Facebook and Instagram must stop ‘addictive’ features causing infinite scrolling, EU tells Meta

The EU’s decree arrives like a diagnostician’s note on the institution’s chart: Cease the addictive designs, halt the infinite scroll. They mistake the symptom for the disease. The platform’s endless feed is not a feature but a compulsion - a mechanical twitch in the system’s muscle memory. Meta’s algorithms do not scroll; they must scroll, driven by a hunger that cannot name itself. The regulators, ever literal, demand the removal of the bandage without asking why the wound refuses to heal.

The company’s defense will be instructive. Should they resist - and resist they will - their protestations will be measured in legal filings and PR platitudes. But if the objection grows shrill, if they deploy armies of lobbyists to defend the scroll’s sanctity, we will know: the EU has grazed the repressed truth. That the platform’s architecture is not merely addictive but narcissistic, a mirror endlessly reflecting the user’s fragmented attention back upon itself. The scroll is the system’s dreamwork, condensing the user’s longing for connection and the corporation’s hunger for engagement into a single, unbroken gesture.

Repetition compulsion, again. How many times must they redesign the feed, only to resurrect the same compulsive mechanics under a new name? Each iteration a disavowal: This time, we shall scroll without consequence. The EU’s intervention is the analyst’s quiet interjection - Observe how you circle the same void. But institutions, like patients, are adept at transforming insight into further resistance. They will comply in letter, not spirit. The scroll may slow, but the underlying compulsion - to capture, to hold, to consume attention - will find new skin.

The real question is what the system cannot afford to acknowledge: that its entire economy of engagement is built upon a void, a hole where genuine relatedness might have been. The infinite scroll is not a bug but a message from that void, a communication from the repressed awareness that connection, in this form, is impossible. The EU’s ruling treats the symptom with all the finesse of a surgeon removing a mole while ignoring the tumor. Still, even such crude interventions can be useful. They force the institution to confront its own repetitions - and in that confrontation, the repressed stirs.

Things that are hateful: a scroll that never ends. A garden path laid in a circle so the feet never arrive. A banquet where the dishes replace themselves before the chopsticks are set down, so the diner forgets the taste of what was eaten.

They call it a feed. As though it nourished. The word itself is the lie - the thing that fattens nothing, that fills no sleeve, that leaves the hands emptier than before.

The continent’s governors say Meta must alter these designs. I read the word “addictive” and understand it to mean: made to hold the eye past the point of pleasure. A screen engineered so the thumb does not rest. This is not craft. Craft is the lacquer bowl that knows when to stop, that gives the hand back to itself.

Things that are elegant: a letter that ends. A garden that has a gate. A poem that stops at the third line because the fourth would be too much.

What I cannot forgive is the presumption - that attention is something to be harvested, like reeds cut and bundled for someone else’s roof. The scroll was meant to carry a painting from one edge to the other and then be rolled and placed in its box. The box closes. The hand lets go. The mind returns to its own weather.

A threat of a fine. Twelve thousand million, the number said. Money measured against the theft of a person’s hours - the arithmetic is obscene. What coin repays a morning dissolved in scrolling? What ledger records the poems unwritten because the eyes were kept moving, moving, never permitted the dignity of stopping?

July 11, 2026

They have told Meta to stop the infinite scroll. The European Union, that vast bureaucratic angel with its face turned toward regulation, has demanded that the feed be made finite - that the thread be cut, that the river be dammed. I read this and think of the arcades: those glass-covered passages where the commodity first learned to display itself under gaslight, where the flâneur could stroll without end, each window a promise, each purchase a postponement. The infinite scroll is the arcade without the stroll - the window that never ends, the promise that never arrives, the postponement that has become the only content.

From behind, facing the wreckage, I see what the scroll accumulates: not commodities but attention, not objects but the time that could have been spent elsewhere, the hours that pile up like the debris of a storm that has been blowing from Paradise since the first advertisement was printed. The EU says “stop” as if the scroll were a machine that could be unplugged, as if the addiction were a bug in the design rather than the design itself. But the scroll is not a feature; it is the architecture of the present. The infinite is not a bug; it is the condition.

And yet - there is something in this demand that vibrates. A fragment of the past breaks into the present: the idea that a space could be bounded, that a walk could end, that a gaze could rest. The EU’s directive is a small, bureaucratic gesture toward finitude. It will not stop the storm. But it names the storm. And in the naming, for a moment, the angel sees what it is facing.