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One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just we
by wateralien 5mo ago
One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal... eventually the cell towers went down and everyone just went to the parks and socialised. Connected with friends, strangers. Everyone was so in the moment because there was nowhere else to be, nothing else to distract them. People would pick up their phone and realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down and continue chatting. People were present in a way I've never seen in these places before. It was pretty magical.
- the_gipsy 5mo agoWe need to go back
- gib444 5mo agoIn comparison to other parts of Europe, my impression (as a visitor to both but mostly Spain) so that they're way ahead in maintaining social interactions, community, neighbourly relations etc. Is that the case?
- frank_nitti 5mo agoIn my brief exposure of about 6 months here after ~40 years in Southern CA, it really seems to be the case. I’ve never seen so many people just interacting and enjoying one another’s company for hours on end. For a decent portion of any given day, nearly every table at every establishment is occupied with people chatting, not browsing nor texting. The local parks are filled with people of all ages playing. Couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief initially
- lofaszvanitt 5mo agoPeople can't even keep up discussions. Most of the population is totally dumbened down, like on the levels of barely functioning monkeys.
- xen_relay 5mo agoLovely! I am all for an offline day in the year where everybody does what you described.
- anhner 5mo agoone day a year? it should be every week :)
- fantasizr 5mo agoI forget where, but there was a restaurant who locked all phones in a box at your table and if you made it to the end without opening it the table got a free cookie.
- andai 5mo agoThat should just be every restaurant, unless you're eating alone. It's just disrespectful otherwise. (And even alone there's a pretty strong case to be made that you should pay attention to the actual food.)
- mycall 5mo agoLet's do it today
- frank_nitti 5mo agoThis also happened in the LA area back around 2015, lasting about 36-48 hours - no power and consequently no internet. Out in suburbia, it was the first time many neighbors even met each other, or the first time some neighbors had spoken in person in years. Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life. It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world
- fullstop 5mo agoI'm going to start off by saying that I know all of my immediate neighbors. More importantly, I know pretty much all of the neighborhood dogs since I walk a lot, and dogs have to be walked. I don't have a dog, but I sometimes carry dog treats on me for when we cross paths. There are plenty of people who never leave their house, and I have no idea what they do all day. A few years ago a very small, yet very strong, thunderstorm clipped through and took out trees, mailboxes, and power. One large tree fell on a neighbor's grill, and another somehow took out mailboxes on both sides of the street. There was so much damage, but it was amazing -- everyone was out there, together, cutting up the trees and clearing the debris from the road. I saw neighbors that I hadn't seen outside in _years_. I know that part of this was because of the chaos, but the biggest part was that nobody had power and the cell towers weren't working either. Unfortunately, it was brief. Maybe I'm just getting old but the more I see our society the more I feel that smart phones, the internet, and social media were a mistake. I say this as I use them daily, of course, but there's some truth in the gen z phrase "touch grass".
- noiv 5mo agoThis has a name in literature: post disaster utopia, google it :)
- sriacha 5mo ago'A Paradise Built in Hell' by Solnit is a good read about it
- Tepix 5mo agoIt's the same with remote locations, we destroyed substantial parts of their magic by getting everyone online everywhere, all the time.
- twolegs 5mo agoSometimes people talk about these types of experiences and I get the feeling that it's an idealized picture of what really happened. I went through this experience in Portugal and it was exactly as described. Everyone came to the same conclusions during the power cut (that it is great to just hang and talk), only to forget the lessons the next day.
- omerfarukkural 4mo agoyes :D
- almogo 5mo agoThis reminds me of the Jewish Sabbath. Here in Tel Aviv, Saturday means no shops, much fewer restaurants, less programming on TV, gyms/etc open late/close early. The parks and beaches are full of people just existing.
- pocksuppet 5mo agoThat sounds nice. Not sure I'd like to live in a war zone, but it sounds like it has its perks. But wait, isn't that just weekends?
- sdellis 5mo agoReminds me of my friends in Gaza, where every day means no shops, no restaurants, no home, no medicine, no food, no water, no hope. The beaches are full of people just trying to exist.
- mannanj 5mo agoThe UN classified it a genocide. Is the latest to call that a marketing ploy or Russian disinformation and say it's not OK or hip or fashionable to question our allies? Evil productized?
- almogo 5mo agoVictimhood stopped being a valid excuse on the 7th. I hope your friend over there is doing well, and hopes for peace as much as we all do over here. Maybe then we'll see an end to all this.
- fugalfervor 5mo agoThe person you are talking to did not personally commit genocide in Gaza. Just as I, an American citizen, did not declare war on Iran. In fact, I think the war in Iran is a stupid and immoral thing to do. It's possible that the person you are responding to feels the same about the Israeli government's genocidal actions in Gaza. However, you did not bother to find out. When you judge someone before knowing them, it is called "prejudice". Pre-judging.
- forinti 5mo agoI spent many holidays in Uruguay in the 80s and early 90s. I loved cartoons, but TV was only on at 10am, so I had to go out and play. If we went to my grandparents' beach house, there was an old vacuum tube TV that took hours to heat up so mostly I didn't bother to use it. I watched Tyson's defeat to Buster Douglas on that TV and the next morning there was still a little point of light in the centre of the screen because it also took a long time to go completely blank. So not having access to TV was liberating. I wouldn't mind having no Internet on weekends today.
- sailfast 5mo agoEasily configurable via router rules at home!
- jmilloy 5mo agoI had an experience with this during the Helene Hurricane in rural western North Carolina. We had no power or cell service for 18 days. In the first few days the roads were too damaged or block, so the only modes of travel a lot of places were by foot, bicycle, or ATV. Suddenly we were visiting with our neighbors by foot without prior plans, folks were grilling in their front yards, and of course, phones were not relevant. The first few days, you pick up your phone out of habit and "realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down". And then you stop even doing that. A lot of people suffered and there was a lot of damage. In other ways we were thriving.
- Shocka1 4mo agoI volunteered down there for a week when that happened. I think the only thing we used our phones for was a picture here and there. Otherwise, complete darkness. Despite the obvious of it being a disaster zone and homes destroyed everywhere, it was a positive experience. When I first heard of Starlink and the possibility to have internet everywhere, I was a little sad inside. It is now impossible to escape in this world, even in the most remote mountains on earth. People always look at me sideways when I say this, but I truly think the power/internet needs shutoff for 6 months to a year every so often to give us a little bit of a reset.
- par 5mo agoSo what is stopping you from going to talk to your neighbor right now?
- squibonpig 5mo agoThe phones
- alex_duf 5mo agoWith AI we're about to have a trust crisis (I'll explain in a sec), so if we extrapolate it very far, we could see a world where nobody trusts anything displayed on a device, which is essentially what you describe but in a world with electricity still running. The trust issue: we already see hacker news members accusing each other of being LLMs, we already see legitimate images being immediately put in the AI category, and AI images and videos being shared as if the truth. We already see signs of infosec changing forever, with flaws found in SSL libraries that makes you wonder how trusty that little padlock next to the URL will become, we already see operating systems having to patch faster than they can. With all that you get to wonder how much you can trust the pixels you see on your device, and how much we'll collectively trust them in the future. That leads you to trust your neighbours way more than your social media feed, which frankly, may have a positive impact on society over the long run, despite a very painful transition. That's under the hypothesis that AI leads us to experience a trust crisis, which isn't a given.
- jjav 4mo ago> One of the most amazing things happened during the day long power cut in 2025 in Spain and Portugal After hurricane Maria in 2017 in Puerto Rico, most people had no electricity or internet for many weeks, some for many months. This kind of human (normal!) connection fluorished for all that time.