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

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?