I’m going to date myself here, but there’s a scene in the 1985 film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome where a lost tribe of children called “The Waiting Ones” refers to “The Sonic.”
What exactly was the “sonic”? It was a record. There is no electricity in Mad Max’s dystopian future, but there are records. By manually spinning them, the kids could listen to the disembodied sounds from a past they called “Tomorrow-Morrow Land.”
While the apocalyptic destruction depicted in Mad Max’s world was never explicitly explained, wars over oil and water were hinted at as the cause. Whatever the reason, Mad Max and “The Waiting Ones” lived in a world devoid of electricity.
A world without electronic devices.
Farfetched?
Imagine this scenario…
“It began like any other summer morning – a blinding flash across the eastern horizon, the briefest burst of cosmic munitions from our sun. But this introductory salvo was merely an overture to the true devastation that followed. Within hours, the Electromagnetic Pulse had rippled across the globe, frying electronics and crippling power grids on a planetary scale.”
That’s an entirely fictional account of an event that could actually occur. In fact, it most likely will. It might be later today, tomorrow, next month, or ten years from now. When it happens, we will have no warning; even if we do, there will be nothing we can do to prevent or prepare for it. In a moment of millennial whiplash, the modern world would be hurled back into the digital dark ages.
The eerie truth is that a similar event, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), hit the earth in 1859. It’s now called the Carrington Event and was named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who observed the solar flare associated with the ejection.
Fortunately, electricity didn’t power the world in 1859; human and animal labor did, and so did emerging steam technologies. What the CME did was knock out telegraph systems across North America and Europe. Sparks from failed telegraph pylons caused fires, and it is said that some telegraph operators received shocks. It is now known as a benchmark for understanding the potential impacts on “modern” society.
In the blink of an eye, a solar flare similar to the Carrington would wipe out global power grids, destroy electronic devices, and plunge the world into darkness. We are a pebble’s toss away from the Stone Age.
Fun right?
And what about digital music and the ability to play it?
There would be silence.
Not only would playlists be lobotomized, but all music produced over the last few decades, stored digitally and conveniently, would not only be inaccessible—it would be gone. There would be no backups because even the backups would have been rendered useless.
Imagine being an artist whose entire life’s work is trapped in the cloud, a cloud that doesn’t exist in any tangible form. Years of artistry wiped away because the sun, for all intents and purposes, “sneezed”.
All we will have left are those little black “sonic” discs made of plastic.
Like “The Waiting Ones”, we will find our only way to connect to the music of the past is through vinyl records.
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