The Infinite Scroll Is Eating the World

Prior to 2006, you would read to the bottom of a web page, and that would be it. The end. Unless you clicked on some link to surface more content. And then, an entrepreneur named Aza Raskin introduced the infinite scroll to his Humanized Reader app and social media feeds were never the same. Pages became bottomless. Content frictionless.

Who would have thought that innovation-- that feature release-- would end up eating the world?

To set some context, a few years after the Global Financial Crisis, Marc Andreessen, software developer, Silicon Valley investor and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz , declared "Software Is Eating the World." He made the case that everything that could be digitized would, and that investors had undervalued technology companies. Software had eaten books and movies and communications. It was coming for cars and just about every traditional value-chain industry, blurring the line between the physical and the digital.

Andreessen proved prescient. We've seen a meteoric rise in software companies' valuations in the thirteen years since the post, and we've seen almost every company in every industry try to be a software company. Software is no longer eating the world. It's eaten it.

But the world, eaten as it may be, somehow keeps spinning, and now software's offspring, in this case the Infinite Scroll, have started chewing. Understanding what's now eating the world explains, at least in part, how we've landed in this liminal space, disoriented, divided, and searching for meaning.

Infinite Game Theory

In 1988, James Carse, a history and literature of religion professor at NYU, distinguished finite games, like chess and basketball, from infinite games, like business and global politics. Finite games have a structured set of rules. They end with a winner and loser. Infinite games, on the other hand, never end. In Carse's model, players in infinite games don't seek power; they "display self-sufficient strength."

Thirty-three years later, Simon Sinek built on Carse's concepts in The Infinite Game. Sinek implores leaders to embrace an infinite mindset, and suggests that those who don't, will see their organizations go the way of Blockbuster, eaten by software or whatever other carnivorous force the markets unleash on the world. Finite players in infinite games make poor strategic choices, exhaust their resources, and exit the game.

Infinite games are not about winning this month or this year. The object is to stay in the game. To get better. To innovate. On a personal level, we aren't competing with our Porsche-owning brother-in-law or that suck-up angling for a promotion. We're competing with our past self.

Andreessen, I suspect, would agree. Software ate the world in part because of creative destruction. Infinite mindset led to disruptive innovation. New business models delivered more value at lower cost. Finite players like Blockbuster and their franchise owners became meals to be carved up, chewed and digested.

Stepping back, game theory studies the strategic interactions among rational agents. John Nash asked a series of questions and built mathematical models to answer them. How do people behave when competing against others for scarce resources? When do they cooperate? What happens when they don't? Over time, what becomes of the Common Good?

We're now living in the punchline of a joke.

Question: What do you get when you cross a John Nash mathematical model with a Simon Sinek bestseller?

Answer: The Infinite Game Theory

Nash and Sinek have collided, and the Common Good doesn't seem to be faring so well. Some might even call it a tragedy. Part of Sinek's infinite-game checklist requires institutions to have a just cause. In this collision of seemingly infinite players, we've lost that plot point. Or we've rationalized our just cause to feed our need to grow, a seeming prerequisite to stay in the Infinite Game.

The Infinite Scroll happens to be the perfect innovation to understand Infinite Game Theory. It's eating the world. All of it. All of us. One not-so rational actor at a time. The Infinite Scroll and its ravenous appetite have cast us into this liminal space. If war defined the Greatest Generation and protest defined the baby boomers, The Infinite Scroll might be the defining feature of The Liminal Age.

The Infinite Scroll is Eating Our Mental Health

College campuses, once a carefree space where pupa-like humans went to find themselves, explore their independence, engage in a broader discussion with the world, and figure out what they might want to do for a living, now feels more pressure cooker than petri dish. There's a race for internships, a contest to see who can be most involved, and a feeling that everyone else has life figured out.

Kids talk openly about grades in ways that my friends and I never did. The students I interact with are an impressive group, driven and smart. They care about one another, and they worry about the planet and the future. They're also overwhelming counselors' offices, riddled with anxiety and depression.

Parents are at a loss. They've read about the correlation between phone use and this spike in depression and anxiety. Chances are, they've read about it on their phones. The toothpaste's out of the tube. If a parent takes her daughter's phone away, won't that contribute to her social isolation? Make her feel like even more of a social pariah? And how will they stay in touch at a time where communication is so vital?

