Weekly Short Story: The Waveries by Fredric Brown

I have read The Waveries, a 1945 science fiction short story by Fredric Brown, a number of times.  Its ramifications are especially important in our digital era...but perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.  Since the rest of this article will probably give away the story, I suggest you first read it for yourself...it's now in the public domain, so you can read it online...just click on the following link: [you-books].  I also recommend the book From These Ashes, which is the collected short science fiction of this terrific author whose works I have enjoyed since I was about twelve and began reading his stories from a couple of cheap old paperbacks my father had.  But back to The Waveries...

Back in 1945 there was no internet, and computers were a project in the early stages of development.  But electricity and radio had been around for decades, and society had dramatically transformed itself wherever in the world they had taken hold.  It's a funny thing about us humans: whenever a great new innovation comes into existence, like the telephone, radio, automobile, airplane, television, computers, smart phones, the internet, and so on, we marvel at it in the very beginning but then very quickly adapt ourselves to its use to the point where it is taken for granted as being an absolute necessity.  When The Waveries came out 73 years ago there was no internet or smart phone and computers were in their primitive, fledgling stage of development.  But they still had radio and electricity (and automotive travel, which depends on electricity).  If they were suddenly gone, we're talking about a major stepdown in our civilization, right?  Fredric Brown comes to a different conclusion as an exotic form of interstellar life that feeds on radio waves and electricity is attracted by signals coming from Earth and descends upon the planet, causing no direct harm to our life forms but putting a permanent end, first to radio transmissions and then anything depending on electronics or electricity...even lightning from storms gets eaten up by these strange entities.  How the author portrays humanity reacting to this apparent calamity seems counterintuitive, but I kind of liked it anyway.  Do we really need all this "stuff" that keeps coming out, or are these "needs" artificial creations of our consumer-based society that marginalizes those who either refuse or are unable to keep up with the trends?  I strongly suspect that the latter is closer to the truth...