Around eight in the morning, a certain silence descends on a subway car, with dozens of people standing shoulder to shoulder, thumbs moving, eyes fixed downward, and no one fully present. Now that it’s so prevalent, it’s easy to overlook, but things weren’t always this way. Strangely, the person who made the change in the architecture of our attention has been attempting to apologize for it for the past few years.
His name is Aza Raskin, and he created what he called infinite scroll in 2006. It was essentially a straightforward technical solution designed to eliminate the annoyance of clicking “next page.” Perhaps too well. Since then, Raskin has stated in interviews and in court in Los Angeles that he had no idea what would happen once social media companies got their hands on it. He likened the experience to filling a wine glass without ever seeing it reach the top: your brain never receives the signal to stop, so you just keep drinking.
You remember that particular detail. It’s such a modest, domestic image—a dinner table, a wine glass—for something that has completely changed the way billions of people spend their evenings. Raskin has acknowledged that he once had to create his own software in order to overcome his tendency to disappear into bathrooms during dinner in order to scroll. That sounds almost confessional, and it’s difficult to ignore how infrequently tech innovators discuss their own inventions in this manner.
Although it took some time for neuroscientists to clearly explain the psychology underlying all of this, it is not mysterious. It turns out that dopamine has nothing to do with pleasure. Anticipation—the space between wanting and getting—is when it spikes the most. For decades, slot machines have taken advantage of this; the lever only needs to pay out sporadically. With the exception of the fact that the device fits in your pocket and the lever is your thumb, Infinite Scroll uses the same wiring.
It’s the accountability that has changed more recently, not the psychology. Meta and Google were found negligent by a Los Angeles jury for creating apps that were designed to make kids addicted. A Santa Fe jury came to a similar conclusion a few days later and awarded $375 million in damages. The figure seems almost symbolic when compared to the billions in quarterly profits these companies report. But in this case, symbolism is important. Platforms have been hiding behind Section 230, which protects them from liability regarding user content, for years. By concentrating on how the apps were developed rather than what users posted, these cases completely avoided that defense.
During his testimony in the New Mexico trial, Raskin told jurors something worth considering: browsing YouTube or Instagram isn’t a fair contest between your willpower and a feed. He claimed that thousands of engineers are conducting hundreds of millions of experiments on the other side of the screen, honing the product in opposition to your own psychology. That isn’t a metaphor. Because engagement affects stock price, bonuses, and competitive position, internal company memos that surfaced in litigation appear to demonstrate that executives understood exactly what engagement-maximizing design was doing and decided to keep it.
The truth seems messier than that, despite the temptation to present this as a morality story with obvious villains. It is reasonable for tech companies to claim that there is no official clinical diagnosis for “social media addiction,” and that teenage mental health is too complex to be attributed to a single app. The American Psychological Association appears to agree that the picture is mixed, pointing out that developing brains may be more susceptible to the pull of variable reward loops than adult ones while acknowledging both risks and benefits.
Even so, there’s a sense that this has permanently changed the way we discuss app design in the future. It’s genuinely unclear if these verdicts will survive the appeals process. However, thousands of similar lawsuits are reportedly still pending in court, and even a strong precedent might compel product teams to reevaluate features that were previously thought to be untouchable.
Raskin has proposed small fixes, such as the intentional reintroduction of minor friction, a pause button for the feed, and something akin to the page break that infinite scroll silently removed almost twenty years ago. It’s unclear if platforms will truly implement anything along those lines. Seldom do businesses offer to reduce the stickiness of their products. However, there is an odd and fitting irony in the possibility that the man who eliminated the page’s bottom will ultimately persuade an industry to reinstate it.
