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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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