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I don’t think it would work unless you can seriously curtail the democracy and liberalism involved. The general conceit of democracy is that people can and should be making all of these decisions themselves. But it also means that those people will almost always vote for things that make them feel good rather than what is actually good for society. The People, it seems tend to think like teenagers when the votes are aggregated, and thus you really can’t say no to allowing stupid people to ruin their lives or no to allowing whatever dangerous, destructive, or socially harmful thing that the public has decided it really wants to do.
In the past, limitations of technology and communication prevented things from getting too out of control. In the past, you might not find out about an important bill until it had already passed. You thus couldn’t weigh in on it. If you did, you were limited to telephone calls (and you’d have to know the name of your congressman and how to find the switchboard number) or mail (which took longer and again required you to know who to address the letter to and to know the specific bill you want to pass or fail). Now you have instant access to the information and you have access to those government officials in your social media, and thus weighing in is easy.
In everyday life as well, I think limited options because of technology were a benefit. When you could only gamble in Vegas, in an actual casino, there were natural limits to how much gambling you could actually do. Unless you live there, you can only afford to go there a few times a year, for a week or two at a time, and then you had to leave. Now that the casino is in your pocket, blowing all of your money is easy. You don’t need pants, let alone to fly to another city. Anywhere you happen to be, if you have a phone with the app installed, that place is a casino. And it’s the same with other things like shopping. It’s much easier to overspend when everything on the planet is offered for sale in your pocket, any time and place you want to open Amazon.
I feel like really the biggest problem of modernity is the degree to which it allows people to engage in their Id with very few restraints and how good it is in removing both physical and social barriers that held those Id impulses in check. I think this is the thing most people have a hard time dealing with. Not that they cannot cognitively understand that some Vice is a bad idea. People know gambling, porn, overspending, overeating, and overuse of screens are bad. They just need a bit more of a natural limitation on getting access to those things. Personally I think even for high functioning people, having natural friction around doing those kinds of things is helpful. For lower functioning people, it’s a losing battle as they keep indulging in bad habits because it’s just so easy to do.
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