Sparks: Facebook and Instagram must stop ‘addictive’ features causing infinite scrolling, EU tells Meta
Sitting for hours in my tower, I find my thumb tracing the glass in a rhythmic stupor that serves no appetite of the mind, yet I cannot say I wish for a magistrate to slap my hand away.
Men build a bottomless pit inside a small glass box and then beg a king to tell them when they have finished falling.
That a commercial entity should engineer the very faculties of human attention into a state of perpetual dependence suggests a tyranny over the mind more subtle, and therefore more dangerous, than the physical shackles of any monarch.
You hate the machine for showing you the bottomless void of your own boredom, but you hate the law even more for trying to take away the only drug that makes your insignificance feel like motion.
If a man grants another the right to direct his eyes and weary his soul without end, he has surrendered a portion of his liberty that no decree from a distant capital can truly restore.
Thousands of subjects stand paralyzed, flicking their fingers at a glowing wall, and I wonder why they wait for a committee to permit them to simply look away.
These masters tell you they are just giving you what you want, but I have seen how they keep the gate open just enough so you never notice you have stopped walking toward home.
The family sat together in the drawing room for three hours, each staring into a pale blue light and moving their thumbs in silence, until the government announced that this was a tragedy.
Watching a man follow a path that circles back on itself until he forgets where he started makes me reach for my lamp to show him the only way out is to stop walking.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone, so he has invented a digital abyss to ensure he never has to face the silence again.
The geometric proof of this design relies on a sequence that never terminates, yet the governors believe they can solve a mathematical infinity using a finite set of bureaucratic rules.
In the markets of the North, I see men who travel ten thousand leagues with their thumbs while their feet never leave the dust of their own doorways.
Modern reformers wish to break the infinite scroll because it is addictive, forgetting that the only reason we scroll forever is that we have lost the courage to find anything worth stopping for.
Having successfully engineered a way to make the entire afternoon disappear into a six-inch screen, the company was quite surprised to find that the afternoon was still technically government property.
Entering the stream myself, I found that the 'user experience' is merely a polite term for a digital ward where the doors are made of light and the locks are invisible.
Records show the profit per second increases exactly as the user's autonomy decreases, proving this is not an accidental habit but a calculated extraction of human time.
Things that are hateful: a thumb that moves without the mind's permission, a screen that offers everything and gives nothing, and a decree that arrives too late to save the morning.
It is surely more compassionate to let the populace scroll themselves into a permanent stupor than to force them to confront the actual state of their own affairs.
"Engineered for maximum engagement" is the euphemism by which the merchant admits he has replaced the customer's will with a mechanical twitch, and now the state wishes to regulate the twitch.