IRONBOUND ELECTRONS
Excerpted from The Geoffrey Letter: Jan 13, 2025
The grid must evolve to a state of fairness and cooperation, or it will fail us. Grids can become gridlocked or transformational. It's up to us.
hoping for fair & free electrons (sic)
In the follow-up to my middle grade thriller Never Less, Pablo, now twenty-two, has never forgotten about his mother’s way of seeing hope. Her name is Sanchia Esperanza. Sanchia, to her, means sacred and her last name, Esperanza means hope. Though she has lived a secular life, it’s her sacred hope that guides her. “It’s a reminder to me,” she told Pablo. “When hope is sacred, it’s not just a dream.”
This sacrosanct compulsion to do what he wants has stayed with Pablo, though now he has replaced hope with ambition. In his job he has been rewarded for taking responsibility. Trustworthiness charges out of him, and he begins to believe in himself and what he can achieve.
The puzzle in the grid.
But then he oversteps the trust he’s built and turns it into a defiant flood of innovative logic, and reason. It’s pure self-assured hubris. He runs into his own boundaries and longer feels unfettered. So he breaks through the grid of his own making; it’s an act of apparent irresponsibility. Those who trusted him now find their relationships infected, his betrayals are the discharge.
However, Pablo’s sincere belief is that if he lays waste to an elemental puzzle, he will transform his tomorrows. His puzzle is molecular in nature: how does he manufacture a material for the bikes he designs that is light and strong without using elements from the periodic table, which can’t degrade, namely the carbon in carbon fiber. The clues he follows lie in the wind, or rather the harnessed wind, which feeds energy to a hungry economy.
Grid locked:
iron to information
The media refers to our electrical distribution simply as “The Grid”. Public consciousness now accepts the grid, but increasingly at high cost and low reliability, not due to the grid itself, but the gridlock that burdens and shackles it.
Pablo’s compulsion to break out is not new. Breaking out is how we have made progress through industrial revolutions. First people broke out of their thinking and then by surrounding themselves with new, innovative ideas. (Read my essay on The Paradox of Revolution, in which I make the point that fairness is the revolutionary’s greatest challenge)
Over the decades we have bound ourselves to the mindset that defines the industrial age we live in. It took an “industrial revolution” to disrupt the ways of steam and iron to merge into electricity, the telegraph and railroads. Information technology followed by breaking the ways of business management and replacing it with an age of democratized information. The computer age migrated from the mainframe to the cloud because of networking—a communications grid. The age of interconnected information that aspires to embrace all knowledge is however, already mired in gridlock: AI engines compete, harkening back to the locomotive engines of the past. Corporate interests jealously protect their networks, even when they control the grid from space.
The lack of cooperation between the (ununited) states to facilitate the delivery of energy is no different than the lack of cooperation between railroad companies of the past. Both victims of bureaucracy, they were and are bound to restrictive traditions that defy change.
IRON BOUND
A case in point: “The Ironbound” neighborhood in Newark, NJ, east of Penn Station and downtown Newark, is the name of a metalworking industrial area surrounded by railroad tracks. Today, The Ironbound is known for being a Portuguese neighborhood. Portugal itself was bound by its agonizing colonial ways. Read A Fado for the River (on Amazon) to see how that worked out!
Whereas historically neighborhoods could become bound by railway lines and heavy manufacturing, today the equivalent is neighborhoods, cities, and farmland bound by electrical transmission lines, wind turbine towers and square miles of solar panels.
If we allow ourselves to be bound to only certain molecules (like carbon fiber), and certain ways to distribute electrons (like transmission lines), and political uncertainty, we will never break out to disrupt our march to destruction.
However, if you’ve started on a path to question the collective wisdom, and the way you push and pull molecules in the physical world, and how you use all energy sparingly, then you’re on a path to disrupt a dystopian future—for the better.
The Grid is the COMMUNITY neural network
The grid is the subject of my new work in progress, Never Ending Earth. My story revolves around our fragile energy supply. This is not a story about getting off the grid, it’s about making the grid work for us, serving us the consumer of electrical energy. Grids are necessary. They are the neural networks of society, but when the synapses misfire the collective mind fails.
By writing this novel I hope I’ll be making readers aware that the mental, industrial and electrical grid cannot be taken for granted. Nor can our information grid be bound by competing AI engines or physical networks, whether they span land, sea, or space.
I want to thank you for doing something for our planet. I believe many of you don’t even give your environmental efforts a second thought. Because you see them as a given, not a responsibility. Your effort is quietly powerful and couldn’t care less about being on social media. Know that your actions for a greater good speak louder in the wind and the oceans, which reverberate in the hearts of unborn generations.
