Give Chris Hayes points for honesty. The left-wing MSNBC host has a new book out, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. In it he makes a proposition: We spend too much time on our cellphones, and the government ought to prevent that.
“There are some basic approaches one could imagine,” Hayes writes, “a mandatory, legislated hard cap on, for instance, the number of hours of screen time on our phones, or perhaps something tailored per app.” Of course, “immediately you can imagine both the logistical problems—needing to answer a work email while running an errand only to find your screen time has run out—and deeper political and philosophical problems: Wouldn’t this be an intolerable assault on our cherished freedoms?”
