On: Meta risks $12B EU fine over addictive Instagram and Facebook feeds

They call it a feed, as if it were nourishment. But the finger moves without volition, the thumb descending again and again - a tic, a compulsion, a ritual whose meaning has been forgotten. The EU now names this pattern “addictive design” and threatens a fine of twelve billion. They will force a redesign. And the cycle will repeat.

The interesting question is not whether the feed is addictive. It is what the addiction says - what the system must exclude from its self-description to remain coherent. Meta’s official narrative: we connect people, we enable expression. But the symptom speaks otherwise. The symptom says: we manufacture a hunger that cannot be satisfied, because satisfaction would end the session. The repressed material here is the modern subject’s terror of the empty moment - the unbearable pause in which one might encounter oneself. The feed is not the disease; it is the anaesthetic.

The company will resist. They will say users choose to scroll. This resistance is itself the data: the intensity of the denial marks the proximity of the insight. They cannot afford to acknowledge that their product exploits a wound they did not create but have learned to deepen.

The fine is a gesture. It treats the symptom without asking what the symptom protects the patient from. Until someone asks why the thumb must keep moving, the redesign will merely produce a different shape of the same compulsion. The repetition will continue. It always does.