The fact that you’re reading this means that you have survived! With heartfelt appreciation, we congratulate your existence, despite all the odds. Hopefully, you are thriving in a much, much later time period than ours, just a quarter of the way through the 21st century at this point. Though we never meant to directly cause you harm, our naïveté and willful ignorance conspired in their own way to cause incredible damage to our host planet, as I’m sure you recognize in your future time. We did it in the name of progress, though!… if that’s any consolation to you, we can only hope.
It was actually in that very drive of progress, the drive to optimize and improve, that you no doubt surely maintain in your future time, that we first tapped into something unexpected… something electric… and in our unraveling of this new electron-phenomenon we saw power, and freedom, and wonder, and we set about putting it everywhere so that we might never be without it. It became the support structure for our entire society, as you know, and it soon came to be that the vast majority of us would do whatever we needed to have permanent access to electricity without ever understanding what it was, nor were we honest with ourselves about the costs of using it…
We have composed this account of our electron-based society, for you, our distant descendants, so that you might fully appreciate how painfully naïve we actually were about the flow of our most abundantly-used resource.
We would like to begin by calling attention to a particularly instructive moment as it was illustrated in the 2012 Disney’s Marvel’s The Avengers movie, specifically at timeline marker 01:16:20, when Captain America (eponymously named for a powerful nation-state in the 20th and 21st centuries) pulls open a control panel to try and assist Tony Stark/Iron Man (a man in a high-tech prosthetic suit) in making mid-flight repairs to a flying craft. Stark, referring to an electronic control panel, asks Captain America, “What’s it look like in there?” To which Captain America, the gleaming beacon of American right-ness, replies,
“It seems to run on some form of electricity.”
And the audience gets a good laugh at how unfamiliar this man-out-of-time is with the structural basics of electrical engineering. Herein, though, we find much more than a punchline at a character’s expense: we find a kernel of truth that applies to nearly all people in our time, and we find that the audience was really laughing at itself.
In our time, people displayed their base level of electrical naïveté by pondered such absurd queries as how one “form” of electricity might differ from another. Only our specialist-class electrical technicians purported to understand the field (how were we to verify their level of competency, anyhow?); though the rapidly spreading horizon of electricity-powered applications quickly complicated the precise understanding of interdisciplinary domains. (To be fair, the vast majority of people in our time didn’t know that much about anything2.)
Could you, dear future reader, explain how electricity is “generated” in a utility-scale generator, the kind most humans had powering their homes? It may be simple for you. People in our time could complete no such mental task.
The list of things we didn’t know about electricity is long, far too long to reproduce here in full. The average human in our day couldn’t explain:
what a diode is;
what semiconductors do;
anything about impedance, resistance or gain;
what actually happens to electricity once it enters into a computer;
how the chemical composition of a battery matters;
or even “what” electricity is, or “where” it comes from. And these questions primarily pertain to electrical machinery, not even delving into the quantum nature of the electrons themselves, nor the fields which are actually responsible for propagating energy across the aggregate of electrons populating a conductor.
For what it’s worth, self-entitlement was a big struggle in powerful societies in our day; the “right” to be able to not have to understand any given thing while using it was frequently raised in official proceedings, much to the chagrin of the most sensible among us, and surely also of you, as more-advanced future beings.
People in our day might’ve known two or three others who knew anything about electricity beyond anecdotes of static cling and nasty wall shocks—our electricity was conducted into our individual homes and accessed through little panels in the dividers of our buildings. Knowing little-to-nothing, we were nonetheless permitted to “plug” things into this sprawling electrical grid at our discretion, and use as much electron flow as we were willing/able to pay for, with several exceptions. There was no real pre-requisite level of comprehension required in order for one to be allowed to use electricity.
Electricity, or more precisely, the energy that flows on electrified electrons to produce the phenomenon of electricity, we knew was not scarce; our physicists3 and electricians were keen on this fact, but the absence of conversation on the topic almost suggests it was a sort of secret that they were intentionally keeping from the rest of us. The reality, though, was that our general population was not intellectually equipped to navigate the complexities describing electricity at the quantum level. In our day, many of the notions concerning electrical field dynamics had no daily-life-equivalent that could be easily used as a similar model of comprehension.
Certain stubborn ideas, such as causality, held up barriers to understanding. For example, most people in our day believed electricity had something to do with “charged” electrons bouncing around, colliding into each, emitting photons and such which then collide into other electrons and photons, and somehow that dynamic of physical particle interaction was what underlay electricity. This model, as you know, is irrelevant to understanding energy flows through an electric conductor; electrons emit photons in all directions, including backwards through time, but non-linear temporality was a real difficult concept for people in our time. It was also quite difficult for us to envision and mentally manipulate non-physical “things”, such as the Fermi surface, a non-physical surface in momentum space, from which, delineated by Pauli exclusion, electrons already moving with a high enough momentum velocity are coerced into participating in the directed energy conduction, standing out from more-stable-state lower electrons in a given medium. The preceding sentence, though helpfully explanatory, was gibberish to most early-21st-century people; they tended to stick with the conventional, and deeply flawed, hydraulic analogy, which was usually the tendency whenever the word “flow” came up4.
