What technology will survive the coming collapse of civilization?

[BigV]

I'm gonna prefect my fermentation and distilling skills.

Liquor's not going out of style, and it is fungible. I can drink it, I can trade it, I can use it as a disinfectant or as firestarter.

[gvidas]

Neon.

I'm not aware of any other sort of electric lamp that a reasonable number of living people know how to manufacture on a small, local scale with simple technology: all you really need are glass tubes, relatively pure neon/argon/mercury, heat (forced air natural gas torches), and a good vacuum pump. It happens to be energy efficient, also.

The components themselves (glass tubes, transformers) strike me as fairly impervious to EMF, too, if you're worried about some sort of nuclear devastation/sunspots knocking things out -- I think you'd have a better chance of scrapping and salvaging neon than a fluorescent system, anyway.