This is an interesting idea: Voting on the norms of society even if not strictly enforceable. I would love a referendum on tipping in my American state.
The proposed solution that at least 54% of this village have recognized is that the internet has really eroded societal bonds. The optimization of everything, coupled with the easy on-demand connection provided by phones is a big problem for society. It's like eating cake all the time, its easy and feels good in the moment but it will likely have negative societal impacts.
I'll speak for America, but I am sure it isn't unique here. The optimization of everything to short term profit & loss coupled with phones has made society pretty unpleasant.
- Grocery stores have removed handles from bags and most tellers.
- Extremely uniform big box stores are primarily all that are left
- Shopping is fully online
- Workers have been reduced as much as possible to automata in low status jobs.
- Due to the quality and quantity of data, of all goods are priced to the absolute max society can bear and wages are suppressed to the extent possible as well.
- Connection with society is primarily done through a screen and id ephemeral
I could go on. The point is that in concert, this has seriously changed our society even if any single change alone would be positive.
Phones are simply a symptom of a society that is lonely and disconnected and a biological psychology that makes adaptation to this change hard/impossible. It's not neccesarily negative, but we will see how this shapes society when gen-z and gen alpha are in their 40s.
Interestingly the article mentioned that some young people raised an
objection that they had "nothing else to do" without their phones.
In response the mayor promised new investment into sports, recreation,
libraries and book sharing... In other words, there's more going on
here than just the "phone ban", but a broader attempt to reconnect and
rehumanise the village life.
My concern is that even with the social and financial will to restore
a more convivial lifestyle, those young people won't be able to
engage. Having been raised by screens they are already so
psychologically altered (damaged?) as to be lost.
The assumption that life can "go back" may be misguided, and that
makes this an experiment worth watching.
Here's an article discussing a recent law change here in NZ banning phones from schools. The upshot seems to be that more normal human relationships come back pretty quickly, although this is still very recent so it's hard to tell definitively.
Amazing. Adaptation at work. Hard to believe how well that
went. Bookmarked for further research, thanks. Maybe that explains a
deep fear latent in the tech industry. That in reality someone could
say "Enough. No more smartphones!", and a whole generation could just
turn around and say "Okay. No worries. What's next?"
I’m pretty sure (like 99%) that you can unlearn social media and phone bad habits if forced to with minimal fuss. Just go on a month long camping retreat (sans screens) and you’ll see how quickly we adapt.
Your perspective is as always refreshing and unique. Thank you :) I hope to do my reading outside of jail and I still haven't installed TikTok and never will but I think my kids would be happy to agree with your position (probably minus the jail bit too).
It was once said that the only time in a man's life that he will be able to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time is in jail. So I had someone send it to me and of course I was released the next day.
p.s. I exaggerated slightly, it took me 3 days before I installed TikTok. I'd watched silly viral videos that appeared on the news for years and so I was intrigued about it. I've loved it ever since. Just gotta get it set up right so your filter bubble is what you're into. I get half my tech news from HN and the other half from TikTok.
I used to read 500 books in a single summer as a teenager. I don't know how much free time you have in prison, but I can totally see doing 800 books in just a year or two.
Heh - confined for the summer gives a bit of an incentive, sorry about that.
All the same it's a high number, .. I'm guessing more than a few were light pulps and the best you could find given the library at hand?
I read a lot of books, several thousand, from 12 to 17, and kept a log of them - later I worked in (and led) a team that digested a few thousand technical documents a day (with a heavy dose of computer assistence to find|pick out key parts), there's a lot of material you can fly through quickly and not miss much, there are rare books that can take a year or a lifetime to fully digest and finish with.
I would have classed myself as a bookworm when I was younger, but there's no way I could have read anywhere near that many books in that timespan. I would say that whilst I believe you, you're also an extreme outlier with that figure.
Not dissing your idea, which is accurate, but I can't not-find it funny to then remark that most Americans couldn't even take a 2 week vacation without cheating with sick days.
My thoughts are that sure, when you are living and working alone, as
happens to many of us at times, it is possible to successfully apply
"force". Like making objects of temptation unavailable, maybe using a
time-locked safe or taking a week away at tech-detox bootcamp.
IIRC Johann Hari in "Stolen Focus" seemed to think this only ever
created a temporary relief, a bit like dieting and then gaining
rebound weight.
What I wrote about in Digital Vegan was based on my interaction with
heroin addicts, and is all about the friction that comes from peer
pressure and groups that reinforce (mutually enforce) behaviours.
Friends are a bigger problem than self-will in the arena of addiction.
External force, even in peer relations, tends to have the opposite
effects.
We did the same, but only because a medium-sized city in a Midwest state offered nothing for young people to do. We could go bowling or go to the movies.
