Electricity has only been around about a century and the Internet as we all know it about 10 years.

Talking to someone brought up in the African bush in Zimbabwe without electricity for their first 20 years he found it quite amusing the dependency we have in the west for electricity and technology and freely admitted that folks in the west could not possibly cope without the energy intensive push button instant gratification consumerist society.

But human beings are known for their ability to adapt and survive.

I suspect that many North Koreans don't even have proper shoes much like many did before the introduction of electricity during the beginning of the 20th Century. North Korea is just a very poor country that can barely feed itself.

BTW it doesn't even need a man made EMP incident. Nature is fully capable of inflicting a similar result as an EMP but with much wider scale impact.

What is quite worrying though is the dismantling of the robust fall back technologies such as the post office and local banking branches and other services which were so useful before the introduction of the Internet and the information surveillance society.

Many houses in my City were built pre 1970s (typically from the 1890s) and still have fireplaces and chimneys which could be re-opened and used with a little effort. A cast iron wood/coal burning stove could be very useful though.