They blame themselves, and they're not alone in doing so. The same experts who cite phone usage also call out a shift in parenting styles. Children, they say, are overscheduled and over-protected, shuttled between structured activities with limited free time. When they are free, they can't go outside and play. Who knows who might be out there? They've filled most of this free time with social media use, potentially scrolling unsafe content in the supposed safety of their bedroom.

Parents might frown upon this activity, but they also have to look in the mirror. Thirty years ago, Robert Putnam alerted the world that we were Bowling Alone. We've all graduated to Scrolling Alone.

But maybe there's an upside to this. For years, we stigmatized mental health issues. Generations didn't deal with their pain. Some turned to alcohol and drugs. Others acted out on those closest to them, establishing or perpetuating a cycle of trauma. So many suffered in silence.

Maybe we can leverage social media for good, help kids (and adults) struggling with depression and anxiety by exposing them to others challenged in similar ways. Let them know they're not alone and give them some strategies to combat their runaway thoughts.

We've learned about the power of vulnerability. Maybe social media can help eliminate the stigma and propagate coping strategies. Kids and parents can learn about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). They can learn from other kids who face similar challenges. It has to help them to know that they're not alone. That other kids feel like they do. This could be a powerful story of how democratized information can naturally, frictionlessly flow to those in pain.

Except studies show that more information and more examples aren't curbing the depression and anxiety. Quite the opposite. Volume and exposure seem to be amplifying the issue. Some posit that removing the stigma related to mental health has caused teens to see symptoms in themselves. Friends and influencers are getting likes and positive comments for opening up. Kids are prone to see some of those same issues in their own life. Who hasn't been sad or anxious about something? Psychologists dub this Prevalence Inflation. Depression and anxiety have become part of the identity for a critical mass of scrollers and posters.

But there's another phenomenon at work that might not seem so obvious. When someone works with a therapist, they not only have a trained clinician helping them process their feelings and offering coping strategies, they also have timebound sessions. They cross a threshold to enter a therapist's office. Or in a post-pandemic world, they log into a zoom call. Either way, there's a beginning and an end. It's a safe space for them to explore and learn. A safe space to process their complex emotions. Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at USC, and Derek Thompson talked about this on a recent episode of Plain English.

By contrast, when the algorithms serve up mental health-related posts and videos, there's always another post or video. There's always another hashtag to follow or influencer to watch. Always another hack for getting through difficult this time. A different way of framing the problem. The algorithms don't actually promote anyone processing their problems. They feast on rumination.

We live in the time of the Infinite Scroll. We enter this liminal space that has no real beginning and no end. Ever. Just more content to consume. Frictionless, bottomless content. And, from the perspective of the companies tuning those algorithms to optimize attention, more eyeballs to sell.

Ride a subway or glance around a coffee shop or look around during a tv timeout at a basketball game. We're all staring at our rectangles, effortlessly thumbing upward so we can be entertained or outraged or moved by the next posts in our feed.

It's no longer software that's eating the world. It's the Infinite Scroll. It's eating our brains and it's eating our mental health. We can't get away from it, and yet we all know it's making us miserable. We're stuck, and the algorithms know what people who are stuck like to look at.

Stuck is a terrible place to be.

We are sense-making creatures. We are drawn to stories that follow Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. Stories help us learn lessons, and we use them to establish our own identity. Campbell tells us that archetypal stories end with the hero returning to the known world with some elixir. In The Liminal Age, not so much. Every time we tap that TikTok icon, we enter a liminal space not designed to help us process anything at all. Instead, it's optimized for rumination. The more stuck we get in rabbit holes, the more eyeballs and the more monetization of those eyeballs.

The Infinite Scroll is eating our mental health one thumb swipe at a time.

So how did we get here?

The Infinite Scroll Is Eating Our Middle Class

Aza Raskin did not understand what he was unleashing on the world. In fairness, if he hadn't invented it, someone else would have. It's too perfect a device for our devices. Too perfect an embodiment of The Infinite Game Gone Wild.

In a GQ interview, Raskin said, "Infinite scroll was one of many things that I was working on and that's the one that everyone knows me for. It'd really suck if I get to the end of my life and the thing on my tombstone was like, 'He scrolled.' The assumption that making something easier to use is better for humanity was dismantled by that invention."

