On: Facebook and Instagram must stop ‘addictive’ features causing infinite...
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.