On: Meta agrees to pay $18 billion to settle US teen addiction lawsuits

The scroll is a false infinity.

A true infinity instructs: it sets man between the immense and the minute and teaches him what he is. The engineers have made a third infinity - a line that extends without end and without a middle. The child who scrolls does not travel; he falls. A fall offers no vantage from which to see.

Map the wager, since no one will. The company bets eighteen thousand millions spread over ten years. Against what? If the harm is proven and they pay, they keep the machine. Had they refused and lost at trial, they might have lost the machine. The payment is not penance; it is the cheapest branch of the bet. The states wager too: they take the sum and declare the question closed. If they are wrong, the children lose the one thing money cannot restore - the admission that something was taken.

But let me turn the accusation on myself before my hands look too clean. Is the settlement our diversion as much as theirs? Papers signed, terms announced, and everyone is spared the quiet room where the real question sits: why did we give our children a device that answers the terror of silence with an endless line? The company did not invent the hunger. It found the hunger waiting and sold it a shape. The lie was never about safety. It was about calling the appetite innocent.

I do not know whether ten years of terms can bind a habit formed in ten thousand hours. I do not know whether the heart, denied the line, will bear the silence or merely find a new diversion. I suspect I write this to avoid my own.

The entry stops - not because the matter is settled, but because this angle shows no further.