Last week's #PowerOutage in Spain was a wake-up call for many people. I personally found out at 12:35 that my printer wasn't responding, and seeing that our house was without electricity, I went out on the street, like several neighbours. Through them, I got fragments of news, some had still mobile data connection, while most had no network coverage whatsoever.
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We got some fake news as well, saying that large parts of the EU had gone blackout. We realised that a(n analogue) radio on batteries is useful to have access to news. Indeed, the (public) radio stations were the heroes of the day.
Still on the street, we speculated about possible causes, from cyberattacks to technical failures propagated as domino pieces falling on each other. And still today, the real causes are not revealed. Check the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackout
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We learnt quite some details about our dependence on electricity, about electric and electronic devices. Yes, our solar panels automatically deactivated, as is mandatory, when the electricity grid shuts down. There is some work for me to become more resilient on this one.
And we use kWh to cook on an induction plate. Immediately, our neighbours invited us for dinner.
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Friends told me that their water is pumped up to the rooftop before they can drink it. That stopped working, and it caused large queues in the supermarkets. Water is essential, of course. But how to pay for it, if you haven't got too much cash? Yet another problem. (Of course, there is also a political problem with us relying on VISA, Mastercard and AMEX, all US companies providing us with the payment backbone for basically all card payments.)
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Then there is the #Preparedness Strategy by the European Commission, urging all EU citizens to have an emergency kit at home and have stocks at home for at least 72 hours. Being prepared is not bad, I'd say, but IMHO this is far too individualist. Between the neighbours and local community we care for each other. That is lesson number one from such a crisis situation. You can never have everything you need at home, and mutual support and interdependence is vital.
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In fact, it is also much nicer to rely on each other and provide a helping hand. I feel like the individualist discourse and view of humans as "homo calculus" is such an abused, ill thought and limited view of us humans. This view has been created for political purposes, as is suggested by the 2007 BBC documentary: The Trap - What happened to Our Dream of Freedom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(British_TV_series)
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Maybe to be prepared, we don't only need to have sufficient stocks and a battery powered radio, but more local communities producing whatever are our first needs. For me it connects to the #CommunityEconomy, with local energy grids in the hands of neighbours, telecommunications infrastructure that is owned and governed by your local community, food coops and community supported agriculture.
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And local servers and communication tools that are peer2peer, distributed (local) networks and are resilient to outages, attacks and hostile governments. We need #SovereignTech
Time for the @EUCommission to move to a public values-based #eurostack
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Wouter Tebbens
Gert V 🇵🇸