must be avoided. Whereas many scholars and activists have argued that geoengineering must not even be countenanced because it constitutes a dangerous distraction from the more urgent goal of emissions reductions, Buck elaborates not only the dangers of the technologies but also of their political and economic administration over the long term—of starting and then stopping, or losing political control over interventions in earth systems. In view of these risks, open minded and serious considerations of geoengineering veer close to the logic of A Modest Proposal.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction novel The Ministry of the Future (2020) is set in a near future in which, after suffering a devastating heat wave that kills 20 million people, India takes unilateral action to begin a stratospheric injection program equivalent to a “double Pinatubo,” reducing global mean temperature for a few years. The plot device reads as a narrativization of a scenario exercise very like ones considered at the 2017 Climate Engineering Conference held by the Potsdam Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Berlin, in which I participated.
See e.g. Tamzy J. House, et al., “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” (Air University, Air Command and Staff College, 1996), ➝; and James Roger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
Rider W. Foley, David H. Guston, and Daniel Sarewitz. “Towards the anticipatory governance of geoengineering,” in Geoengineering Our Climate?, 223-243 (Routledge, 2018).
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “The Bestowing Virtue,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (1891; Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis. 1909), ➝.
Nietzsche, “The Bestowing Virtue.”
The masculine overcompensation thesis asserts that when men perceive threats to their masculinity, they are more likely to support war or buy an overpriced SUV. See Rob Willer, et al., “Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis,” American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 4 (2013): 980-1022.
Point 11 of F. T. Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), trans. R. W. Flint, ➝.
Timothy J. Freeman, “Nietzsche as Ecological Thinker,” n.d., ➝.
See Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2022).
The term “anthropause” is coined in Christian Rutz, et al., “COVID-19 lockdown allows researchers to quantify the effects of human activity on wildlife,” Nature Ecology & Evolution 4 (2020): 1156–1159 (2020); see also Noah S. Diffenbaugh, et al., “The COVID-19 lockdowns: A window into the Earth System,” Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 1 (2020): 470–481.
Jeff Tollefson, “COVID curbed carbon emissions in 2020 — but not by much,” Nature 589, 343 (2021).
Congressional Budget Office, Emissions of Carbon Dioxide in the Electric Power Sector (December 2022), ➝.
See e.g. Courtney Lindwal, “Decarbonization: Why We Must Electrify Everything Even Before the Grid Is Fully Green,” Natural Resources Defense Council Explainer, December 1, 2022, ➝; Saul Griffith, “From Homes to Cars, It’s Now Time to Electrify Everything,” Yale360 Opinion, October 19, 2021, ➝; Jesse D. Jenkins, “What ‘Electrify Everything’ Actually Looks Like,” Mother Jones, May–June 2023, ➝.
Roland Stulz, Stephan Tanner, René Sigg, “Swiss 2000-Watt Society: A Sustainable Energy Vision for the Future,” in Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, 477-496, ed. Fereidoon P. Sioshansi, (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2011); see also: “2000-Watt society and 2000-Watt Site,” n.d., ➝.
T.J. Demos, “Blackout: The Necropolitics of Extraction,” Dispatches Journal 000 (2017), ➝.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2009).
Demos, “Blackout”; Bakke, The Grid, 25.
Bakke, The Grid, 25.
Jillian Ambrose, “Invasion of Ukraine ‘has fuelled funding boom for clean energy’,” The Guardian, May 25, 2023, ➝.
For example, Emily Foxhall, Kai Elwood-Dieu and Zach Despart, “Texas power struggle: How the nation’s top wind power state turned against renewable energy,” Texas Tribune, May 25, 2023, ➝.
Andreas Malm and Chantal Jahchan, How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (London: Verso, 2021).
See e.g. László Erdődi, et al., “Attacking Power Grid Substations: An Experiment Demonstrating How to Attack the SCADA Protocol IEC 60870-5-104,” in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2022), Association for Computing Machinery (New York, 2022), Article 69, 1–10; Prashant Anantharaman, et al., “Going Dark: A Retrospective on the North American Blackout of 2038,” in Proceedings of the New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW 2018), Association for Computing Machinery (New York, 2018), 52–63.
Ulf Houe, “Frankenstein Without Electricity: Contextualizing Shelley’s Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 55, no. 1 (2016): 95–117.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: Annotated for Scientists Engineers and Creators of All Kinds, ed. David H. Guston (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017), 24.
Rita Wong, “Blueberry River,” The Capilano Review 3, no. 45 (Fall 2021): 98-9.
