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GDP is higher if free time of people is spent staring into magic soul stealing mirrors.
Maybe. Anyway, not that our society is able to regulate predatory business practices.
Am writing this squatting in the downstairs bathroom in the family dacha. It's 0130. I should have already showered. Got an urge to check Twitter.
A bad habit, costs me 10 hours a week, at least. Payoff ..well, I can usually tell you tomorrow's headlines. Useless, really.
Another ten minutes of my life gone.
I really think a big part of the next 50 years is going to be a screens equivalent to puritan prohibition movements.
The way we use the black rectangles with absolutely no restraint is literally killing us and turning us insane, and the natural reaction to new pressures like that has always been the apparition of new religious norms.
Maybe those creepy AI videos of Master Chief and Batman telling you not to watch porn are onto something.
Zero Theorem is proving more prophetic every day.
Porn would be a problem even if greenscreen command linw and bitrates of 10 kilobit were the pinnacle of interface. People out there have fucked up their brain wiring through erotica alone. True, it's a rare person who reads.
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The trouble is that simple prohibition doesn't work for screens. I could go cold-turkey on using screens for movies, video games, social media, chats, and silly Motte arguments, and maybe my life would be better on net or maybe it would be worse, but it'd still be a reasonable life. But if I went cold-turkey on using screens for paperwork (paying bills, hiring contractors, making purchases) or personal research (figuring out what's worth getting a bill for, what contractors to hire, what products to buy) it would be a massive inconvenience, and if I went cold-turkey on using screens for work-work I'd be fired. "Never drink alcohol" is a reasonable Schelling point that makes prohibitionism a conceivable ideology there. "Never use screens" isn't.
Maybe there's some equally clear Schelling point I'm missing, a bright-line rule under which e.g. having some stupid argument about climate change on Facebook would obviously be avoided but hitting up the IPCC reports page or having a kind chat with old friends on Facebook wouldn't? I'd love to know what the rule is. And by that I don't mean "I'm rhetorically challenging the possibility of it existing", I mean "if it's good I'd like to try it out for a week or two".
I do fear that I should be rhetorically challenging the possibility of a clear and unambiguous rule existing, though. Perhaps in 50 years the problem will have been solved, not when we come up with a simple rule, but when we just have a population of people who avoid draining all their time and sanity into screens because of cultural or genetic selection bias. Young people at that point will be the ones for whom two or three generations of their parents had constant access to pocket screens and were resistant enough to the downsides to form stable families anyway.
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