I've been doing some conceptual sketching over the last several weeks, chewing on the limited technology zones idea that I've been working on. (It's not just an excuse for fictional detectives.)
Rather than proposing a single solution, this post covers some of that thinking, to provide you with concepts to chew on.
The Medieval1900/1960s/1990s/2010s/+ tech zone poll was based on a general sense regarding the speed of movement and the speed of information, and noticing that in the year 2000, "the Internet" was still a place you went to (by sitting down at your computer), and not a cyberspace layer that surrounds the planet.
But what, exactly, would "1990s/Y2K computer limits" cash out to? 800x600 pixel resolutions? 800MHz processors?
Just what was this mysterious "it factor" we would be trying to bring back by making computers slower and less advanced?
One way to view virtual reality is that the VR environment has extremely low weight, and is therefore extremely mutable. Any physical good, such as a sports car, can be simulated, and in almost any number, which raises a question: why buy a real sports car when we can simulate them?
People are at risk of getting lost in virtual reality, with simulations becoming more satisfying to them than real life, leading them to underinvest in their real life. We can think of technology as altering the ratio of effort to environment change. High effort is required to move dirt with a shovel. Low effort is required to move the same volume of dirt with a bulldozer.
The assumption behind the zones-by-tech-level question is that beyond a certain point, except for medical technology, additional high-tech development is superfluous, because virtual reality means that nearly arbitrary sensory experiences can be generated relative to an agent's sense limits.
Demand results when the expected value of a change in the environment loops back through the agent, resulting in a potential change in behavior.
The point of video games is to produce a high stimulus feedback relative to the amount of effort. (I read that in an article on GamaSutra once years ago, and it really stuck.)
In a virtual reality environment, reward signals can become disconnected from agent well-being.
Movies, television, and books appear to be less addictive than video games and social media. What separates them? Interactivity appears to be the primary difference.
With this in mind, I was then able to work backwards and develop an intermediate regulatory concept: interaction frames.
With a book, the content is static the entire time. With a DVD, you press a button and then the DVD may play to completion. You might skip back to a previous scene, but there is no need for further interaction.
A paged website is static until you update the page. With continuous-scroll social media, new content is always being added, and at any moment you may receive a notification to get into an argument or that someone liked your post. Video games in general tend to have continuous interaction.
This model does not adequately address the situation, and, importantly, cannot distinguish between a video game and a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel.
We can adapt a concept from gambling: human beings seek mastery or identification of patterns, and the randomness of gambling prevents mastery of the pattern from being achieved. A spreadsheet is very much not random, while loot drops in many video games are quite random!
We could at least measure commands to produce random numbers, or require registration of pseudorandom number generators.
However, this is still insufficiently general. Simulator games may generate complex behavior from simple rules. Are we stuck regulating "game-like elements" by committee? That doesn't sound right.
Still, people do get bored of single-player games, either by mastering the gameplay, or when they get used to the story elements of the game. A visual novel is more like a spreadsheet or a book than like a slot machine.
Also, not all social media seems to be equally addictive. Why were chatrooms seemingly less dangerous than twitter?
There is an anticipation of information gain (informative tweets). There is an anticipation of exciting experiences (someone shows up to fight!). Also, from the user's perspective, it's somewhat random.
In a chatroom, there are fewer people, and they stay for longer. This means that (1) you have more information about them and their positions, (2) you have more incentive to be cordial, and (3) because there is a limit to how much they can have gotten up to while you weren't looking, there is a limit on the anticipated amount of new social information.
On Twitter, there is an endless stream of new people to argue with, and they can show up at any time. You can post about some chalupas you made yesterday, and some lunatic will show up to fight you. Thus, there is always the background anticipation of an (emotionally stimulating) attack.
In a chatroom, if someone would attack you over chalupas, you already know him as the chalupa guy. In real life, an argument is limited by space and time - the chalupa argument ends by default when the bar closes and the chalupa guy is no longer within earshot, and you cannot reopen it until you see him again.
Tumblr is slower-paced, but things like "likes" are continuous, so there is always the incentive to check in to see how your post is doing.
This allows us to get into a model based on food.
There is a dieting strategy involving not buying junk food at the store, so that it is not at your house when you get a craving for it.
This implies that the craving is a temporary impulse or peak, and that it just has to be outlasted. If the craving were uniform, the strategy wouldn't work, because the dieter would just buy the junk food at the store.
(This suggests that the baseline craving for drugs is higher, because drug addicts are willing to take much more extreme actions to feed their addictions, over a longer time period, and that the symptoms for withdrawal (a more constant negative stimulus) are worse.)
So is control in the hands of the agent, or is it in the environment? Is there choice, or not? The dieting strategy appears to split the difference - removing junk food from the cupboard is a kind of prosthetic self-control and willpower shifting. Willpower exists and can be exercised, but is limited, and reserves vary over time. Altering the environment at a point of high willpower can reduce willpower requirements in later contexts, until they are within the window of reliable feasibility.
This suggests a strategy of altering the digital environment to enable users to act on meta-preferences for prosthetic self-control.
For social media services, this suggests regulations imposing new usage modes. For example, it might be required to provide access to third-party user interfaces, which might do things like hide the number of likes. Alternatively, a user might receive all the tweets from a specific set of accounts as a daily summary. Since social media companies require revenue, this access might be a paid service based on average foregone ad revenue. It's a matter that would require a good deal more consideration.
For other items, as part of a broader social movement, we might imagine users being able to buy dedicated hardware. Attempting to control interactivity via software requires a great deal more regulation and is easier to bypass. By contrast, we might imagine a hardware module that writes to a virtual canvas at some rate. The user could then scroll the canvas without receiving updates until the next refresh.
The user could buy an appliance device with built-in limits, similar to not bringing junk food home from the store.
If social media makes people insane, then refraining from social media is pro-social, but suffers from a coordination problem.
However, that's more speculative. More broadly, this is about the liberal concern of consent under capitalism, and what it means to consent to technology. There are two considerations, in tension.
If you have to either use a technology or be homeless, then can you really have been said to have "consented" to the technology?
On the other hand, why should everyone else be expected to subsidize some guy using a horse and buggy?
Maximization of pattern efficiency is likely to be hostile to the continued existence of the human species, not that differently from how hard drugs distort and kill people. On the other hand, insufficient pattern efficiency means reduced production, which may mean making hard moral choices and having wasteful suffering that could have been avoided.
(Regulated capitalism is actually pretty good about consent relative to production levels, compared to say, feudalism or command economies.)
The conventional liberal response is a universal basic income - this neatly ties up many questions of consent by removing the greatest point of leverage - but this is problematic, as it involves redistributing labor to able people who may not be working at all. I've been working on an alternative based on "universal basic land," but I'm not satisfied with it yet. The essential idea is that land and materials are scarce, while labor (directed effort) and capital (configurations of materials) are variable. If life support (sunshine, air, food, water) is guaranteed, then trade is a net benefit (rather than resulting in potential gradual loss of life support due to lack of leverage).