Raskin now spends his days advocating for humane and ethical uses of technology. He and Tristan Harris warn of the addictive nature of these tools and evangelize the ways we could be leveraging these technologies to nudge people toward pro-social behaviors. Or better yet, how we should regulate these technologies and re-shape our relationship with them.

But Moloch, a phenomenon called out by beat poet Allen Ginsberg, has other ideas. To understand the infinite scroll, you need to understand Moloch.

The basic premise: there are times when individual actors operate in their own interest even when they see a broken system or recognize that their actions will contribute to an eventual negative outcome. When multiple individual actors behave in this fashion, a race to the bottom ensues.

Experts call this a multi-polar trap, and it often results in what's known as the Tragedy of the Commons. If I have an option to stop polluting a lake, but it will cost money, and I suspect none of my competitors will make the investment, I'll likely rationalize skipping the investment. The lake (in this case a common good) loses, and I sleep well, thinking that the alternative would be to go out of business.

Ginsberg named this phenomenon Moloch after the Hebrew god of child sacrifice. In so doing, Ginsberg gave it agency, showed how Moloch controlled systems that no one else seemed control.

Moloch takes over these complex systems, robbing all those affected of hope. Without coercion, no one will clean the lake. Moloch presses good people to rationalize, "If I don't do it, someone else will." Or profit-motivated people to rationalize, "We're making some tradeoffs, but on the whole, we're doing a lot of good. People love our product. And a lot of people, shareholders and employees, are depending on us to hit our subscriber target."

And once you see Moloch at work, once you see the power and danger of the infinite scroll, you see it everywhere. You see that the Infinite Scroll was taking shape long before Raskin.

The Infinite Scroll has been eating the corporate world and eating the middle class for decades.

In their early days, software companies shrink-wrapped their product and sold it in stores like Best Buy or Staples. Or they deployed salesforces and integrators to install enterprise software on companies' servers. But as bandwidth expanded and the internet grew in size and scope, companies determined that they could distribute their software over the internet. More than a new distribution approach, this enabled a new business model. These companies could deliver updates on a regular basis and expand their offerings to a now-captive audience. They could deliver software as a service (SAAS) and employ a subscription model.

Instead of paying $139.99 for a product, people could pay $5.99 a month and get the benefit of a constantly improving experience. What's not to love?

Nothing if you're an investor. The market started tracking something called Annual Recurring Revenue-- Infinite Scroll on a financial statement. Earnings would be more predictable, less dependent on some big-bang next release with complicated and expensive upgrades.

And software companies loved it. They didn't have to pull rabbits out of hats every few years with some new software version, and they didn't have to hold their customers hostage with threats of support for older software going away. They could limit the customizations companies did to their product, making upgrades simpler.

Moloch loved it too. Companies would surrender their data to the cloud and become more dependent on these SAAS providers, who realized their leverage and expanded their margins. They sold licenses for future seats and changed their support packages to further shake their customers' money trees. Growth, growth, and more growth. If you were a customer, you'd better keep paying that subscription, only you derived limited real advantage because all of your competitors felt compelled to "unlock" the same value.

And to feed the growth machine, software players needed more employees and more perks. Nicer office space to compete with those other digital players who were serving freshly caught barramundi in the cafeteria. And they needed to deliver more value faster, lest Wall Street fall in love with the next SAAS start-up.

Moloch cranks up the speed of the treadmill, cycles come and go, hiring binges lead to mass layoffs. All of this feels pretty normal.

But along the way, there was a shift to platform business models. Innovation and optimization conspire with network effects to make sure that the rich get richer. Kids exclude the android-owning boy from their group text because they don't want their messages to turn green. If you want to interact with friends and family, you'd better be on Facebook because that's where they are. Software platforms that were supposed to democratize information and opportunity instead wipe out industries and give the spoils to the few.

The top one percent of VC firms. The top one percent of influencers. The top one percent of authors. The top one percent of podcasts. Retail stores close while apartment building lobbies fill with Amazon packages containing beauty products that Moloch convinces us we need.

The top one percent of the top one percent really loves it. They set the game up to not only gather the spoils, but retain those spoils, sliding in favorable tax status for their capital gains, establishing carried-interest loopholes, and employing lawyers and tax specialists to ensure they keep as much of those spoils as possible.

