i>Electrifying Anthropology : Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures, edited by Simone Abram, et al., Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (original) (raw)

Not a thing, stolen It begins with a theft. 'Early in the process of Soviet electrification, ' writes Arkady Markin, a Soviet himself and chronicler of this era, 'two men were arraigned for stealing energy. Though they freely admitted to tapping somebody else's electric mains, they were acquitted on the following pretext: "The nature of electricity is unknown, " said the judge. "When talking of electric current people take the word 'current' conventionally. A theft, however, implies that some definite object must be stolen, such as storage batteries, or wires. " In response, the defense attorney crowed, having just won his case: "The courts cannot establish the fact of theft! Indeed, " he continued, "can a smell, or air, or sound be stolen?"' (Markin 1961, 7). The same story, again differently In 2016, a power systems engineer in California repeated to me an explanation he had given his wife for the difficulty in assuring 100 per cent renewable power on any large-scale electricity system (a difficulty not acknowledged by those electricity retailers, who promise to sell such purity to customers for a small additional surcharge). 'Stand in the middle of a field, ' said this engineer to his wife. ' At the other end of the field are a number of men, each equipped with an identical bass drum. This one we'll call coal; this one-nuclear; this one-natural