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The Coming Divide
Mar. 15th, 2021 11:17 amSomething that's taken me by surprise, but in hindsight shouldn't have, was the aftermath of the winter storm in the American South. I don't mean that the fact there was a winter storm in Texas, nor the fact it knocked out power and water, but rather the length of time it took for people to get it back took me by surprise. I figured we still had a few years before the rural electric grid would be allowed to decay, and power would start getting intermittent like this. I had assumed that there was a major piece of infrastructure which would be allowed to collapse first, but I'm realizing I had that backwards.
The internet will survive the rural electric grid. We could support the rural electric grid for another decade or two past its impending collapse if we were to allow the internet to degrade, but this is not what will happen. Instead, keeping the internet running appears to be a top priority of our governments, at least here in North America.
The main consequence of this is very simple: over the next twenty years or so, daily life in urban and rural areas will diverge. As rural areas lose electricity, they will undergo a radical transformation, as people adapt to the realities of de-electrified life, with its harsh limits: strictly limited artificial lighting, far more manual labour, and a great deal of work merely to survive.
Urbanites, meanwhile, will remain living a semblance of modern life, with electricity, and everything that goes with it: easy refrigeration, TV, electric lighting, the internet, vacuums, and a great many other perks. I expect this world to be fully established by the 2050s, and the divide here is going to be immense, and probably be one of the major issues in societies of that era.
It will not appear all at once, however. For a while, the rural grid will be intermittent and unreliable, but still there much of the time; for a longer while, everyone but the poorest will find ways to generate some electricity for personal use, and even in the 2050s I expect plenty of businesses will exist reliant on some amount of electricity in rural areas; they'll merely need to generate it themselves.
The divide will still be immense, however. A society where internet access involves going to a cafe, where there's a reading room with a light in the library but most homes use lamps, and where cinemas dominate because no one has a TV will look very different from one where most people have internet access, there is copious amounts of artificial light, and most people have TV at home. These two cultures will exist next to each other, and very likely a lot of conflict will exist between them, but I freely confess I don't know for sure how that will play out.
The internet will survive the rural electric grid. We could support the rural electric grid for another decade or two past its impending collapse if we were to allow the internet to degrade, but this is not what will happen. Instead, keeping the internet running appears to be a top priority of our governments, at least here in North America.
The main consequence of this is very simple: over the next twenty years or so, daily life in urban and rural areas will diverge. As rural areas lose electricity, they will undergo a radical transformation, as people adapt to the realities of de-electrified life, with its harsh limits: strictly limited artificial lighting, far more manual labour, and a great deal of work merely to survive.
Urbanites, meanwhile, will remain living a semblance of modern life, with electricity, and everything that goes with it: easy refrigeration, TV, electric lighting, the internet, vacuums, and a great many other perks. I expect this world to be fully established by the 2050s, and the divide here is going to be immense, and probably be one of the major issues in societies of that era.
It will not appear all at once, however. For a while, the rural grid will be intermittent and unreliable, but still there much of the time; for a longer while, everyone but the poorest will find ways to generate some electricity for personal use, and even in the 2050s I expect plenty of businesses will exist reliant on some amount of electricity in rural areas; they'll merely need to generate it themselves.
The divide will still be immense, however. A society where internet access involves going to a cafe, where there's a reading room with a light in the library but most homes use lamps, and where cinemas dominate because no one has a TV will look very different from one where most people have internet access, there is copious amounts of artificial light, and most people have TV at home. These two cultures will exist next to each other, and very likely a lot of conflict will exist between them, but I freely confess I don't know for sure how that will play out.
