IThe aura of an air blinking, or rather of a large energy plouf so that Spain and Portugal find themselves, the space of a day, powered by the Stone Age. Or almost. Monday, April 28, 2025, at 12:30 pm, lady electricity decided to go out a general strike.
Result: more light, more internet, mess at airports, blocked metros, stop trains, endless queues at bus stops, monster traffic jams and, above all, a large moment of collective idleness under the pale light of pocket lamps.
The Iberian Peninsula has suddenly once again become what it had not been for a long time: a vast territory deprived of its electronic toys and traveled by men and women walking, lost and disconnected from everything. So, the space of about twenty hours, they had to relearn how to live like their ancestors: lighting up with a candle (when you found them), talking to your neighbors (when you remembered their first name), do without Tiktok, Facebook, Instragram …
A real existential vertigo, especially when you know that the only idea of a wifi failure is usually sufficient to dive a whole country into collective anxiety. In Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon and elsewhere, the breakdown will have offered scenes of rare dramatic intensity. Because the most impressive is not so much this blackout as what it revealed: a terrifying inability of the contemporary world to consider the existence without direct current of 220 volts.
Without electricity, the modern individual, so proud of his artificial intelligence and his electric cars, becomes a haggard two -way, completely confused. For those who had the courage to observe the scene from an unlit public bench, the spectacle was almost touching: an entire people rediscovering that the human is completely helpless.
Empty. Especially when he has no battery. However, from Madrid to Lisbon, we relearn, for one night, which was a real conversation around a candle. What was a city without the permanent buzzing of engines and notifications. What was a life without Google Maps or Waze to tell us where to go.
What was just having a social life. As we wrote these lines, the origin of this giant breakdown remained a mystery. Pedro Sánchez, Spanish Prime Minister in Olympian calm (or almost), however, had not removed any hypothesis. Accidental overvoltage, sabotage, cybernetic attack, or even divine revenge against turtelectric (sic!), Everything is on the table. Morality of this mishap and/or experience, is it?
We have built technological empires on foundations as solid as a card of cards supplied by 220 volts. It only takes a jolt for everything to collapse and that Homo Connectus becomes a prehistoric curiosity. But in this great blackout, sparkled a moment of Ibero-Moroccan fraternity: Rabat, in a beautiful momentum of solidarity, sent juice to its Spanish neighbor. Like what, even without electricity, there are connections that hold good.
By D. William
