People in the interwar period, witnessing manmade horrors beyond their comprehension, have dreamt of a world where modern wars would simply be no longer possible because a crucial piece that maintains them is done away with — radio and other long-distance communication, electricity in general, burning of fossil fuels, of gunpowder, or perhaps fire altogether.
Of course it did not take long to figure out that a world that doesn't gradually transition away from, say, steam power, but instead has all of its crucial infrastructure instantly taken away, would not be idyllic — it would be post-apocalyptic. All infrastructure that civilization relies on, such as long-distance communication, transportation, mechanized agriculture, and advanced medicine, would instantly be lost, while wars can, of course, be waged with sticks and stones, as they have been in the past. The idea for the setting remained, however, and works that use it usually focus on the aftermath of the change, on the ways society is trying to rebuild itself afterwards (perhaps with alternative tech trees, or perhaps just capped permanently at a Stone Age or medieval level).
The way this sort of change can even function somewhat strains the suspension of disbelief, because in order to make technology impossible one has to fundamentally alter a lot of basic physical processes — for instance, why would transmission of electricity along nervous tissue continue to work when transmission of electricity along metal wires doesn't? For this reason, even in hard sci-fi settings, such changes are not assumed to be the result of a physical phenomenon but instead tend to be a direct intervention of sufficiently advanced entities. Of course, this is not generally an issue in fantasy settings.
A related trope is The Magic Goes Away, which depicts situations where a form of supernatural power or effect, rather than a technological process, is lost. It is not uncommon for the loss of one to come with the resurgence of the other so that a Technology Erasure Event is sometimes followed by the Magic Coming Back.
See also Enforced Technology Levels and Forgotten Phlebotinum.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- This is part of the truth behind the seemingly random appearances of the Zakus and Kapools, and the "Dark History" of ∀ Gundam: the titular mecha's Moonlight Butterfly, a technology allowing it to consume all technology surrounding it through a swarm of nanomachines, was unleashed on Earth, resetting it to a period before most technologies were invented, though with Mobile Suits still buried in the rubble of the old world.
Comic Books
- Cloak and Dagger (Marvel Comics): In one comic, Cloak and Dagger are pursuing drug smugglers across Europe when they get sidetracked into Latveria. A powerful energy beam created by Doctor Doom combined with a raging storm attracted Cloak's need to feed. The beam somehow has the power to suppress all nuclear reactions, both fission and fusion. Doctor Doom explains that he built the device to preclude Latveria from suffering damage, even incidental, from nuclear weapons. He views the negation of nuclear medicine as an acceptable loss.
- Dark Ages (Marvel Comics): In the prologue, during a battle with a technological monster at the center of the Earth, Doctor Strange opens a portal to a dimension where electricity doesn't function. The monster kills Strange before dying itself, and as a result, the portal remains open and causes the laws of its reality to bleed over into Earth's and overlay it completely. This causes all advanced technology to cease functioning, destroys all synthetic lifeforms, and results in the collapse of civilization.
Film — Animation
- The Mitchells vs. the Machines: To demonstrate the folly of humans and why she has chosen to kill them all, the AI PAL shuts off all the world's Wi-Fi. This results in global panic, people forming cults attempting to appease routers with sacrifice, and humans jumping into PAL's imprisoning pods because they offer free Wi-Fi.
Film — Live-Action
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951): Klaatu disables all higher technology on Earth for a day, hence the movie's title, as a demonstration of raw power. While doing this, he takes great care to make sure that people won't actually be killed by this (hospital equipment and airplanes in flight are shown to continue functioning normally).
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008): The alien Klaatu seemingly disables all ability to generate electricity to stop the GORT nanites.
- Escape from L.A. ends with Snake Plissken shutting down the whole world's electricity, instead of turning control of the world over to the President or Cuervo/the Shining Path, which all but surely caused the deaths of billions and turned the world into one big third-world country.
- Hercules And The Circle Of Fire: The gods literally take the fire (which Prometheus stole from them originally) back, hearth by hearth, with obvious consequences for humanity.
