We Need Radical Tech Legislation: a Blueprint for Reclaiming Our Shared Humanity

We're watching meatspace die quietly and everybody's too busy scrolling to care. Social media, engagement algorithms tuned to keep you twitching, and AI tells you whatever you want to hear, and all of it is replacing the actual presence of other people, and the result is an isolation epidemic nobody wants to name for what it is. The machine is putting us in a prison of screens.

Tech companies aren't going to fix this because their whole business model runs on you being lonely enough to keep opening the app. Maximizing engagement is the same as minimizing your offline life. If we want people back in the same room as each other, we have to stop pretending this is a lifestyle choice and start treating it like the public health problem it actually is. There's no other way to fix this then through a legislation, so here is how you'd legislate your way out of it.

AI companions and social feeds are the trash goy slop of mental pollution. Force hard usage caps, make the thing cut you off. Shut the apps down after a set stretch of time. Companies should have to give people the ability to opt out of algorithms, they would have to actually limit engagement and force the AI to cut you off. This would allow the companies to make their AI less sycophantic because if they have to cut you off anyway they might as well stop kissing your ass. Again this should be legislated.

AI companions should be legislated to operate as a chaperone to talk to other people by text message. It could match pen pals with people in their town, then suggest what NOT to say "are you sure you want to send that?" The AI could ask people about their work schedules and then suggest meeting times and places to get them together. First it would get each person in a pair of friendships with three other people then construct groups of mutuals so that when you go to an event you already know a few people there. They would have to force tech companies to orient themselves to the real world, to real world events, more like Meetup.com. If you're going to talk endlessly to your AI companion it's going to pressure you to talk to real people as well. Maybe the app will even figure out how to match insufferable autistic people with each other or with other mentally ill people who have complimentary personalities.

The video game companies should match you with other players in your city so that you at least have the chance of forming offline relationships. Multiplayer online games will match you with global players only if not enough local people are available.

So localize the internet. The whole promise of the internet was connecting you to somebody five thousand miles away, and the price was losing the guy three doors down. Force games to prioritize local matchmaking. If you're already spending twenty hours a week playing with people in your own zip code, going from "one more match" to "let's get coffee" is a short walk, not a leap. Give people algorithm opt-outs oriented toward real local events instead of an infinite global feed.

Text messaging itself should be eliminated in favor of voice messages. You only receive a text when your voice message is transcribed after 24 hours. You can send short voice messages to people or long voice messages but you can't read what they said for the first 24 hours after which you can search for it or read it.

So kill the silent text. Instant text lets a man sit next to his wife on the couch while carrying on a second life through his phone. Replace it with voice messages, and delay the transcript twenty-four hours — you can send and hear the message right away, but you can't read it until the next day. We need to hear people's voices and understand context and emotion. A text message relationship is not really anything at all. And you can't run a double life out loud the way you can in silence. Only diplomats, generals, spys, and high-ranking people should have access to silent text messaging, only people who need to talk without being overheard by an enemy.

Enforce a digital sabbath. As long as the pacifier is available every hour of every day, people will keep reaching for it instead of walking outside. Turn parasocial apps off two days a week. Boredom is the friction that gets people out of the house, and losing the feed for forty-eight hours is enough to send people back to diners, art shows, and actual neighbors. Nothing makes people meet their neighbors like boredom and inconvenience. The day the power goes off is the day you meet all your neighbors, and 9 months later there's a surge in women giving birth. It is not an overstatement to say that staring at screens all the time is massively destructive to birth rates. Civilization has to go on and that means controlling the technology that controls us. Teleoplexy, which is the idea that the machines will become independent of us, is probably an optimistic delusion. It's more likely that we will just die off until all that's left is the Amish and other groups that actually assert agency over tech.

People will hate this at first but so what. They got used to seatbelts and indoor smoking bans, and every real public health intervention gets fought before it gets adopted. But once it's done it will be unthinkable to go back to the world before it. The old and more fulfilling dopamine sources come back and nobody wants to go back to the isolated world before that. There's a reason in The Matrix movies the 90s are considered "the peak of human civilization" by the machines. Even answering machines were better than this.