Electricity to Wales and Scotland

I saw this headline in the Washington Post this morning: "Remote Welsh families get electricity." I thought, "Must be an awfully slow news day," but I checked it out anyway.

It's a nice story. Remote parts of Wales and Scotland still don't have electricity, but the writer wasn't decrying poverty or anything like that. Rather, the writer points out that the people who are now getting electricity are excited, but they were able to live good lives without it.

So is it just a piece of Luddite propaganda? No, not at all, but it's worth keeping in mind the salient point: What will the electricity take away from these communities? I'm not saying they shouldn't have power grid electricity (I'd die without it, as would this blog, because I couldn't peddle the Gilligan bike for more than twenty minutes), and I defer to the people in these remote areas that wanted it. It is a good thing. But that doesn't mean it doesn't come without societal and existential costs. If we can understand those costs, we can better shield ourselves from the societal and existential costs of modern technology in general.

The effects of electric lights on society are breathtaking, incidentally, when you sit back and think about it. I won't explore the effects here, but five minutes of thinking with a beer in your hand will show you a dozen ways life is different now, and not all of them are good.