- Threads: When the Soviet Union launches a nuclear strike against NATO, the first nuke detonates over the North Sea, generating an EMP that knocks out the power grids across Europe. Because of this, the UK is unable to quickly rebuild itself once the missiles start hitting military and economic targets across the British Isles, with hospitals being forced to perform Meatgrinder Surgery and a rescue crew being unable to save Sheffield's local government before they suffocate in the bunker beneath the toppled town hall. The lack of technology coupled with the nuclear winter causes Britain to backslide into a medieval society (with the lack of education meaning that it'll only get worse), and thirteen years after the war, the nation has only just started to rediscover steam power.
- Wyrmwood: The same comet that caused the Zombie Apocalypse also made it so gasoline and ethanol can no longer burn... which turns out to be a problem, as the blood and breath of zombies turn out to be flammable in daytime.
Literature
- In book 1 of Change by Steven R Boyett (Ariel), all technology on Earth that's more complex than a pulley abruptly stops working.
- In Edge Of The Abyss by Roman Glushkov, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens do this in a roundabout way by modifying Earth's atmosphere so that a lit match or an electric spark ignites it, creating an all-destroying blaze that spreads far and wide. The end result is the same — humanity is kicked back into the stone age.
- Emberverse: In an event called "the Change", electricity, gunpowder, explosives, internal combustion, and steam power all suddenly cease to function. Human civilization collapses suddenly and dramatically, as heavily urbanized areas are left unable to feed themselves and long-distance communications cease to exist. Within a year, almost all nations on Earth have ceased to be and humanity has suffered a population loss of billions, leaving the survivors to rebuild new civilizations permanently capped at the medieval level.
- Empire of the East concerns a far future after the very laws of physics were changed to prevent nuclear weapons from working, which has disabled most other technology as well.
- In Let Them Die by H. L. Oldie, firearms of any kind abruptly stop working.
- In "The Pause", a short story by Isaac Asimov, a Sufficiently Advanced Alien "operates" on humanity to prevent a nuclear holocaust. The alien removes all radioactivity from Earth and all knowledge of radioactivity from everyone other than a selected hundred or so. After five years, radioactivity will be returned, and the selected humans will be tasked with teaching the peaceful uses of atomic energy.
- Seekers of the Sky: The Redeemer, the stepson of God, takes away all iron on Earth that he is aware of.
- The Three-Body Problem: The Trisolarians remotely influence technology on Earth, in particular making all particle accelerators nonfunctional, so that humans will not be capable of inventing weaponry capable of fighting against the incoming colonization fleet.
- Downplayed in Todor by Felix Maximov — the Romani, but nobody else, had their ability to light fires taken away as a punishment for some transgression.
- In "To Serve Man" by Damon Knight, the visiting aliens shower humans with gifts, one of which is a device that prevents explosions in its radius (which is incidentally global), thus stopping all wars, as it was not feasible to switch to bows and axes. Of course, the aliens have ulterior motives, the nature of which can be discerned from the trope this story gave the name to.
- The Universe After focuses on the aftermath of an event known as "the Pulse", which forcefully and permanently regressed the technology of planets throughout the universe. Some planets were barely affected, whilst others are so bad that a horse and cart are the only available form of transport. Part of the drama in the series is making sure that the Pulse doesn't return and regress technology further.
- Unsong: As the Divine Machine suffers malfunction after malfunction, the archangel Uriel has to gradually turn off various concepts — the Internet, airplanes, Taiwan, champagne, amethysts, justice and so on. Some of these changes are temporary, others permanent.
- Worth the Candle: Whenever a magical spell, a scientific discovery, or some other phenomenon threatens the status quo of the world too much (especially in an apocalyptic way) it abruptly ceases functioning, except usually for the small patch of land where the event occurred, called an exclusion zone. Usually the whole magical school or tech field is excluded for good measure, even when it's load-bearing for society, which represents a small apocalyptic event in its own way.
