The Tyranny of the Feed

There used to be a bottom to things. You read the newspaper and at some point you reached the back page and you were done. You watched a show and the credits rolled. The end was built into the object. It told you, gently, that you could now go and live your life.

The feed removed the bottom. Not by accident — by design, and at considerable engineering expense. An infinite scroll is harder to build than a finite list. Someone decided that the absence of an ending was worth paying for.

A current, not a place

We talk about going on a platform as if it were a destination, a town square, a library. But you do not arrive at a feed. You enter a current. It is already moving when you get there and it will keep moving after you leave, and while you are in it, it does the one thing currents do: it carries you somewhere you did not choose.¹

The genius and the cruelty of it is that each individual moment feels like a choice. You chose to keep scrolling. You chose to tap the next video. At no single point were you forced. And yet the aggregate of all those tiny consented-to moments is an outcome no one would choose on purpose: an hour gone, a vague unease, nothing to show.

Freedom at the level of the swipe can add up to captivity at the level of the afternoon.

The cost is not the time

People defend the feed by doing the math on minutes. It's only twenty minutes a day. But the time is the cheap part. The expensive part is what the feed does to the shape of your attention even when you are not using it.

After enough scrolling, a strange thing happens to silence. A queue at the coffee shop becomes unbearable without a screen. A walk feels incomplete without a podcast. The capacity to be bored — which is also the capacity to think, to notice, to let an idea finish forming — gets quietly trained out of you. You become a person who reaches for the phone in the half-second pause, and the half-second pause was where the good thoughts lived.

What I actually do about it

I am not going to tell you to delete everything and move to a cabin. I like the internet. I built a website. Instead, a few small structural changes that have held up:

• Put a bottom back. I read newsletters and RSS, which end. When the unread count hits zero, I am done. The feeling of done is the whole point.
• Make the friction asymmetric. The apps that want my attention should have to ask twice. Logged out by default. Off the home screen. A few seconds of friction is enough to break the reflex.
• Protect the pauses. The queue, the walk, the waiting room — I try to leave the phone in my pocket and just be bored. It is uncomfortable for about ninety seconds and then it is wonderful.

None of this is a moral position. It is closer to ergonomics. The feed is a tool optimized for someone else's outcome, and you are allowed to hold a tool differently than the way it wants to be held.

The bottom of the page is right here. You have reached it. Go and live your life.