In our time, we (or rather, the smartest among us) “knew” that electrons were a fundamental material component of reality, found within every single atom in the cosmos, but surely your understanding of subatomic particles has rendered much of what we “knew” obsolete. Regardless, once we started to figure out that we could tap into electrical power to perform work for us, we began putting infrastructure everywhere to capitalize on this access to power.
Our contemporary life was powered by electricity—everywhere; always; irreplaceably. Utilizing the flow of electrons to accomplish more “work” became one of the hallmarks of our species’ accomplishments, without question. Still, our entire history of utilizing electron flows to accomplish work and “advance” our species’ industries felt as if it amounted to a single fiber of a single strand of a single threads-worth of significance in the endless tapestry of what seemed possible with electricity; viewing us from the future, you must be able to clearly see how elementary our understanding actually was. It would be boastful to imply that we had even scratched the surface of how broadly and deeply a full appreciation of electrical power might go in our future—we’d only just begun the journey—but we boasted quite a bit in our day.
Electricity was nonetheless the non-negotiable foundation of life in the 21st century, even though we never really talked about it that way. Variously vested interests never ceased trying to seize the crown of “most-important problem”. Usually, one such demander-of-attentions won the day, relegating a more-thorough discussion of electricity, yet again, to some unscheduled time in the future. Everything we did, we did with the implicit understanding that electricity would be available to, quite literally, em-“power” our actions and keep us safe. It became so omnipresent that we were virtually blind to its level of ubiquity; instead, we, as a society, frequently focused on new ways in which some particular “innovation” proposed to integrate human life technologically at some point in the future, as if electro-technological integration weren’t already the case.
In past generations, electricity wasn’t fundamental to society, but we (already, in our time) viewed times as having changed things, as they always do. We needed electricity to survive, and more of it every day.
No longer a novelty like at the dawn of the 20th century, we had successfully, infrastructurally incorporated electricity into all new societal developments: all new cities were electrified; all new manufacturing was electrified; globe-spanning, electric-empowered supply chains touched every economy. This process, in our day, was not singular, as the electrification of society went through successive phases of implementation, with constant iteration and the upgrading/evolution of systems being essentially on-going at all times, via billions of independently acting agents with little or no coordination, and with no clear boundaries delineating shared abandonment of one technology for another. It was a smear of progress through time, not a clean stroke; and it was all, ALL, enabled by electricity, even though the vast majority of us couldn’t explain why, nor anything particular about electricity at all.
Having some perspective here is important. In our day, we used electric power for far more than lights, batteries and digital screens, even though those would probably be the answers you’d get if you were to poll someone randomly in the year 2024.
Once we built electric elevators, we started erecting tall buildings for our people and deep basements for our stuff (most of which must seem to be useless trash to you in the future, surely.) We didn’t spend much time thinking about how electric elevators enabled our big cities with their overstuffed (according to standards in our day) population densities. To us, the electricity seemed almost “hidden” inside the buildings; it was so out of sight in so many applications that we were quick to gloss over it even being there at all.
For the same reason, we never thought much about how our safety systems were fully electrified. We even had running jokes about how much we hated needing to change the batteries in our smoke detectors, as if requiring electrical power was almost a nuisance in and of itself. Around the turn of the 20th century, electric smoke detectors were invented, cutting the human casualty rate from fires by half. Since then, all of our conventional safety and fire alarms were dependent on electricity, as were the firefighters and firetrucks, as was our municipal water service—pumped, piped and monitored by increasingly sophisticated electrically-powered systems all around the world. All of our large areas were more-monitored and more-electrically-interconnected on an ongoing basis. Communication and emergency systems, including all large-scale relief efforts, were entirely electrically-dependent…but we never considered that very much; we behaved as if, at the very least, we’d be able to scrounge up some batteries in an emergency.
In our time, when we saw the cars, planes, motorboats and large container ships connecting the global economy, we thought about their fossil fuel emissions, and maintaining the amount of jobs and labor-hours committed to the industry against the onslaught of robotic advancement; we didn’t much debate the relevance or use of electricity in producing, operating or loading and unloading the vehicles. The electricity-provision was such a ubiquitous “given” in our “developed” world that it sometimes never even came up for discussion, depending on the parties involved in any situation.
