The real risk today isn’t losing power in an instant. It’s failing to realize we’ve been living in the dark for far too long.
On April 28th, electricity briefly stepped away, taking with it the illusion of absolute control we like to believe we have over our daily lives. The Iberian Peninsula was plunged into darkness — literally. Lights out, phones silent, payment terminals down, elevators stuck, and worst of all, espressos cut mid-extraction. A national tragedy.
It was a sudden disruption, but an instructive one. A reminder that the infrastructure supporting modern life — digital, fast, efficient — is more fragile than we care to admit. In a heartbeat, we saw that being "connected" is less of a choice than it is a dependency. Without power, little moves. Not people. Not ideas. Not decisions.
And yet, the absence of screens and notifications revealed something rare: presence. People came outside. They talked to strangers. They made eye contact. It was as if the world, deprived of its electric current, had recharged another one — the humankind. For a day, we lived offline. And somehow, paradoxically, it brought us light.
The power came back. The system stabilized. But the blackout left a lingering thought: this outage was visible, immediate, with a clear origin and a technical solution. The others — the ones we’ve been living through for much longer than we should — make no headlines and trigger no contingency plans. Maybe because we’ve grown used to the dark.
That darkness is made up of blackouts that don’t cause traffic jams or make the evening news. They don’t spark technical failures. They are slow, quiet failures of the very elements that sustain a capable, critical, and sustainable civil society.
Take, for example, the social blackout we’re experiencing. In 2024, according to Eurostat, over 93 million people in the European Union were at risk of poverty or social exclusion. In Portugal, the figure stood at 19.7% of the population. These numbers aren’t new — but they are increasingly ignored. As if exclusion had stopped being an emergency and become just another stable statistic.
Then there’s the democratic blackout. Political disengagement is growing. Voter apathy is becoming chronic. Distrust in institutions lingers like background noise. The real danger isn’t collapse — it’s irrelevance. When too many people stop believing in the system, the system doesn’t shut down. It just runs on autopilot.
Next comes the fiscal blackout. Subtler, but no less real. While ordinary citizens see their income taxed at the source, global financial flows slip through legal loopholes, optimized to the last decimal. It’s not fraud. It’s structure. But the outcome is the same: fewer resources for what is public and shared. A constant short circuit in the circuit of fairness.
And then there’s the blackout of critical attention — perhaps the most elusive, and the most dangerous. We’re connected to everything and attentive to almost nothing. We jump from post to post, react instead of reflecting, consume information without processing it. Deep, thoughtful thinking is becoming a borderline subversive act.
These blackouts don’t strike with the suddenness of a power outage. They cause no immediate stir. But they’re more corrosive precisely because of that — because they become routine. Because they stop being news. Because they turn into the new normal.
The electrical blackout was a nuisance. But it was also a mirror. It showed us how fragile the systems we rely on really are. And perhaps, it reminded us how urgent it is to pay attention to other systems — social, political, economic, and cultural — that are quietly shutting down, without alarms, headlines, or public outcry.
The real risk today isn’t losing power in an instant. It’s not realizing that we’ve been living in the dark for far too long.
André Alves, Brand & Digital Marketing Director da CATÓLICA-LISBON