Disruption is Normal Blackouts, Breakdowns and the Elasticity of Everyday Life Frank Trentmann
And there are blackouts in LA tonight An evident lack of light tonight
An increase in desire, you’ll catch me Hanging out on a wire
Cutting the voltage to your power line And the lights, go, out.
Now you cannot affect me I feel no electricity Now you cannot control me I feel no electricity
And the lights, go, out
Hybrid, ‘Blackout’, from the album Morning Sci-Fi (2003)
It was a stinking mess. In John Kyffin’s draper’s shop in London’s East End the toilets were blocked and overflowing. Since the water company had cut back supply in July 1895, water had slowed to a trickle, leaving his toilets with ‘no flushing remedy’. He and his shop assistants had nowhere to go; some were even taken ill. For Kyffin and other East Enders it was a return to ordinary life under drought (‘Court Report’, Daily Chronicle, 22 July 1895; Trentmann and Taylor 2006).
Breakdowns and shortages are a regular feature of everyday life. Indeed, some disruptions, like traffic jams and blackouts, have evolved into routines themselves. Others have had devastating consequences, bringing in their train mass migrations, disease and death, like the drought that ravaged the northern hemisphere in 1921, killing several million people in northern China and southern Russia. Disruptions, however, are not limited to developing societies, or to natural causes. John Kyffin lived in one of the most developed pockets of the world, the ‘heart of empire’, in a metropole that was amongst the first to have a network delivering a constant supply of water – except when it broke down, as it repeatedly did. In the last decade, water shortages have once again become a prominent feature of life in many affluent societies, disrupting the quotidian rhythms of bathing, gardening and other waterintensive practices. They are part of a broad range of interferences, ranging from serious natural disasters, like the Canadian icestorm of 1998, and technological accidents, such as at the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979, to quotidian disruptions like congestion, electronic spam and power cuts. In Barcelona in the summer of 2007, for example, 350,000 inhabitants had no power for two days. Commuter trains stopped running. There were no traffic lights. In hospitals, the elevators were stuck. Shopkeepers had to sell by candlelight (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 18/19 August 2007: 7). The blackout that swept across Ontario and the American East and Mid-West on 14 August 2003 affected 50 million people. Not all disruptions are this large and dramatic, however. In the United States, the average customer loses power every nine months for a total of 214 minutes, not counting the additional effects of storms or hurricanes (Apt et al. 2006: 51). Even more quotidian, in Italy the flickering of lights or a blown fuse are normal, as many homes are on lower tariff, low-wattage electric circuits that trip under the pressure of washing machines and other appliances.
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