So, the central conceit of my story is that one day in the modern times, everyone on Earth over the age of 13 starts getting superpowers. While some of them are possible to remove (but only if replaced by others), there are a few that everyone’s stuck with permanently whether society likes it or not. And unfortunately for the entire fabric of modern society, one of them is the ability to disable any and all technology just by looking at it.
If you have this power, you are able to take any point in space you can see and make it the center of a spherical energy pulse 10 feet in radius that instantly turns everything in it monochrome and inert for an hour. By inert I mean that electricity doesn't flow properly through it, chemical reactions don't take place, and it won't burn, melt, freeze, boil, sublimate, or even change temperature. This effect lasts an hour, and all living creatures (whether they be humans, other animals, or plants) are immune, and in fact anything that enters their bodies will instantly be brought back to normal. Also, while you can use it while looking through a telescope or other such method of vision augmentation, the power's effective range is still only a little further than the height planes fly at, and telescopes and the like do not change that.
To be clear: Everyone over the age of 13 has this power, and there is no way to get rid of it.
The purpose of this is to allow me to keep the rest of the superhuman powers I give people at a reasonable power level without having to deal with the question of why people would use them to fight instead of guns and tanks and such. But it also obviously has fascinating implications for worldbuilding.
Now due to this power and other simultaneous circumstances, modern infrastructure is heavily damaged in the ensuing chaos, and the new status quo should make it painfully obvious to anyone who knows what they're doing that rebuilding it as it was almost certainly won't be worth the time and money.
But that just raises the question: Once humanity rises up from the chaos and starts making serious attempts to rebuild again, how would they design their new societies to account for the fact that everyone on Earth could shut off any technology they can see with a glance?
Obviously planes would be impossible. You'd have to block out the sky itself for it to ever be safe to fly a plane again if anyone watching the sky could send it crashing down to Earth if they felt like it.
Public highways also would almost certainly be a thing of the past. Technology-dependent transportation would have to be underground, restricted to essentials only, and regulated and policed and vetted to make sure nobody could bring it to a standstill. But what would such a system actually look like?
But I think the biggest change would be to how buildings are built, powered and wired. I figure that at first the people with generators or solar panels or other off-the-grid power systems would build walls, or at least hollow frameworks to put tarps on, around their houses to defend from anonymous malicious eyes, but I have fewer ideas about how the later professionally from-the-ground-up buildings would be designed. Would public power grids even be feasible? Would personal per-building power generation become the new normal? I just don't know enough about construction and infrastructure to say for sure.
Note: the internet and long-distance communication in general would not be affected. Since I need these things to still exist to justify why there are still standardized and generally agreed upon names for each power (because otherwise it would be ridiculous and frustrating), I added a bit of alt-history sci-fi satellite tech that basically phased out most of the necessary terrestrial infrastructure for wireless technology to operate. While servers for websites would still need to be powered, servers don't need any larger infrastructure to communicate with client devices. And phones don't need anything at all to work but the satellites and another phone.