It's hard to figure out how to regulate this emerging space, especially when congress doesn't understand the business model (cue video of 84-year-old Orrin Hatch, chair of the Senate Republican High Tech Taskforce, asking Mark Zuckerberg how he expects to "sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service." https://youtu.be/n2H8wx1aBiQ?si=k7-hcW867evY1Voz ).

Capitalism with appropriate light-touch regulation has been instrumental in building our middle class, distributing the gains in a Gaussian bell curve fashion. Not so much when the Infinite Scroll starts eating the world. That bell curve flattens, and the distributions go to the top few percent. Gaussian curves give way to Pareto distributions.

And Moloch belly laughs, because in a game controlled by Moloch, even the apparent winners aren't happy. They're convinced that they should get more, and they know that their position of power depends on further tilting the board in their favor. Only the paranoid survive, they tell us, quoting Andy Grove, one of the early arrivers in Silicon Valley.

So, they tilt. They deploy lobbyists and they buy upstart competitors. They forget that many of their products have been built on the backs of taxpayer dollars. DARPA and NASA paved the way. Now, they see the government as the problem. An obstacle to surmount.

And even if Orrin Hatch doesn't get it, Eyeballs as a Service (EAAS) turns out to be a lucrative business model. A seemingly infinite growth model.

All hail the Infinite Scroll.

The Infinite Scroll Is Eating Our Children

These races don't just live online and in our economy. The Infinite Scroll is eating our children. Consider this: For the first time in 70 years, fewer kids are playing recreational sports. How is that possible? In an age where we've limited unstructured play, aren't we shuttling kids from one practice to the next?

Some of the answer seems obvious. Time spent on phones or time spent gaming is time away from rec sports. But there are deeper forces at work.

Twelve months a year, some variation of the following conversation plays out across the country.

Parent 1: What are you doing this weekend?

Parent 2: Standing on the sideline of a lacrosse field for seven hours on Saturday and Sunday. Gonna be 90 degrees.

Parent 1: Ouch. That sounds miserable.

Parent 2: <Name> thinks he wants to play in college, and this is one of those showcase tournaments, so he's pretty nervous.

Parent 1: I'm sure he'll do great.

Parent 2: Not sure he's getting any money even if he plays. I've gotta get a hotel room and pay the club dues. We're driving up to New York to play a bunch of teams from within twenty miles of us.

Parent 1: I guess you gotta feed the Youth Sports Industrial Complex. <Chuckle> Does he like his team?

Parent 2: Just switched to this club. Coach seems okay, but he doesn't really know these guys. And I don't know the other parents. Super awkward.

Parent 1: What time do you leave?

Parent 2: Five a.m. Can't wait.

I've been on both sides of this conversation. And let me be clear: sports can be an amazing experience. It can teach grit and teamwork and can be a creative outlet and a lot of fun. On the flip side, too often, the above story ends with the kid deciding he doesn't want to play lacrosse in college or the kid not getting recruited by colleges he thought would recruit him or going to play in college only to realize he wants to be a college student, not a Division 1 athlete who barely sees the field.

You could substitute field hockey or softball or AAU basketball for lacrosse. There's a similar industry built around competitive contemporary dance, and I suspect plenty of other "hobbies." It's the same conversation.

Earlier and earlier, clubs are pushing kids (and parents) to specialize. When I was lacing up my sneakers, baseball happened in the Spring, soccer in the Fall and basketball in the Winter. I played with and against kids from my neighborhood. We had one or two games a week and one or two practices. We'd meet in the backyard most days after school to play nerf football or ride bikes or stare at clouds.

No more. Once your nine year old decides she loves softball, she has signed up for the Infinite Scroll of 12-month softball. Maybe there's a winter stretch with no tournaments and a break from practice, but that's when all of the other kids are working with their hitting coaches, so she'd better get in that batting cage. That fast-twitch, upper-cut swing isn't going to teach itself!

What happens if you don't have the means to cover club fees and hotel rooms and private coaches? If you're lucky, there's still a rec league in your area, but none of the travel kids are allowed to play and many of the most engaged parents are now sweating on the sidelines of those travel tournaments. Hence, the drop in rec sports.

