The grid is an accident in motion.
Paul Virilio once said:
When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…
Energy is Virilio’s dromology made incarnate: speed and infrastructure fused into a single nervous system. The grid housing this dromology isn’t so much a machine as a choreography of velocities:
- Electrons running across transmission lines;
- Dispatch signals pulsing every five minutes;
- Frequency deviations within fractions of a second; and
- Trade windows collapsing into the sub-instant.
To govern energy means to balance supply and demand, of course, but also to command tempo. Regulatory proceedings, RTO dispatches, FERC orders…these were once dry bureaucratic acts but they’re becoming dromopolitical struggles over speed. Whose tempo is supreme? Or more precisely: what is the shape of that tempo as it reaches domination?
Fossil fleets march to the slow time of depreciation schedules: predictable, securitizing beats across decades. Renewables lunge into interconnection bottlenecks — like lightning fields, they are volatile, with intermittencies that mean rapid success or sudden failure. And in the edge node, Bitcoin miners chase marginal megawatts like stormfronts. They are nomadic (albeit territorially agnostic) players.
Per Virilio, each acceleration breeds its own accident (and for our purposes reveals the shape of power):
- Negative price cascades expose feedback loops where automated bidding deepens volatility instead of damping it;
- Texas 2021 wasn’t “just” a blackout: it was slow, brittle tempos colliding with untamed intermittency under weather stress; and
- California’s rolling outages reveal the jagged seam where algorithmic speed strikes physical constraint.
And beneath all of this lies the immobile sludge of planning: “Resource Adequacy” stretches across years, “Integrated Resource Planning” simulates infinite futures, procedural rituals grind away while electrons demand answers in milliseconds. Institutional time is fundamentally mismatched with operational time. Bureaucratic delay begets temporal violence.
The system, meanwhile, is learning to operate in live time, with quasi-sentience. Watch an operator dashboard: there are price spikes, frequency corrections, and dispatch orders radiating like pulsars. This isn’t mere data flow; it’s systems responding faster than human operators can deliberate.
Nick Land saw this in Bitcoin’s “unleashed thought”: infrastructure that philosophizes by running. He writes:
Bitcoin seizes philosophical attention because it is already doing philosophy – or what philosophy is still (on ever rarer occasions) expected to do – and at multiple levels. It tells the truth. Bitcoin is not only a recognizable philosophical statement, but also, and more importantly, a philosophical automatism, a synthetic philosophical machine. It not only philosophizes in the manner of a man – although this is its certain prospect – but also finally in the way of an angel, or a lesser god. The ‘intellectual intuition’ (Intellektuelle Anschauung) that is for Kant a mortal impossibility, is for Bitcoin an operational principle. It is destined to close upon itself, and thus know itself. By becoming time, Bitcoin promises an exhibition of unleashed thought, in a way no introspective anthropology ever can.
What Land identifies in Bitcoin (infrastructure that operates as philosophy) is equally visible in the grid. But where Bitcoin crystallizes time; the grid shapes “temporal topology,” the contours and textures of how speed unfolds across infrastructure. Both systems generate meaning through operation, not contemplation.
The broader ecosystem emerging from all this (microgrids, ASICs, and data-driven sovereignty projects) represents laboratories of temporal autonomy. Post-grid autonomy isn’t so much an off-grid lifestyle as a means of creating your own time-signature, at your own cadence, rather than bowing to a centralized clock. These projects contain pulses and heartbeats. Each stakes a claim on its own time-shape, a unique way of moving through catastrophe (or near-catastrophe).
To wrap it all in a bough: Energy is speed made visible. Regulation attempts to civilize this velocity. But dromology’s lesson remains harder: there is no power without acceleration, and no acceleration without accidents. True sovereignty becomes the right to orchestrate your own accident, to establish the conditions of breakdowns before someone else’s tempo determines them for you.
Your rhythm, your tempo, your chosen fragilities and their topologies make up a new form of sovereignty, one that operates through the deliberate orchestration of breakdown rather than the prevention of it. The future involves a tolerance for fragility (and innovating on its bleeding edge), not because doing so is ideal, but because entropy and human error make invulnerability a pipe dream.