When it comes to comprehending the vast, slow, and complex abstractions of structural violence, monsters are good to think with. See for example the now classic epidemiology paper, of renewed interest during the COVID-19 pandemic, P. Munz, et al., “When zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection,”in Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, eds. J. M. Tchuenche and C. Chiyaka, Eds (Ottawa: Ottawa University Press, Ottawa, 1999), 133-150. On the violence of finance capitalism, see Leigh Claire La Berge, “‘The Men Who Make the Killings’: American Psycho and the Genre of the Financial Autobiography,” in Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
See e.g. Crystal Ponti, “‘Vampire Energy’ Is Sucking the Life out of Our Planet,” Wired Ideas, April 22, 2022, ➝.
David McDermott Hughes, “To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity,” Boston Review, October 5, 2020, ➝.
Amy Westervelt, “The ‘Electrify Everything’ Movement’s Consumption Problem,” The Intercept, May 8, 2023, ➝. The challenges and advantages of running computers, websites, home heating systems, and myriad other comforts of modern life off of renewable energy sources is explored extensively by Low-Tech Magazine, whose website states “This is a solar-powered website, which means that it sometimes goes offline.” See ➝.
T. Vettese, “To freeze the Thames: Natural geo-engineering and biodiversity,” New Left Review 111 (2018): 63-86.
Blake Alcott, “Jevons' paradox,” Ecological Economics 54, no. 1 (2005): 9-21.
Henry Shue, “Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions,” Law & Policy 15 (January 1993): 39-60.
Daniel A. Barber, “After Comfort,” Log 45-51 (2019), 40-50, 49.
These arguments date back to the beginning of electrification, see, for example Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s provocative 1933 treatise on Japanese aesthetics In Praise of Shadows (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1977). Contemporary calls to action include Paul Bogard, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light (New York: Back Bay Books, 2013); Johan Eklöf, The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms That Sustain Life, trans. Elizabeth DeNoma (New York, NY: Scribner, 2022).
D. Isitani, “Number of Ions in the Free Atmosphere near Hot Springs,” J-Stage 4, no. 19 (July 1908): 370-377; A. Hartl, et al. ,“Health effects of alpine waterfalls,” Hohe Tauern National Park 5th Symposium, Conference Volume for Research in Protected Areas (June 2013), 265-268.; A. Wiszniewski, “Environment of Air-Ions in Healing Chambers in the Wieliczka Salt Mine,” Acta Physica Polonica 127, no. 6 (2015):1661-1665. For an overview, see Fred Soyka and Alan Edmonds, The Ion Effect: How Air Electricity Rules Your Life and Health (New York: Bantam Books, 1977).
See, e.g., P. Jordan: “Über die Ursache der Föhnkrankheit,” Naturwissenschaften 39 (September 1940): 630–631.
For a current assessment and recommendations see IEA, “Ukraine's Energy Security and the Coming Winter,” Paris, 2024, ➝.
Tetiana Maloholovchuk-Skrypchenko, “How Ukraine is adapting to frequent blackouts,” Emerging Europe, December 27, 2022, ➝.
Markus Krajewski. “The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy,” IEEE Spectrum, September 24, 2014, ➝.
The current essay began with a course that I taught with curator Nadim Samman at the University of Toronto’s Daniels School of Architecture, Design, and Planning in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. From the beginning of the winter 2020 semester until the shutdown in early March, students from the Critical Curatorial Lab were engaged in developing an exhibition format to be deployed in an emergency scenario. Conceived as pre-mediation for a moment when patterns of life are radically disrupted, their aim was to examine the affordance of art during a power blackout. Addressing social relations, spectacle, and consumption, the project outcome was conceived as an emergency kit (or an exhibition in a box) and instruction manual (qua exhibition catalogue) to be activated in the event of a future power outage. In light of the very different emergency situation that ensued, only the second part of the project was realized: To mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we released a digital Blackout Manual featuring instructional artworks, student essays, and archival material. While ultimately consuming energy via university servers, the document was offered as a polemic for a speculative method of curatorial pre-mediation. Such a strategy might act as a bulwark against intercession by panic or shock doctrines, when everyday society and culture are up for grabs. Thanks to our students Lilian Ho, Kaixin Li, Leona Liu, Jiaxin Mai, Olivia Musselwhite, Simon Fuh, Talia Goland, Eli Kerr, Seo Eun Kim, and Matthew Nish-Lapidus, and to Charles Stankievech for hosting Nadim Samman and myself as Visual Studies Researchers in Residence during these challenging and thought-provoking months.