Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

[vierasmarius]

Originally Posted by DCB

How about a toxic meme? In essence, the neurological patterns involved in comprehending this idea interact badly with certain hard-wired parts of the brain, leading to negative outcomes; for example, a feedback loop in the language wiring that leads to increasingly worse seizures.

I'd put toxic memes into the category of "magic", especially ones with such a dramatic effect. They can be interesting (the Neal Stephenson book Snowcrash is a great example) but they are ultimately unbelievable. Of course, we may need to resort to magic to make this scenario work.

A second alternative is to have people actively attempt to eradicate technology, perhaps due to blaming it for a terrible disaster (e.g., nuclear war); that's the setup for "A Canticle for Leibowitz".

I think this is a much more believable situation, though I'd only seeing it coming about after the infrastructure has already collapsed. People are generally resistant to change, so conservative ideologies fight against new technology... but they also fight to keep the status quo, so would be unlikely to intentionally abandon working technology. If society has already been battered down to TL0, those who benefit from keeping it there may fight to do so.