Last week I met friends at a board game cafe / bar (I live on the west coast now) and there were tons of college students enjoying coffees and beers and pizza. There was still alcohol, but it wasn’t the point of the evening. When I was their age, we got loaded to forget / escape our boredom.
What I’m saying is that there’s a positive outcome that can be reached through community investment.
> there were tons of college students enjoying coffees and beers and pizza.
So what are High School students supposed to do? They often don't have the money to go spend to hang out someplace, and even if they did, can they actually get there? Maybe with an hour of transit time each way or with a friend's parent who can drive them.
The complaint of "I don't have anything to do without my phone" is probably coming from a younger group than College Students in general.
given the epidemic of sexlessness and general delay of adulthood among young people I don't understand the demonization. Smoking, drinking and getting into some trouble have been important rituals for a long time for a reason.
Now we've traded it in for solipsistic, depressed, pill hooked anti-social teens because of an obsession with health at the cost of everything else. The pandemic of course did its part to accelerate that trend. Hitchens anticipated it a generation ago.
Your body will recover from some stupidities in your teens and young adulthood, having your mind glued to your phone instead of having a real life for your formative years, not so sure.
I think that as long as a) the effects of the measure were well communicated and b) there were no significant impediments to actually voting, then the percent that vote is immaterial and the result of the vote should stand for everyone.
After all this is the way the US conducts its elections. Many elections have very low turnout, yet the results are binding.
I think there's a difference between the result being binding, and that the vote stands for everyone.
Abstaining leads to your opinion not being represented, which is to be expected. It doesn't follow that therefore other people's vote hence represent you.
For the vote mentioned in the article, which is non-binding, non-enforceable, and ridiculous in its scope, I'd guess that most abstainers' real opinion on the matter, is that it's a waste of their time to participate.
People have their own reasons for silence, even when a referendum is nonbinding. Interpreting that silence as consent or approval is the moral equivalent of a bulldozer.
Either it will negatively affect the bottom line and stop, or diners will get used to it and it'll continue.
Or it'll actually boost profits from people having the menu on their phone for dine-out ordering, allow the restaurant to update pricing more easily matching their costs, and of course the savings from not having to print physical menus.
I just play dumb and ask for a physical menu, claiming that my phone broke this morning. Adapt the experiment for the number of people. With 2, the other one might say "and I'm out of battery". 3 could be "mine I forgot at home". And 4+ people are already too many to reasonably expect customers to share a single phone between them all.
It's all just a social experiment which hopefully ends up trickling up and making owners aware how stupid it is to expect everyone to bring a phone in their pockets in order to being able to order food.
Some times it's not even a lie: as part of mentally cleaning up from an intense addiction to social media, I've forced myself into offline mode and purposely leave the phone at home from time to time.
One time my phone was getting terrible reception in the restaurant, and couldn't download the way-too-big menu file. I ask the server for a paper menu, and apparently they'd went all-in on paper-free, so no menu for me. Instead, the server had to present their iPad to me so I could see all the software buttons for the items I could choose from as they scrolled through. Ridiculous. The next time I went they had paper menus.
It's for fun. I just want to have them making the effort to realize that they shouldn't drop physical menus altogether.
Also some times I didn't feel like doing the theatrics, and upon asking for a menu, they'd say "it's there in the QR code, please scan it" and leave me to it, as if they had done a good job. Not on my watch!
As a counterpoint, most people use their phones daily while sitting on the toilet and very rarely sanitize it. You may be diligent in keeping it sanitary but the past 50 people who kept their phones on the table while reading the menu probably didn’t (and the wet rag the bus person wipes the table down with probably doesn’t do much either).
I do not believe that most people use their phones on the toilet at all, much less daily. It would be incredibly stupid to risk dropping your phone in the toilet just so you have something to look at for the <1 min it takes to do your business.
I just dealt with this the other day. One of my favorite restaurants kept the menu "books" but when you opened it up it just had a QR code. Tease... So I went to the counter and asked for a paper menu, which they provided. While my friends are struggling to figure out the online ordering system, I ordered directly through the waiter. All seems to be well and I'm feeling smug. Then my friend comments that they can't figure out why there is another item on their order, an item that just happens to coincide with what I ordered. facepalm So I ask the server to put it on a separate tab, to which they responded "I already did." Ok... So we'll have to figure this out later. After I eat, I walk up to the counter since I don't expect to receive a paper bill from the server as everything seems to be online now. I ask to pay for my meal, and they say they don't have any such item open on the tab. facepalm I walk back to table, and later my friend and I go back to the counter so they can show the staff that my item is on their tab. We can't figure it out with the staff, so we decide I'll just pay my friend for my portion. Except my friend's tab is already closed apparently and my item wasn't on it? Gah... Third time's the charm, I ask the server for my check, which they bring out. It has a QR code to pay online, no chance I'm messing with that. I walk to the counter, present the bill, and the server is able to ring up my tab. Way too much hassle associated with just ordering and paying for food. I suppose next time I know all the dance moves required for things to go smoothly, but I came to eat, not dance. Grrr....
