Yet expecting some harsh top-down measure to deal with it is often as useless as expecting the drug addiction epidemic to end if only drugs were illegal. Ultimately we need to not only put effort into hard limits tech-wise for those in exploitative/extreme situations but most importantly developing social awareness and strategies to deal with the issue.
Not having a phone at the dinner table (with family, with friends, etc), for example, could easily become a social norm/taboo, and it already is for most people I know already. The benefit of these rules (vs more aggressive top-down rules like no phones in the venue period) are there can be exceptional exceptions when you really need to be on-call.
While I'm sympathetic to the motivations behind stuff like gov/venue controls for stuff like this, in practice it's usually a much tougher social issue that needs to be nurtured rationally/carefully, with respect towards those tangibly victim to the downsides. We all are inclined to seek cheap boogie men to blame for social issues but we also tend to disregard the downsides of the utility of hard/aggressive rules while simultaneously being fully aware of the natural inclination to bypass such rules when it matters.
Drugs are a poor comparison. I can make many drugs in my basement using cheap and widely available supplies. I cannot make a highly available global network optimized by corporate psychologists to be as addictive as possible.
If we decided to we could have our government snuff them out for good in a single bill.
Not having a phone at the dinner table (with family, with friends, etc), for example, could easily become a social norm/taboo, and it already is for most people I know already. The benefit of these rules (vs more aggressive top-down rules like no phones in the venue period) are there can be exceptional exceptions when you really need to be on-call.
While I'm sympathetic to the motivations behind stuff like gov/venue controls for stuff like this, in practice it's usually a much tougher social issue that needs to be nurtured rationally/carefully, with respect towards those tangibly victim to the downsides. We all are inclined to seek cheap boogie men to blame for social issues but we also tend to disregard the downsides of the utility of hard/aggressive rules while simultaneously being fully aware of the natural inclination to bypass such rules when it matters.