Drag. Years ago, I read in Wired in 2001 how no one could figure out if efforts to transmit access to the internet your home's electric outlets. The promise of capacity was staggering:

.... anyone with electricity running into their homes would have access to an almost unimaginable amount of bandwidth. Where available, a typical DSL line or cable modem can provide speeds up to about 8 Mbps. Even the fiber-optic trunk lines that move the data around the country do so at only up to 10 Gbps. Media Fusion was talking about a network that operated at exobits - more than 1 billion gigabits - per second. That would translate, the company said, into 2 Gbits right in your home: more bandwidth than you'd ever know what to do with. In a flash of Stewart's genius, Media Fusion had apparently solved the last-mile problem once and for all.

I even recall hearing about this in the late-mid 90s when I worked a bit with the distribution of electricity and Nortel in England was trying to pull this off. But it was, not to be. Turns out that the man behind the ideas was a serial tech guru / promoter: "I watched him over the years bring certain beautiful ideas and inventions and thoughts that could change the entire world's application on things," he said. "But it seems that every time, he would start something, get to a certain level, and then literally disappear."

Yet here we are almost ten years past the new millennium and somebody clearly thinks there is something to the idea... because totalitarians are already planning to hack it if it ever rolls out:

The U.S. electricity grid is infected with malware from China and Russia, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The article from Siobhan Gorman sources unnamed officials from the intelligence community and Department of Homeland Security as saying the unidentified intruders haven't yet harmed anything, but have "software tools" in place that could be used to disrupt the system.

Anticipatory hacking. Pre-techological attack on a technology. It's like Monty Python's Welsh martial arts skit on the secrets of Llap-Goch" which is explained this way: "The BEST way to protect yourself AGAINST any ASSAILANT is to ATTACK him before he attacks YOU . . . Or BETTER... BEFORE the THOUGHT of doing so has EVEN OCCURRED TO HIM!!!"

Excellent. In the upcoming dark age, people are planning based on Monty Python.