We also fully depended on batteries of all sizes: our watches and time-telling devices; our sensory aids, pacemakers and industrially-manufactured implants of all kinds; our satellites, weather systems, and environmental sensors. We rarely ever invented anything in our time without the input and/or required flow of electricity, via battery or connected current, taken as necessary for manufacture and/or use.
Our pharmaceutical industry was globalized in our time, and (electrically-powered) factories around the world produced drugs and shipped them around the planet at (mostly) very competitive prices. Without them, anyone who required life-sustaining medication would’ve been out of luck, as would’ve anyone who came down with a serious illness, disease, virus or injury. Let’s just say, our “Big Pharma” didn’t manufacture medicine by hand; though, in relishing our littles packets of pills, we never considered the electron input factor.
Global and local agricultural systems were even dependent on our electrically-supported industry. Crops across much of the world utilized synthetic fertilizers (electrically-empowered; industrially manufactured), feeding about half of the global population every year. Without the increased yields made possible by synthetic fertilizers, our food distribution systems would have withered and collapsed, further over-stressing the cropland that remained and likely resulting in massive population collapses on the order of billions of people dead from starvation. We never clearly tracked how electricity produced our food and enabled its distribution, but it most certainly did so.
We also never considered what would’ve happened to our toilets without electrically-managed municipal water services. In our day, people living in wealthier areas had a long history of using methods (all electrically-influenced) to ship their poop out and away from themselves. Resemblances surely existed between our contemporary hydro systems/piping, and the non-electric aqueducts of, say, the storied pre-electric Roman days of (our) yore, but rest assured that our pipes were fully dependent on electrical provision. We could only manufacture our pipes and controls with heavy, electrically-powered machinery; we had no substantial manual industry for the manufacture of plumbing parts, tools or infrastructure.
In fact, all of our industrial scale manufacturing utilized electricity, as did virtually all of our small- and cottage-scale goods production. More than 90% of the world in our day had some sort of access to an electrical grid, and more than half of those who didn’t were trapped in fragile or conflict-torn areas, so it’s tough to recognize them as relative hotbeds of manufacturing output or progressive innovation. It was virtually impossible for someone in an “advanced economy” in our time to find a single good in their home that wasn’t influenced by electric power. Books, clothes, furniture, toiletries; even in the case of a handmade item, the maker of any given item was more-than-likely to have been electrically-privileged enough to live with a lightbulb, eat from a refrigerator, take the bus to school or wear clothes or use tools that were made from electrically-powered equipment.
We would be remiss at this point not to mention our infatuation with plastic. For about a century and a half, up until this point, our society has been exploiting manufacturing processes to convert polymers into plastics of all shapes and sizes, and for basically any use we could’ve imagined. So versatile it was for us, and so blind were we to its costs, that we literally made at least one version of everything out of plastic, and it was usually the cheapest option for producers and consumers (we didn’t factor in environmental costs, remember). It became common knowledge that after it was discarded, it didn’t break down in an environmentally-friendly way, but the common knowledge discussion never much incorporated the fundamental electrical provision required to power the many processes along the plastic production pipeline. (For example: it was common to use a 750-ton injection machine to press our plastics into our desired shapes; how did we suppose it was powered? Well, we didn’t. Most of us never even bothered to ask the question in the first place.) We were more-or-less voluntarily ignorant of the electrical costs of most things. To put it like the nerds in the International Journal of Energy and Environmental Engineering put it:
Polymer processing is an energy-intensive industry.
IJEEE: Energy demand and efficiency measures in polymer processing: comparison between temperate and Mediterranean operating plant – 2016
Also remember to consider that this is an example of how the utilization of electricity frequently produced, at least with the predominantly fossil-fuel-powered generation methods used in our day, additional orders of impact; it “costs” a certain environmental impact to generate the electricity to begin with, then—”down the line”—electricity is again used to power machines, which each have their own version of environmental impact. The train of eco-devastation logic is simple, and we debated it in our governments for decades, but we routinely failed to follow-up on it in a way that was helpful preventatively. In all cases, the essential provision of electricity trumped any eco-ramifications stemming from that provision.
As it modernized, the interconnected global military apparatus, the “war machine” of humankind, came to be thusly manufactured in the electric age. Though the war machines themselves still largely ran on fossil fuels, they were built by high-precision engineering in advanced manufacturing facilities heavily dependent on electricity, along with arms, munitions, surveillance equipment and virtually everything else militaries used, from the formal uniforms to the lunch trays. It was generally agreed, in our time, that a functioning national war machine was how a country protected its territory, borders and way of life. Electricity was non-negotiable for our armed forces, so also for our central governments’ considerations.