Gaussian distributions turn Pareto. The opportunity divide widens.?Ivy league coaches fill their bloated rosters with full-pay-tuition kids who have been participating in travel water polo or AJGA golf or club squash since they were five, and we all decry the unfairness of the system. How can these schools favor the elite?

Parents, like me, remember playing multiple sports. Seasons existed. We share video clips of college coaches saying how much they love kids who play multiple sports, but these same college coaches drive to turf-field complexes to watch showcase tournaments on a July morning, knowing that's where the best kids will be. What are they supposed to do? Their rival coaches will all be there. It works for the best college teams and the best clubs (or at least the most well-funded).

It doesn't work for those on the long tail in that Pareto distribution.

Those same dynamics play out with tutors and academic opportunities and essay coaches. The top 1% of colleges have endowments larger than the remaining 99%. The elite send their kids to prep schools and onto the Ivy League while long-tail families struggle to pay for college and long-tail colleges struggle to survive.

The Infinite Scroll is eating our kids' childhood, we're watching it happen, but we don't want our kid to be left behind.

As a consequence, we're leaving the majority of kids behind. That doesn't bode well for our standing in the world. Nations fall when inequality grows.

The Infinite Scroll Is Eating Democracy

Sounds like it's time for our Democracy to spring into action. Surely our politicians see this widening inequality, and surely they understand Moloch. They have to understand the rise and fall of empires-- that rising inequality leads to populist uprisings and eventual regime change. Surely they'll do something to curb the appetite of the Infinite Scroll.

Alas, the Infinite Scroll has been eating our political system for at least fifty years. Elected officials used to reach across the aisle to legislate. There was a healthy tension in the air, but the system was built of the people for the people and by the people.

Moloch had other plans. The day our elected officials take office, they have effectively started their next campaign. And to start that next campaign, they'd better start fundraising. And that fundraising isn't really to support their own beliefs. It's to play their role in the Duopoly.

If you've ever made even a modest donation to a candidate, you know what I mean. Texts calling you to action come at all points in the election cycle, most preying upon some fear that the other side is ending democracy as we know it. That's what gets the clicks and that's what brings in the dollars.

Twelve months of fundraising. 24/7 campaigning. Infinite. Scroll.

Our primary system favors the most extreme candidates. If you want to motivate the base, you'd better get as far Left or as far Right as you can, particularly in heavily gerrymandered districts. Maybe these candidates just have to play the game to get through the primary. Maybe they'll moderate their positions once it's time for actually governing. Alas, it's an infinite game. If someone steps out of line and, god forbid, votes their conscience or their country over their party, they'll almost certainly face a well-funded primary challenge from someone even more extreme, who will always put party above progress. Those who vote their conscience say goodbye to public life, hoping to get a job at Fox News or MSNBC. Infinite Game Theory.

So if our remaining elected representatives only vote the party line, who sets the agenda for the party? That's where Moloch and the Infinite Scroll (sounds like a Harry Potter sequel) have converted our Democracy into a Plutocracy. We've allowed lobbyists unfettered access to our representatives. The parties have turned those representatives into fundraising machines. And Citizens United has essentially legalized bribery. Our representatives have no term limits, and monied interest works to install increasingly partisan justices for potentially lifelong (near infinite) appointments.

The War on Terror and the Cyber War have changed the nature of Geopolitics. On the one hand, we can see a significant drop in war-time casualties since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the globalization of our economies. Or we can realize that the nature of war has shifted. It's no longer an event in a theater with a beginning and an end. We're in a constant state of War, infinitely scrolling the cyber risks and ever-vigilant of the next disinformation campaign, the next potential terrorist attack. War Games are Infinite Games.

The Infinite Scroll might be eating much of the world, but I fear it's fully digested our political system, gluttonously feasting on the expense accounts of Big Oil and Big Agriculture and Big Tech and Big Whatever.

The Infinite Scroll Is Eating our Physical Health.

Big Whatever includes Big Healthcare, Big Pharma, Big Legal, and Big Insurance.

In the past 150 years, life expectancy has doubled. We can thank the magic of science and the power of free markets. We've seen the eradication of so many childhood diseases (diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever) and other infectious diseases (cholera, tuberculosis). We've greatly expanded the food supply and increased access to potable water. Infections that used to kill us now run their course after a round of antibiotics.

