Ralph Waldo Emerson, Considerations in Conduct of Life (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1860).
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (New York: Verso, 2021). Notably published in advance of someone actually blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, ed., An Overheated World: An Anthropological History of the Early Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2019).
Gretchen Bakke, “To Transact and Shimmer: Energy in the Expanded Field” Annual Review of Anthropology 54 (2025): 167–83.
A linchpin is a sort of sturdy metal skewer that one slips through an axel to hold the wheel of a cart in place. It’s a simple technology that allows a more complex technology (the cart) to work reliably and well.
See especially Gökçe Günel, “Energy Accumulation,” e-flux Architecture, September 2020, ➝.
Gretchen Bakke, The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future (New York, Bloomsbury 2016).
Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber, eds., The Persistence of Technology: Histories of Repair, Reuse and Disposal (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2021).
Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).
It is worth noting that in the south (global and American) the air-conditioner augments the refrigerator’s role in the production of nighttime load. There are many complications, however, to balancing a grid with the mass adoption of this device because people can (and do) turn the air-conditioner up and down as they please, usually all at the same time and in reaction to local shifts in the weather, contributing to unbalancing a grid running on baseload, which is poorly reactive. The fridge thus is a better match to a fossil-fueled grid than the air-conditioner because its electrical draw is constant.
Ellen Messer, “The Hot and Cold in Mesoamerican Indigenous and Hispanicized Thought” Social Science and Medicine 25, no. 4 (1987): 339–46.
By 1950 more than 80 percent of American farms and more than 90 percent of urban homes had a refrigerator. In England the number was 3 percent largely due to the slow development of the national grid; in Germany by 1954 about 10 percent of households had refrigerators due to prewar poverty and postwar rebuilding. For all of this and more, see Helen Peavitt, Refrigerator: The Story of Cool in the Kitchen (London: Reaktion Books, 2017).
It is undeniable that the refrigerator changes worlds, especially in places hot and humid enough that food rots quickly. However, it is the culture of a place and not its climate that determines how a fridge remakes relations of society and health. In India for example, especially among the higher castes, food must be made and served fresh. This necessitates at least a person – traditionally and today, a woman – singularly devoted to shopping and cooking. A woman cannot buy fresh food and prepare several meals across the day to be eaten in their entirety and also go to work. In this context the domestic refrigerator is an important element in the professionalization of women, a development that is also linked to a family’s movement out of poverty. To buy food and to refrigerate it; to prepare food and to refrigerate—that enables time itself to be compartmentalized. One can cook now and eat later, and while extreme freshness might be lost, it’s not so far gone. In contrast, in Jamaica, also a hot and humid place, the refrigerator and its pocket of cold is regarded with the same distrust as in Guatemala. There rather than learning to refrigerate, a set of practices and foods have been developed that bypass refrigeration. These include relying upon dried foods, like beans and rice; the cultivation of those sorts of rot that “preserve” food in edible forms (the French do this too), most especially yogurts, cheeses, fermented vegetables etc.; and the sharing of fresh food among households. If for example a family kills a pig, it is quickly distributed and eaten by the community. A gift repaid by neighbors at a later day and with another pig. Cultures of food, class, and gender thus matter as much to the purported necessity of a refrigerator as climate or the characteristics of the device itself. On India, see Harold Wilhite, “Refrigerating India,” The Material Culture of Energy, no. 09 (Spring 2018); on Jamaica, see Peter Knight et al., “Household Food Safety Awareness of Selected Urban Consumers in Jamaica,” International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition 54, no. 4 (2003): 309–20.
Ronald Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Antina von Schnitzler, Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid (Princeton University Press, 2016).
This is literally true in Iceland where grocery stores have a refrigerated section—a large room—within which all the “keep cool” goods are simply placed on shelves like in a regular grocery store. In shopping, one first makes selections from the room-temperature room (note: also climate controlled) and then walks through a hanging plastic barrier to the cold room, wholly manned by woolly-coated employees.
Dehlia Hannah once told me that throwing the breaker is precisely what she does when frustrated with her gadget-focused family. The fridge’s dependency on a constant current can stuff it. See Dehlia Hannah, “Blackout: A Manifesto,” E-flux Architecture, September 2024, ➝.
Despite being everywhere in contemporary electricity systems, including in our cars and in our pockets, the battery is a misnomer. It doesn’t have any electricity inside of it. Instead, electricity is used to move chemicals into a relationship that when reversed creates a new electric current. With pumped hydro – a common form of stockpile in places with hills – extra electricity at one moment is used to pump water up to the top of some sort of prominence. Later, when more power is needed, the water is allowed to flow back down hill (using gravity) which, as it passes through a turbine it, generates “new” electricity. Flywheels, which are literally everywhere on contemporary electricity grids, are the same—electricity is used to wind a spring that, when unwound, can be used to generate new electricity. For a gorgeous, novelistic reductio ad absurdum take on the flywheel see Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2009).
Gretchen Bakke, “Electricity Is Not a Noun” in Electrifying Anthropology: Explorations in Electric Practices and Infrastructures, eds. Simone Abram et al. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019): 25–42.
This is why electricity doesn’t drip out of an outlet to burn a little hole in your floor when nothing is plugged in. Air is a terrible conductor.
Worth noting is that it was, and remains, impossible for the electricity industry to make a profit off of rural or poor people. First because of the cost of building an expansive infrastructure for very few customers (see section VII) and the former because they don’t use enough electricity to pay for the cost of running the power plant. Electrification was, thus, in the early days – and to this day in many places in the world – a project for dense urban environments and wealthy people. Where the grid expands to something approximating universal electrification, is where the government has committed to this as a value rather than as a profit-making enterprise and heavily subsidized the expansion in various ways.
Quoted in Richard Munson, From Edison to Enron: The Business of Power and What It Means for the Future of Electricity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005).
The second lag in electricity use is actually midday. Often utilities charge heavy industry less per kilowatt-hour at midday than it cost to make because at least they are getting something rather than nothing for the electricity they would have to produce regardless. Solar only exacerbates this problem. And the wind, unfortunately, tends to blow strongest just before dawn, when nobody, but nobody, is using electricity at all.
This section is largely a recapitulation of a remarkable essay by Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum,” in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1999): 202–18.
This was before it was discovered that people tend to charge their cars when they come home from work, which is exactly the same moment that modern folk use more of everything electric: lights go on, TV goes on, the refrigerator is opened an average of twenty times in the hour before dinner, and just enough people are still at work that that load doesn’t dimmish by much. Dusk is also when winds tend to still and solar’s remarkable midday electrical output fades slowly into nothing.
Perhaps what is most amazing about this story of how we got the electric refrigerator is that the electricity/appliance companies succeeded so thoroughly that not only was their inferior product the market winner, but the very fact of its competitor’s existence has been lost to history.
If for example, we used solar to make electricity, the very first thing we would do is remove nighttime load. No fridge, indeed nothing at all. Flip that breaker off. Instead, what we are doing is not only maintaining baseload despite the addition of solar, but also attempting to design a whole generation of smart machines that can be programmed to run at night. The Internet of things (IoT) is for the most part a way to get your dishwasher/washing machine/hot water heater to act like your fridge and use electricity in the wee hours when nobody and nothing else is.
For an insightful tour of the global cold system that also ends in the domestic refrigerator and which many argue should get the boot because it is extractive, resource heavy, and very bad for local and small-scale agriculture, see Nicola Twilley, Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves (New York: Penguin Press, 2024).
