A net serves to capture and to immobilize life, to assassinate or to enslave. The centralised electrical network is no different: the dependency that ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ imposes on us is a disguised form of slavery, the production and consumption of energy bring about disease and death.
“Necessities” of electrical energy are not, perhaps, needs induced by the system? What are these famous benefits which we enjoy thanks to the electrical energy and to its omnipresent network?
The alarm that shortens the sleep and mutilates our dreams, announcing the sentence of another day of forced work?
The radio that indoctrinates our unconscious while we have breakfast quickly, shaken by the thought to arrive behind schedule, to make rage — according to the case — to the landlord or the professor?
The metro, the trams, the “ecological” electrical buses or the trains that transport us to and drag towards the places of operation and imprisonment that to us are like rolling floors in an enormous slaughter house?
The traffic lights that regulate and limit our displacements, in cars or walking?
The video cameras that, like an army of gargoyles, watch each of our movements and try to induce the fear in us to act to maintain the status quo?
This electrical network is consecrated in the passage from the medieval Christian-centric universe, to an anthropocentric renaissance, to the now total dehumanizing and life-destroying technocentric present.
Do we simply need to put a stop to the benefits of the existence and expansion of industry?
We die working, in the same place of slavery, or die later in slow agony because of the diseases generated by work (without forgetting about the spirit squashed by submission or the neckties that, dividing the head from the body, chokes until death).
Outside the place of work: widespread poisoning, democratic, generous.
It is the electrical mains that allows the operation of the industrial estates, the production and transport of unnecessary consumer goods and commodities, raw materials often from destinations subject to predatory wars and those masked as religious/regional/ethnic conflicts.
While still alive it is the same network that maintains state and international apparatuses, the bureaucracies and their ramifications, the systems of communication, the banks, the factories, the laboratories, the schools and the other means of propaganda...
The same electrical energy that feeds the repression originating from the police stations and their computer science systems, criminal archives, databases etc.
The same that illuminates the classrooms of the courts, that powers the metal detectors and so on.
The same energy that helps to keep the undesired inmates in the jails, the detention centres for immigrants or the psychiatric hospitals...
Meanwhile, being part of the “fortunate” means you are automatically imprisoned in other knots of the electrical network: supermarkets, stores, gyms, places of “art” and “culture”, restaurants, bars, discotheques — all equal in maintaining the illusion of “life”, day and night, whilst for many there is still a uncomfortable conscious feeling deep down inside that something is not well.
The sensation of a life lived is cleaned neither with a shower one warms up nor with an immersion into the dusk of the sparkling waters of the television.
There is no Playstation (and no other drug) that will solve our malaise against the existent; As well, the invention of the ‘Holiday’ a little more of a century ago has not been, will not been able and could never be more than a simple outlet of relief (also fed by electricity) to maintain in such a way the pacifist and productive slaves.
To take apart this electrical network — comprised of slavery and death — is to attack the basis of the system.
In fact, electrical energy serves to maintain this technological society.
We have the sun, we have the fire...
Certainly, a revolution will not be devoid of pain, but, against the impossibility of an “improved” system founded on the dominion and death, does there exist a more effective alternative?
We want to watch shining stars, throughout.
And if this year really must have a Christmas tree, it will be illuminated like the one of the parliament square in Athens.
Until soon...
Some enemies of the electrical network
Iberian Peninsula
For a hot summer of 2009