Undergirding all of it, our whole capitalist-constructed world, which cost everyone living in it money in order to participate, was financially balanced and regulated electronically. The value of money itself was not constant, and if communication systems were to break down, so would agreement about the value of money, collapsing the economic system entirely and rendering paper cash just as useless as now-inaccessible digital financial accounts. Extrapolating beyond that, if there were no more electro-mechanical calculators, we would not have been able to produce or maintain the engineering that designed our modern civilization. The flows of energy via Electron Flow thus came to be embedded in the mechanics of our Capital Flow, our capitalism-as-usual. We had become an electro-capitalist society, but we never put it to ourselves that way.
As you can see, there were many fundamental pillars of our society embedded in the electric arts, as it were. No single fix could’ve cured us of our addiction as it spread into every “organ” of our society. By no small measure, the very essence of our time’s nation-state civilization was completely dependent on continuing access to electric power, with no alternative options. No, a single overly-zealous squirrel could not have crippled a national grid, but it could, and frequently did, certainly do a serious amount of damage.
Doing our best to speak for the people of this time, we are ashamed of the broadly-held level of ignorance about electricity, even as virtually all of our contemporary indoor environments have become electrically-mediated.
What Was It All For?
In our own way, you might say that we worshipped what we gained from “electron flow” in our day, without understanding the flow itself. What we gained was access to other flows, so it became our unspoken primary directive to make electric circuits everywhere, in order to provide the “flow”, for any possible reason, even the yet-unknown ones. The ubiquity of the impulse also had the general effect of hiding “the forest” among “the trees”—we came to form conceptual relationships only with the electric and electronic devices themselves, and the information they transmitted, not the (invisible) electricity they relied on. So ignorant were we of electro-dynamics that it could even be said that all we early-21st-century humans (mistakenly) perceived electrons to be actually flowing, in a controlled, liquid-like manner, through electrical conductors. Nonetheless, or perhaps exactly upon this ignorance, we insisted on electricity—on the electrical flow of energy provided by electrons— on electron flow—our very own, semi-workable misconception. So, again, why?
The answer: Flows beget flows5. The creation of a conducting circuit begets the occurrence of an electric field, which begets the propagation of electric current, which begets the flow of matter/information along a conductor through space, which begets the dissemination of (among other things) human culture and influence to further-flung places—an expansion—facilitating and augmenting the spread of Earthly life through new environs, begetting the emergence of novel adaptations to new and changing local conditions—evolution. All flows are connected, so for interrelated reasons, we couldn’t do without them: our societal survival grew to require electron flows to facilitate access to other flows. The energy we transferred and transformed through our electron flow infrastructure, the energy flows that we utilized to “do” as much of our “work” as we could (then, to do as much more advanced work, that we, ourselves, couldn’t even perform, as possible), did not exist in a vacuum. Through electron flow we incorporated our other important flows, particularly capital flows, which underlay virtually all our productive activity. Our electron flows more-than-enabled and augmented the flows of our money, people, resources, and ideas; it enslaved them.
And here it was that we, talking to you now from our time, at the dawn of the last year of the first quarter of the 21st century, had come to find ourselves. We humans had enslaved our society to Electron Flow just as much as to Capital Flow. We hope that you, in the future, have transcended above such a situation, which struggled to alleviate the societal ills in our time, and devastated the ecology of our only host planet. We never meant to make things more difficult for you, but we were an agglomeration of peoples who were divided as nation-states, could never easily agree (not even on fundamental necessities for ourselves, let alone our distant descendants), struggled with our addictions, and engaged in limitless self-centered opportunism—we never stopped consuming what our flows provided. Along electron flow, we trafficked in energy flows of all manner. It was our modus operandi.
Now, as time will one day tell, it is again (with unbridled optimism) to Electron Flow that we turn for our salvation…
Bill Vollmann ought to receive the credit for motivating this literary approach. His tome-like writings in Carbon Ideologies were an all-too-overlooked account of our contemporary time’s position towards our energy pursuits; surely they’d make for some interesting reading for you…from an historical perspective, of course. ↩︎
Due to competition pressures emerging from massive population growth, the specialization of knowledge began to proliferate advancing societies, followed with the subsequent networked distribution of know-how, enabling access for many to the fruits of said knowledge in wide-spreading ways. Because the survival of any one person residing in a developing society, receiving, as such, safety and resource-access benefits from said society, didn’t depend on such a person possessing any particular skills or know-how, people, as a whole, were significantly less inclined to acquire what was once considered to be a sufficient skillset for life on Earth. Ensuring survival became a societal matter, rather than a natural one. ↩︎
Physics was not required education in our mandatory public school curricula. ↩︎
Hopefully, the tongue-in-cheek nature of the title Electron Flow alludes to the rampant misunderstandings of our time. ↩︎
In our time, we understood all “flowing” in the material world, to be movement of matter, which we physically resolved to actually be energy-matter, which can never be created or destroyed, only transformed—at least that’s how we understood the cosmos in our time. ↩︎
LOPSIII 