I love how if you pay for your whole grocery order on Amazon with food stamps (because you are below the poverty line) Amazon still recommends you pay a minimum $10 tip from a debit card on your order.
Nothing is more American than taking government money and then not paying your workers enough on top of it requiring your customers to determine if your workers receive a fair wage or not.
It's like how CA taxes you on your unemployment insurance income.
I'd like to see some expansion of some of the points. I'll take a stab at a couple of them related to shopping.
First, in a physical store, if I wasn't familiar with that location I'd often have to pester a store employee for information of where a product is located. Now I pull up the store's app and it tells me the aisle and often bin location. Saves me time, lets the staff do their regular job (stocking shelves, etc), and it works out good for people who have a difficult time navigating social interactions with strangers.
Now the negative of this -- stores can have less staff (as they aren't getting pestered as much), and the staff they have doesn't really have to know the products that much (so you lose out on a 15 minute talk with a retired plumber working the plumbing aisle at the hardware store, getting sage advice). Flip side of that is sometimes you can get better advice by looking it up on your phone, but quick internet research isn't something that everyone is really good at.
Online ordering -- yes, I can now get access to things that were never available to me before (unless I happened to be in a very high population density area that could support certain specialty stores). Years ago I had always wanted to try something like Vegemite, and finally ran across a very small jar in a World Market store in the city. Now I can order multiple jars of the stuff on Amazon for a reasonable price.
The negative of this is once I needed an air filter for my lawn mower (about 10 years ago or so?). Craftsman mower, so I went to Sears. Couldn't find it on the shelf, grabbed an employee, they looked it up on their computer and basically ordered it for me on sears.com and had it shipped to my house. Had to wait a few days instead of fixing my lawn mower right then (like my Dad would do back in the day, by grabbing a needed part from the local small town Ace Hardware or similar). Heck, I couldn't even get a headlight switch for my (at the time) 10-year old truck from Autozone without ordering it. (But today I'd just model it and 3D print the thing).
Most of this is just "things were better when I was young". It's nostalgia for a past that might have had some advantages for some people, but was also worse in a lot of ways.
40 years ago if you lived in a small town and had nerdy or niche interests, you were mocked, bullied, and socially isolated from your peers. Now you can find thousands of other people who share your exact passions and interests and connect with them through the internet.
The status quo is always defended by people who are well adapted to it. But the status quo doesn't work for everyone. The internet age is making life a lot better for a lot of people who were previously marginalized.
I'm sure that when Gen Z gets old, they'll be nostalgic for the good old days of TikTok and Instagram. They won't understand whatever new VR metaverse their children live in, just like Boomers and Gen Xers don't understand the current situation. It's a story as old as time, but the world will move on and continue improving.
This is also what comes to mind with all of the "just go out and socialize like the good old days" suggestions. Being an introvert I'd still rather just stay indoors and enjoy my niche hobbies, if anything I'd be less social due to not being able to meet people with similar sets of interests to share spur of the moment thoughts with.
Hell, the way I got even more into tech (in the very early smartphone days) in the first place was because my friend group - which isn't easily changed when you're not an adult - was not very accepting of my hobbies/interests. I still remember the mocking I got for not being able to match the quality of a AAA game or mocked for tinkering with electronics by people who were 100% confident in their opinion that cheap earbuds would spontaneously explode.
There's also the mention of asking for directions instead of using map apps, have we already forgotten how frustrating an experience it used to be, trying to find a place, getting vague and often wrong directions, circling around the same place until finally getting the right directions?
The proposed solution that at least 54% of this village have recognized is that the internet has really eroded societal bonds. The optimization of everything, coupled with the easy on-demand connection provided by phones is a big problem for society. It's like eating cake all the time, its easy and feels good in the moment but it will likely have negative societal impacts.
I'll speak for America, but I am sure it isn't unique here. The optimization of everything to short term profit & loss coupled with phones has made society pretty unpleasant.
- Grocery stores have removed handles from bags and most tellers.
- Extremely uniform big box stores are primarily all that are left
- Shopping is fully online
- Workers have been reduced as much as possible to automata in low status jobs.
- Due to the quality and quantity of data, of all goods are priced to the absolute max society can bear and wages are suppressed to the extent possible as well.
- Connection with society is primarily done through a screen and id ephemeral
I could go on. The point is that in concert, this has seriously changed our society even if any single change alone would be positive.
Phones are simply a symptom of a society that is lonely and disconnected and a biological psychology that makes adaptation to this change hard/impossible. It's not neccesarily negative, but we will see how this shapes society when gen-z and gen alpha are in their 40s.