It's really a relatively old disaster theory. I remember Winn Schwartau, of "Information Warfare" "fame", lecturing about it on stage at Summercon in 1997.

Later, in ~2009, I attended a NIST workshop for "smart grid" standardization right after Chu was nominated to lead DOE. It was mostly incredibly boring, with IT people from power companies talking to product managers from smart grid companies. Except that it seemed like every working group had at least one rando who was in no way associated with any actual smart grid concern who kept asking us to discuss EMP issues.

I think the generalized concern is, we're living in "an increasingly technology-dependent society", and if technology is suddenly taken away from us, we'll collapse into anarchy. It's the same narrative as Y2K.

This is a flavor of the Y2K narrative that seems, for some reason, to be heavily politicized.