In the northern districts of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, there is a neighborhood where dusk arrives before the sun sets. The light doesn’t dim early—rather, the absence of illumination is imposed by rolling blackouts, the quiet prelude to what locals call “digital silence.” It’s the kind of silence that accumulates over years: thin, granular, nearly invisible until it becomes total. When the electricity cuts out, cell-phone towers stutter. The few public Wi-Fi kiosks blink off. And the digital life that people elsewhere take as a fact of modern existence collapses for hours at a time, revealing that for millions across the global South, the much-touted information age is less an era than a rumor.