But while we've made tremendous progress against acute conditions and communicable diseases, we still struggle to address chronic conditions. Peter Attia categorizes these into The Four Horsemen of Death, labeling them: "Atherosclerotic disease (comprised of cardiovascular disease and cerebrovascular disease), Cancer, Neurodegenerative disease (Alzheimer’s disease being the most common), “Foundational disease” ? a spectrum of everything hyperinsulinemia to insulin resistance to fatty liver disease to type 2 diabetes."

We haven't ignored these conditions. Quite the contrary. Our healthcare system has sprung into action. We spend more to treat these conditions than any other nation, and we've seen a steady rise in our expenditures. In the below chart, the US is the pink outlier line racing above every other nation's line.

We are the wealthiest country, so we should spend more. Right? Only our outcomes are not improving-- people in other developed nations live several years longer on average. The US does not make the top 50 countries in terms of life expectancy and finishes dead last in most cohorts of rich, developed nations.

And our spending is projected to continue. This has a lot to do with our aging population, but it also has a lot to do with the physical condition of that aging population.

People are living longer than ever, but they're also living with chronic conditions that can be debilitating and require expensive treatment. Moloch loves it. Our healthcare system treats the symptoms of chronic diseases, and lets the Infinite Scroll offer up diet and exercise hacks that turn out to be ineffectual fodder for more scrolling.

And that healthcare system has developed its own version of the Infinite Scroll. Big Pharma, the most profitable industry this side of Big Tech, has figured out how to deliver Symptom Relief as a Service (SRAAS). Sometimes this can turn criminal, like the pill mills that surfaced in the last few decades. More often, it's legal and profitable. A cynical person might suggest that our healthcare system needs people to grow old with any number of chronic ailments requiring daily pills.

Gotta hit those earnings targets.

The Infinite Scroll Is Eating Our Leisure Time

There must be some escape from all of this, some place where we're free of the Infinite Scroll. Maybe we can look to Carse's finite games. We're a sports-crazed nation who loves our timed affairs. We love a structured contest between two rivals with a clear winner and loser. Maybe these finite games can offer us respite.

When I was a kid, I'd watch the Philadelphia Eagles most Fall Sundays at 1:00. There would be another NFL game at 4 and Monday Night Football. Those were optional, but my team almost always played during a three-hour window, 14 Sundays a year. Every once in a while, the Eagles would play a playoff game or two and the city rejoiced.

No more.

Now games happen on Thursday night and Sunday night. Sometimes teams fly to London so they can broaden the international audience and capture some Sunday morning eyeballs. And we add Saturday games as the college football season winds down. You can buy the Sunday Ticket and not miss a game or tune into RedZone, a channel dedicated to scrolling through every game. You'll never miss a touchdown. No commercials to interrupt this infinite scroll.

NFL Network and ESPN will fill in the blanks during the week with talking heads debating blitz packages and player personnel moves. Gotta make sure we know who to start on our Fantasy team.

The season has been stretched by four weeks (adding three games and a bye), and the league has added extra playoff rounds. But at least there's an off-season, right? Kind of. You can watch the draft combine (aka, the Underwear Olympics) and see your favorite college stars run forty-yard dashes while draft gurus release the seventh version of their mock draft, and then we get to watch the real draft, now stretched over three prime-time sessions.

Let's face it, though. The NFL (and all other sports, college and pro) no longer market to the draft-watching, jersey-buying, talk-radio calling lunatic who can't understand why his team doesn't use a jumbo package and commit to the run. They've jumped into bed with Big Gaming and gear everything toward the fan scrolling across apps with game updates, hoping Justin Jefferson catches more than 4.5 passes in the first half of the Thursday night game while watching the ticker to see how many assists Jokic has.

The Infinite Scroll has eaten the NFL, the NFL Fan and the NFL media.

And to fully capitalize on this infinitely scrolling growth market, football can't really afford to have an off-season. That's why it's so important that the XFL and the USFL have merged to create the UFL. Fear not, infinite scrollers will be able to bet the over and watch the Arlington Renegades square off against the San Antonio Brahmas on either Fox Sports or ESPN during the NFL "off-season."

