How technologies change behaviour
The Slot Machine in Your Pocket: How Infinite Scroll Rewired Your Attention
The man who invented infinite scroll now can't stop checking his phone — and he designed it specifically so you couldn't either.
The Idea
Aza Raskin, a designer at Mozilla, introduced infinite scroll in 2006 as an elegant solution to a clunky problem: the interruption of clicking 'next page.' Remove the friction, let content flow continuously, and the reading experience becomes smoother. It worked. Within months, every major platform had adopted it. What Raskin didn't anticipate — or rather, what only became visible later — was that the friction he removed wasn't just an annoyance. It was a natural stopping point. A moment where the brain could ask: do I want more of this? Without that pause, the decision to continue is never consciously made. You don't choose to keep scrolling; you simply haven't chosen to stop. This is a behavioural trap with a precise name in psychology: the operant conditioning loop, refined by B.F. Skinner in the mid-20th century. Variable reward — reward that arrives unpredictably — is far more compelling than consistent reward. A slot machine pays out randomly, which is exactly why people keep pulling the lever. Infinite scroll applies the same logic to content: the next post might be funny, moving, infuriating, or irrelevant, and the only way to find out is to keep going. What's underappreciated here isn't that social media is 'addictive' — that's become a cliché. It's that the addiction was an emergent property of a design decision made for entirely mundane reasons, not a deliberate plot. The behaviour change was architectural before it was intentional.
In the World
In 2017, Raskin went public with his regret. Speaking at a conference, he estimated that infinite scroll alone costs the world roughly 200,000 hours of human attention every day — a figure he arrived at by calculating the average extra time the feature adds to each session across major platforms. He has since co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris, an organisation dedicated to documenting and reversing what they call 'the race to the bottom of the brain stem' — the competitive pressure that pushes platforms to exploit psychological vulnerabilities more aggressively than their rivals. The scope of the behavioural shift is measurable. A 2019 study from the University of Pennsylvania found that limiting social media use to 30 minutes per day — deliberately reintroducing friction — led to significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks. The behaviour hadn't changed because people had developed new values or self-discipline. It changed because a constraint was imposed from outside. This mirrors what happened in reverse when the scroll was made infinite: the environment changed, and behaviour followed, largely without conscious participation. Apple and Google have since added screen time dashboards, and some platforms have introduced optional daily limits. But these are opt-in frictions layered onto an opt-out-by-default design. The asymmetry tells you something about where the incentive still lies.
Why It Matters
The deeper lesson here isn't really about scrolling. It's about the gap between the intent of a design and its effect on the people living inside it — and how rarely those two things are evaluated together before a technology is released at scale. Most technologies that reshape behaviour do so quietly, through the accumulated weight of small frictions removed or added. The typewriter encouraged longer sentences. The car made suburban sprawl not just possible but natural. Autocorrect is gradually shifting how people think about spelling — not as a skill to maintain but as a problem already solved. None of these were intended behavioural interventions. They were design choices with downstream consequences nobody fully mapped. For you, the practical implication is worth sitting with: your behaviour online is not simply a reflection of your preferences. It is partly a product of the environment someone else designed, often for reasons entirely unrelated to your wellbeing. That's not a reason for paranoia — it's a reason for a specific kind of literacy. Knowing that friction is a design choice means you can reintroduce it deliberately: a grayscale screen, an app timer, a phone left in another room. Small architectures, built for yourself.
A Question to Ponder
If the environments you move through — digital and physical — are quietly shaping your behaviour without your awareness, which of your daily habits do you actually own, and which ones were designed into you?
Get a new one of these every morning.
Start learning with Thinkable