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caught up in a monsoon of technological change as mind-blowing in its intensity as ... well, having kids in the first place. And I say that not to inspire guilt—if you’re parents, you don’t need my help with that one—but to raise consciousness.
    Public debate around the media ecology of family life has had a helpless quality, positioning parents, not entirely inaccurately, as the little Dutch boy with his finger in the digital dyke. After six months of trying to keep a single household screen-free, trust me, I have much sympathy with that view. It is true, we don’t have a prayer of holding back the flood entirely, even if we wanted to. But why would we want to? Information, like water, is a good thing ... in its place.
    The old saw reminds us that, to a man with a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail. Does it follow that to a girl with a Photo-bucket account, the whole world looks like a fashion shoot? Or that to a boy with a joystick and a graphics card, the whole world looks like a psychotic dwarf with an ax? To an important extent—definitely more than we have been comfortable admitting—yes, it sort of does. Ultimately, the answer is not to take away the hammer, but to see that it is used for more than bashing away at things. To ensure our children free their hands—and their heads—to take up other tools too.
    We don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish, someone wise once observed. Whatever else it might accomplish, or fail to, our Experiment was about to propel us, stunned and gasping, out of our fishbowl for good.

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    Power Trip: The Darkness Descends
    Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
    — WALDEN, chapter 18
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Slipping through the French doors onto the verandah, I felt the night air on my skin like some expensive moisturizer, warm and thick and lightly fragrant. It was just after midnight on a sultry summer night. I could see the moon and a few streaks of fast-moving cloud framed between the sloping tin roof and the white bougainvillea that had grown with fairy-tale abandon since the hot weather set in. The whiff of ocean salt was so fresh I could taste it.
    Inside the house, the kids were asleep, sunburned and still sandy from two weeks of holiday. Concentrating, I could hear the drone of a ceiling fan and, farther back, the hum from my son’s PC, as familiar and insistent as my own pulse. The digital display from my clock radio, flaring red, was just visible from where I stood. Seeing it flash, my heart began to beat in my head like a boom box.
    I knew what I had to do. I was scared shitless to do it.
    A voice within me spoke. “You’re a parent, right? So what else is new?”
    I looked squarely at the meter box mounted at eye level in front of me, the switch marked “MAINS” illuminated in a cheesy shaft of moonlight, took aim with a steady hand—and fired.
     
     
    The idea to go screen-free for six months had been a calculated one. The idea to get in shape for it with two weeks of Blackout Bootcamp was more of a sudden inspiration. If you will, a lightbulb going off.
    Psychologically, pulling the plug on the whole catastrophe—lights and appliances included—seemed to make sense. Like jumping into a cold pool, it was better, surely, to take the plunge in one breath-defying leap than to experience withdrawal gradually, degree by painful degree. And there was a bonus: By the time we got around to switching on the power again, we’d be desensitized. We’d rejoice in what we’d recovered, rather than bemoan what we’d lost. Or so, at least, I prayed.
    In the meantime, well, I was quite fond of candlelight. (What woman of a certain age is not?) Plus, it would mean no vacuuming for two weeks, and no gigantic loads of washing. I told the kids we would each be responsible for our own laundry, and I could practically see them silently counting their pairs of clean underpants. We had a gas stove, so cooking wasn’t an issue. And our gas