Modern society pulls towards more efficiency.
- Modern society pulls towards more efficiency.
- Efficiency creates fragility.
- If the machinery is hyper optimized, just throwing a few grains of sand in can slow it down a lot.
- In the context of High Frequency Trading, there's the concept of the Tobin tax.
- Make it so each transaction has a tiny tax on it.
- Just enough to make it so people who are transacting for extremely small time horizons have less incentive.
- Amazon famously found that every 100ms of delay translates to 1% of revenue.
- So what if things that most people regret doing, we introduced just a little bit of slowness.
- Not a ton, but enough to create a society-wide shift.
- ScreenZen has a feature where when you open one of the apps you feel addicted to, it won't launch it for 10 seconds.
- That cooling off period is just enough time to think, "no, I don't want to do this right now."
- Imagine a process to democratically discover the emergent regret score.
- The products that people use but regret using.
- Having a small tax – monetary or friction– could help align society's desire.
- Rewilding the social fabric.