Need a form of protest like a general strike? Need to resist an authoritarian regime? Do you yearn to throw your body against the gears of the machine and cause the whole system to grind to a screeching halt?

Labor strikes are great, but they lead to retaliation. Physical protests are fine, but police generally try to shut down any left of center protests. Police will also seek to instigate violence at such protests, and seek to use the violence they commit as justification to arrest scores of protesters. Physical protests inevitably produce the risk of arrest and physical harm against protesters. Protests on the highway produce the risk of being run over.

But what if a protest movement could drive a city, a region, or a nation to a standstill, without anyone having to leave their house? Such a thing is possible.

If enough people in an area, at a coordinated time, simply used a great deal of electricity, the power grid in that area would be unable to keep up and would collapse, grinding the economy to a halt in the area. And there’s no protesters for police to bash the skulls of, and no striking workers to fire or murder. It’s a wonderful lazy form of protest - simply turn on a bunch of electrical appliances up to the limit of your home or apartment’s breaker. Get enough people to do so at the same time (ideally on days of mild weather), and the whole economy will grind to a halt. Ideally this could be coordinated to cause grid collapse in areas that cause the most disruption to influential employers or industries.