We live in entropic societies in which security increasingly unfolds within the invisible terrain of technosocial interdependencies.

Energy, digital, and communication infrastructures do not merely constitute the material support of everyday life; rather, they represent its deep architecture, to the point that their continuity is perceived as natural, almost taken for granted. It is precisely this apparent invisibility that renders them critical: when they fail, as in the case of blackouts, the result is not simply a technical disruption but a genuine systemic rupture that simultaneously affects the economy, social relations, meaning-making processes, and public order.

The analysis proposed here is situated precisely at this point of rupture, interpreting the blackout as a revelatory event capable of making visible the structural fragilities of contemporary societies. From this perspective, the interruption of energy is never neutral: it disrupts chains of dependency that bind together material infrastructures and symbolic systems, demonstrating that security is never merely a technical issue, but the outcome of an unstable equilibrium among technology, social organization, and communicative capacity.

The theoretical contribution of the paper is particularly relevant insofar as it introduces the concept of the “pre-connection era” as an analytical category useful for understanding such dynamics in contexts characterized by limited digital integration. In these configurations, crisis management cannot rely on advanced monitoring systems or pervasive communication networks, thereby allowing a clearer observation of the fundamental social mechanisms of resilience.

In the absence of pervasive digital infrastructures, the blackout produces a cascading effect that primarily impacts the sphere of information.

Electrical energy constitutes the material condition of possibility for contemporary media systems: without it, institutional communication channels weaken or cease to function altogether, making emergency coordination more difficult and increasing collective uncertainty. Within this informational vacuum, hierarchies of credibility and authority are rapidly redefined, with a shift from formal to informal circuits. Interpersonal networks, neighborhood relations, local leadership, and social capital assume a central role in ensuring the circulation of information and sustaining minimal forms of coordination.

However, this shift is not without ambivalence: while it may strengthen community cohesion, it can also facilitate the spread of unverified information, foster dynamics of panic, and undermine trust in institutions, with direct implications for public security.

It is precisely in the domains of trust and communication that the blackout reveals itself as a crucial test of the resilience of social order. The literature on risk communication has shown that the availability of reliable information is decisive in shaping collective behavior in crisis situations. When this condition is absent, crisis management shifts from the institutional to the social level, with outcomes that are highly dependent on the structure of social relations and the level of social capital within specific territories. The paper highlights how, in the so-called pre-connection era, resilience does not primarily derive from technological robustness, but from the capacity of communities to mobilize relational resources, cooperative practices, and forms of local adaptation. In this sense, security emerges as an emergent property of a social system rather than as the direct outcome of technical devices.

This perspective also brings into focus the profoundly unequal nature of blackouts. Interruptions in electricity supply do not affect all populations in the same way; rather, they tend to reflect and amplify existing fault lines within the social structure.

The most vulnerable populations, characterized by limited access to resources, precarious housing conditions, or marginal positions within infrastructural systems, are exposed not only to greater material hardship but also to more severe informational exclusion. In such contexts, an energy crisis can rapidly evolve into a social crisis, increasing the risk of disorder, conflict, and instability. Public security, therefore, cannot be conceived as uniformly distributed, but must instead be analyzed as a differential condition deeply intertwined with socio-economic inequalities.

In recent years/months, we’ve already experienced all of this. Communities have/are already experiencing it.

Hypothesizing a comparative analysis of different contexts such as Spain, Cuba, and India further reinforces this perspective, as it demonstrates how distinct socio-technical configurations generate different forms of vulnerability and resilience. In highly technologically integrated contexts, such as Spain, institutional and infrastructural capacity enables more effective crisis management, yet does not fully eliminate dependence on complex and potentially fragile systems.

In contexts such as Cuba, limited technological availability is compensated by a high level of social cohesion, which enables the activation of resilience through informal networks and community-based practices.

The Indian case, finally, highlights an intermediate condition, marked by profound territorial inequalities that translate into uneven crisis management and asymmetrical distributions of security.

Within this framework, the emergence of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence opens ambivalent scenarios. On the one hand, such tools promise to improve the prediction and management of blackouts, strengthening institutional response capacity; on the other hand, they introduce new forms of dependence on digital infrastructures and risk exacerbating inequalities between contexts that are technologically equipped and those that are not.

The increasing digitalization of energy networks, far from definitively resolving the problem of security, shifts its terms, making the socio-technical nature of risk even more evident.

In light of these considerations, the blackout can be understood as a prism through which to observe the fundamental tensions of contemporary societies. It demonstrates that security cannot be reduced to the protection of infrastructures, but must be understood as the collective capacity to manage uncertainty, maintain social cohesion, and ensure the circulation of reliable information even under conditions of crisis. In a world characterized by growing complexity and interconnection, vulnerability is no longer an exception but a structural condition.

To understand blackouts, therefore, ultimately means to understand the limits and possibilities of security in present-day technosocial societies.

References

• This article is an excerpt from recently published research: Buoncompagni, G., (2026). From the Light to the Dark: Blackouts in the Pre-Connection Era in JOURNAL OF DIGITAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT; 1; Chennai, Digital Information Research Foundation; pp. 1–29 (ISSN: 0972-7272) Link: https://www.dline.info/fpaper/jdim/v24i1/jdimv24i1_2.pdf
• Giacomo Buoncompagni University of Macerata – ITSTIME – g.buoncompagni@unimc.it