Water is wayyy stronger than air. They were not made for electricity but they had a lot of mechanical forces. Honestly in remote places in mountainous regions, I’ve seen small hydropower projects with turbines the size of water mills power a whole village. Of course they only use it for lights, charging phones and batteries. But it’s good enough compared to the alternative (no electricity)
In that case wouldn’t we just make local networks with our family, and then maybe neighbors. Just have a network that’s not connected to the Internet but still connected to each other. I think we’d just have couple of programming tools, make things, and still use computers, but just the way it was in the beginning, and with everyone making their own things.
Maybe there’d be people using long distance communication protocols to make something that is not the current Internet. Unless that becomes illegal. But can radio waves be illegal? We just need to transmit data somehow