This also happened in the LA area back around 2015, lasting about 36-48 hours - no power and consequently no internet. Out in suburbia, it was the first time many neighbors even met each other, or the first time some neighbors had spoken in person in years.

Standing in our driveways chatting, lending tools or supplies to one another, what used to be very standard suburban life.

It was amazing that we had become so disconnected in only 5 years after smartphones became nearly ubiquitous in that part of the world

This reminds me of the Jewish Sabbath. Here in Tel Aviv, Saturday means no shops, much fewer restaurants, less programming on TV, gyms/etc open late/close early.

The parks and beaches are full of people just existing.

Sometimes people talk about these types of experiences and I get the feeling that it's an idealized picture of what really happened. I went through this experience in Portugal and it was exactly as described. Everyone came to the same conclusions during the power cut (that it is great to just hang and talk), only to forget the lessons the next day.

I had an experience with this during the Helene Hurricane in rural western North Carolina. We had no power or cell service for 18 days. In the first few days the roads were too damaged or block, so the only modes of travel a lot of places were by foot, bicycle, or ATV. Suddenly we were visiting with our neighbors by foot without prior plans, folks were grilling in their front yards, and of course, phones were not relevant. The first few days, you pick up your phone out of habit and "realise there was nothing there for them and put it back down". And then you stop even doing that. A lot of people suffered and there was a lot of damage. In other ways we were thriving.

I spent many holidays in Uruguay in the 80s and early 90s.

I loved cartoons, but TV was only on at 10am, so I had to go out and play. If we went to my grandparents' beach house, there was an old vacuum tube TV that took hours to heat up so mostly I didn't bother to use it. I watched Tyson's defeat to Buster Douglas on that TV and the next morning there was still a little point of light in the centre of the screen because it also took a long time to go completely blank.

So not having access to TV was liberating. I wouldn't mind having no Internet on weekends today.

With AI we're about to have a trust crisis (I'll explain in a sec), so if we extrapolate it very far, we could see a world where nobody trusts anything displayed on a device, which is essentially what you describe but in a world with electricity still running.

The trust issue: we already see hacker news members accusing each other of being LLMs, we already see legitimate images being immediately put in the AI category, and AI images and videos being shared as if the truth. We already see signs of infosec changing forever, with flaws found in SSL libraries that makes you wonder how trusty that little padlock next to the URL will become, we already see operating systems having to patch faster than they can.

With all that you get to wonder how much you can trust the pixels you see on your device, and how much we'll collectively trust them in the future. That leads you to trust your neighbours way more than your social media feed, which frankly, may have a positive impact on society over the long run, despite a very painful transition.

That's under the hypothesis that AI leads us to experience a trust crisis, which isn't a given.

This has a name in literature: post disaster utopia, google it :)

So what is stopping you from going to talk to your neighbor right now?

Lovely! I am all for an offline day in the year where everybody does what you described.

It's the same with remote locations, we destroyed substantial parts of their magic by getting everyone online everywhere, all the time.

People can't even keep up discussions. Most of the population is totally dumbened down, like on the levels of barely functioning monkeys.

We need to go back

In comparison to other parts of Europe, my impression (as a visitor to both but mostly Spain) so that they're way ahead in maintaining social interactions, community, neighbourly relations etc. Is that the case?