The Noon of Shadows

On April 28, 2025, a strange darkness fell across Portugal and Spain.
Although the sun still stood high, the infrastructures that held up the modern world faltered. Lights died, networks froze, and cities, stripped of their orchestras of signals and commands, stood silent. In those hours, the Iberian Peninsula became a threshold space: neither the technological utopia it had been promised, nor the archaic land of folklore and myth.

This sudden collapse resonated deeply with Federico Campagna’s metaphysical critique, Elias Canetti’s mourning for the omnipresence of death, and Boris Groys’ insights into the politics of the new. Together, these thinkers invite us to understand the blackout not merely as a technical event, but as a metaphysical revelation: the death of an exhausted world, and the trembling birth of a new one.

Silence After the Collapse

Campagna (2021) warns that “the aftermath of an apocalypse is a shivering expanse, where reality itself requires constant mending” (p. 22)​.
The blackout shattered the illusion of seamless continuity. For a few hours, the “spell” of Westernized Modernity — its promise of endless light, energy, and control — was broken. Reality showed itself as fragile, contingent, and mortal.

Elias Canetti, in The Book Against Death, reminds us that death is not distant, not elsewhere. “Modern civilization tries to pretend death isn’t there, but in doing so it gives death more power over us than ever before” (Canetti, 2020, p. 31). In the sudden stillness of the blackout, death — of systems, of narratives, of control — pressed invisibly against the edges of everyday life.

Designing After the Fall

What collapsed on that April day was not only an electrical grid.
It was also a project of total design: the attempt to weave a world so tightly, so seamlessly, that no fracture would ever appear. Yet, as Hal Foster (2002) warned, design under late capitalism had already become “less a solution than a symptom” (p. 16) — not a means of healing, but a superficial aesthetic that concealed deeper systemic failures.

In the blackout’s sudden stillness, the limits of this over-designed world became visible.
Silvio Lorusso (2018) deepens the critique by describing contemporary design as a “promise factory built on precarious foundations” — offering dreams of creativity and autonomy while operating within the structures of instability and exhaustion. Design no longer simply solves problems; it stages hopes that it cannot sustain.

At the heart of this fragility lies a deeper entanglement. Anne-Marie Willis (2006) reminds us that we are not merely users of design, but designed beings: “we design our world, while our world designs us in return.” Infrastructures do not only sustain our daily lives; they shape our expectations, our imaginations, our very sense of possible futures. Their collapse is the collapse of a designed ontology.

Tony Fry (2010) pushes this reflection further. Without a conscious politics of sustainment, he argues, design accelerates the conditions of its own undoing: “without sustainment, design is a process of accelerating unsustainability.” When design fails to reimagine its foundations, it becomes complicit in the very crises it seeks to address.

And yet, within this brokenness, a different possibility emerges. Benjamin Bratton (2015) observes that “infrastructure is what does not reveal itself until it breaks.” The blackout, in its sudden rupture, tore away the invisibility of the systems that undergirded everyday life. It revealed the profound task ahead: not to nostalgically patch a failed design, but to imagine and build infrastructures of coexistence, resilience, and planetary care — architectures capable of surviving beyond the ruins.

Thus, design, like the world it once animated, now stands at a threshold:
between crime and care, exhaustion and renewal, silence and the tremor of a new song.

Death, Collapse, and the New

Yet collapse is not only an end. For Boris Groys, in On the New, true creation emerges precisely from the ruins of the old. “Every new order is preceded by a catastrophe, by the collapse of an old order” (Groys, 2014, p. 20)​.
The blackout, then, is not simply loss: it is the necessary disintegration that opens the field for the new. Groys describes this moment as one where “the archive of the old is suddenly revealed as empty,” forcing subjects into an existential leap, a creative re-founding of sense (Groys, 2014, p. 21)​.

Campagna echoes this when he speaks of the end of a metaphysical time-segment: “Meaning becomes scarce, fragile and rapidly eroding — and the inability to envisage how to close well their own aesthetic creation is immediately translated into the implosion of the very structures that they would need to be able to make-world around themselves” (Campagna, 2021, p. 186)​.

Canetti, similarly, refuses passive resignation in the face of death. “The task is not to live forever, but never to let death have the final word” (Canetti, 2020, p. 112).

In all three thinkers, the crisis is a threshold — a door not into annihilation, but into the terrifying, ecstatic possibility of starting anew.

Toward a Prophetic Culture

Campagna offers a model for surviving the end: the cultivation of a prophetic culture. Such a culture does not seek merely to rebuild the old; it imagines new cosmogonies, new landscapes of sense. “Prophetic culture wishes to provide enough different excesses to any possible world… so that there will always be an outside to which they can withdraw” (Campagna, 2021, p. 186)​.

Groys also highlights that in the face of catastrophe, subjects must become not conservators, but creators. The new is not found by preserving the ruins, but by risking a leap beyond them. “The new is not produced inside the archive but outside of it — through a breach, an interruption” (Groys, 2014, p. 23)​.

And Canetti, with his fierce insistence on collective mourning and remembrance, suggests that even in the darkest times, solidarity can weave new continuities.

Thus, the Iberian blackout — a rupture in the song of Modernity — becomes a call:
Not to restore the old chorus, but to begin a new and fragile melody.

When Silence Becomes Song

When the world stops singing, what remains?
In the dark, there is a trembling.
In the trembling, a choice:
—to fear the silence, or to become the new singers.

The blackout was not just a failure of infrastructure.
It was a metaphysical crack in the edifice of exhausted time.

Yet even from cracks, new seeds fall into the earth.
Even from silence, a first note can rise.
Even from ruins, hands can begin again, weaving fragile worlds.

Somewhere, beyond the collapse, a different song is already stirring.
It waits for those who can dream without maps,
who can design without masters,
who can mourn without surrender.

The world has paused.
The song has ended.
Now: who will dare sing next?

References

Bratton, B. (2015). The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press.

Campagna, F. (2021). Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Canetti, E. (2020). The Book Against Death. (Posthumous publication).

Foster, H. (2002). Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes). London: Verso.

Groys, B. (2014). On the New. London: Verso.

Lorusso, S. (2018). Entreprecariat: Everyone is an Entrepreneur. Nobody is Safe. Onomatopee.

RTVE. (2025, April 28). Apagón eléctrico masivo afecta a España y Portugal por pérdida de 15 GW en cinco segundos. [News report].

Willis, A.-M. (2006). Ontological Designing. Design Philosophy Papers, 4(2), 69–92.

Fry, T. (2010). Design as Politics. Oxford: Berg.