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

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.