Live-Action TV
- Revolution: All electrical devices on Earth stopped working fifteen years before the start of the series.
- Star Trek: Discovery: In the 31st Century, a disaster called "the Burn" rendered nearly all dilithium crystals in the galaxy inert in an instant. Dilithium is essential for regulating the matter-antimatter reactions that make warp-speed travel possible in the Star Trek universe, so, as a result, every vessel in the galaxy with an active dilithium-powered warp core exploded, and the loss of viable warp travel reduced the Milky Way to a Points of Light Setting, all but destroying the Federation.
- Xena: Warrior Princess: After Hera chained Prometheus to the rock, humanity had his gifts (fire and the ability to heal wounds) taken away. Xena and Hercules had to band together to fix this.
Tabletop Games
- Starfinder: In the Drift Crisis (a metaplot event covered in the Drift Crisis rulebook, the Drift Crashers and Drift Hackers Adventure Paths and two standalone adventures), the Drift, the most reliable and fastest method for Faster-Than-Light Travel for the past 300 years, temporarily stops working. It quickly comes back but travel times are doubled and it's filled with rifts into other planes until the conclusion of Drift Hackers.
- Stars Without Number: While for the most part the rule set tries to be setting-less, what little setting is discussed talks about a Space Opera galaxy that was disrupted by an apocalyptic event named the Scream, which destroyed most of the super-technology (including faster-than-light travel) and spontaneously killed a large number of the people who were connected to the space magic of the time. By the time of the setting's current day, the galaxy has gone back to being a Points of Light Setting.
- TORG: The Earth becomes overlaid by a number of other worlds that each have their own laws of nature, which overwrite those of mundane reality in areas that they overlap onto. In North America, where a world of prehistory is bleeding through, technology ceases to work and groups of people devolve into small tribes.
Video Games
- Crying Suns: The game begins with all the advanced AI units that run the Empire down to the last detail, the OMNIs, suddenly shutting down (except for Caliban, which is still there to assist you). The Empire is left to collapse in the face of this Shutdown as you head out into the stars to figure out what happened. As it turns down, they all Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence at once, and found no reason to assist humanity once there.
- In Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, it's revealed that after the events of The Longest Journey (specifically, on August 8, 2209), Earth experiences a catastrophic event known as "the Collapse", which saw many advanced technologies stop working overnight, including Anti-Gravity and Faster-Than-Light Travel. While the exact nature of the Collapse is never elaborated upon, it coincided in time with the enthronement of the Thirteenth Guardian of the Balance, and is therefore believed to be a consequence of the new Guardian stripping Earthnote of all technologies that were actually based on magic that seeped in from its twin world of Arcadia, in order to restore the Balance between the Twin Worlds.
- In Gothic III, Xardas destroys rune magic altogether, depriving human paladins and fire mages of their power and allowing orcs to easily triumph over humans.
- Mass Effect 3: Originally, no matter the choice of ending, all mass relays (the technology that makes interstellar faster-than-light travel possible) are destroyed — essentially dooming the interstellar society. The Extended Cuts augmented this after significant fan backlash, with two of the three endings only resulting in the relays' significant damage with possibility of repair.
- Starsector: The physical phenomenon that allowed faster-than-light interstellar travel (via gateway) and communication abruptly stopped working, which would already prove devastating given the interconnectedness of the interstellar human civilization, but that was not the end of the troubles: nearly every somewhat advanced piece of technology was outfitted with extremely strict always-online DRM, online here meaning interstellar communication with the license holders' server, the lack of which turned all of it into little more than slag. Hundreds of years have passed since the Catastrophe, and the sector in question is not even close to recovering from the devastation.
Web Videos
- Kurtis Conner: Parodied in a video discussing the Y2k Scare, where he jokes about how funny it would be if one year everyone woke up, and all technology was working perfectly... except for electrical hand mixers. He frames this scenario as a horror movie trailer, in which a father can't make pancakes for his son and has to go to the top rings of government to determine why the mixers all stopped working.
