So I did mention that attention will shift to the electrical grid as both a crucial social good and a serious vulnerability that needs protecting. But the socio-political forms of preservation and protection are not always the most effective ones.
This is sort of a constant. One of the better examples of this was the U.S. security priorities during the 911 era. Countless observers pointed to the paranoid surveillance and security theater and noted that deaths from so-called "terrorist" attacks were a fraction of the daily deaths from domestic firearms, car accidents, heart diseases and cancers, and the like, and that much of what we could be doing to reduce those deaths - far more serious to vaster majorities of the population - was not being done. The security priorities were clearly political and remain largely as political levers to this day.
We've known about the problems posed by the electrical grid for a long time. It was almost a decade ago that I remember seeing the protective walls going up around certain power stations after a couple of isolated and mysterious firearm attacks on the grid began to crop up. Every once in a while there is a story in the news about someone attacking a cluster of transformers or some such. I you think about it, attacks like this could be pretty destructive, considering the difficulties of replacing transformers now.
But a few protective walls is pretty freakin' small potatoes compared to restructuring the supply chain for transformers and reshoring critical manufacturing, or revolutionizing the existing power grids for that matter, or even merely passing slightly more restrictive laws on critical utilities and rolling back some of the monopolization and consolidation that has been occurring across every industry, including critical industry.
Every year we field a flurry of articles worrying about the dire state of the electrical grid - we got a particularly intense crop of them after the PG&E fiasco and the Texas power outages - and yet nothing substantial is ever done, even as we move to further electrify transportation and various energy networks. We are seeing anti-trust emerging very gingerly in the political sphere, as well as more nationalist strains interested in reviving industrial policy, but it is happening pretty slowly and mildly.
It turns out that imperial decline is a little bit of a bigger problem, and simply putting a few more walls up and welding on some armor plates or whatever isn't going to cut it. A given body requires a coherent set of protocols for maintaining and reproducing itself, but its internal government is not always coherent.
I remember when I first had Covid, and barely having the strength to get up and go to the bathroom. When you gotta go you gotta go, but apparently even that clear directive comes into conflict with a body riddled with virus. You can't always choose your afflictions and the course they will take.