We get more football, MGM smooths out their earnings, the NFL signs a partnership with the league to test new rules, and media companies have new products to market. Everyone wins, right? And don't worry, every time the league markets some new in-game bet, they publish a number for people with gambling problems to get help. What could possibly go wrong?

Football might be the extreme example, but the same infinite scroll mindset is eating our movies and our books. Producers green light franchises and authors hawk series. They need that revenue stream to stretch out beyond the initial product.

In 2024 alone, we'll be treated to eight movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But the fun doesn't stop there. We get to experience spandex-clad heroes and anti-heroes in books and television shows and at amusement parks.

The Infinite Scroll also doesn't stop with what's been green-lit for the big screen. We had a brief cord-cutting period where we were going to free ourselves from Big Cable. Now, we're on the hook for 5.99 to 15.99 to Apple and Hulu and Paramount and Peacock and Amazon and Disney and Netflix and whatever other media company wants to play this infinite game. Linear TV is dying, and the Infinite Scroll is slathering it in host sauce. Big Streaming has entered the chat.

Seventy years ago, the world relied on Walter Cronkite for its television news. We collectively mourned JFK, and we knew it would all be okay because Uncle Walter told us so. Forty years ago, our news sources expanded to Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. Thirty minutes a night for these sober white men to explain the world.

But that was too finite. Enter CNN and the consumerization of news. And then enter CNNs competitors. We needed 24-hour news. Some way to make the OJ trial keep us riveted during the down periods. A way to scare us into thinking predators were after our kids. A way to make sure we all stayed indoors and watched more 24-hour news.

Ted Koppel said, "We used to give people the news they needed, whether they wanted it or not. Now we give people the news they want, whether they need it or not."

The infinite scroll has eaten our news programming and spit it out as soundbites to try to retain viewers in the face of the actual Infinite Scroll personalizing content and stealing those viewers away.

The Infinite Scroll is eating our entertainment dollars and eating our entertainment industry. It's eating "art" and it's eating news and it's eating our wallets, one $9.99 streaming service at a time.

The Infinite Scroll Is Eating Our Jobs

In some respects, none of this is new. Industrialization and mass production brought on a quest for efficiency and productivity. The Second Industrial Revolution kicked that into a higher gear with Frederick Winslow Taylor introducing time and motion studies to optimize worker output. Artisans of the pre-industrial age became cogs in the industrial machine.

I'm reminded of the famous scene from I Love Lucy where Lucy and Ethel take jobs at the candy factory. Early on, Lucy says, "This is easy." Ethel responds, "Yeah, we can handle this okay."

But the candy keeps coming, and the machine picks up its pace, scrolling faster and faster until they can't keep up. Lucy sticks candy in her shirt, hides it in her hat, eats a few pieces. She looks at her friend, and says, "I think we're fighting a losing game."

Who knew I Love Lucy offered such searing social commentary?

When they hear their supervisor approaching, they scramble to hide all of the unwrapped chocolates. Lucy stuffs several in her mouth and more in her hat, which she places on her head. Her boss tells them they're doing splendidly. Their reward? The boss yells off-camera (perhaps to Moloch), "Speed it up!"

There's a difference between work in the time of I Love Lucy and work today. Lucy and Ethel went home. Their shift ended. They might have been playing a losing game, but, for them, it was a finite losing game.

For an increasing percentage of workers, that's no longer true. There's no end to the shift. Emails keep coming. Customers expect answers on a Saturday much as they expect answers on a Tuesday. We keep speeding up the candy machine with no end in sight. To quote Lucy, "We're fighting a losing game."

Productivity has increased since these times, but I'd argue that's in spite of the Infinite Scroll, not because of it. When there's no end to the race, people don't know how to pace themselves. They get less done. They leave work because it's time to leave work, not because they've completed their mission.

I am a big believer in hard work. Discretionary effort built our economy and separates great companies from everyone else. But we've confused infinite-distraction-peppered-infinite work with hard work. Much of the automation has served to distract us more than help us. Email was going to revolutionize communication. We've now been in a twenty-year battle to stop the madness of the inbox. Sure, there have been efficiencies, but I'd bet most of those have been erased by the distraction of people checking their Infinite Scroll 24-7.

I can't wait until artificial intelligence does to the PowerPoint what email did to our inbox. Stay tuned for a world of co-pilots building a billion PowerPoints summarizing Teams' meetings that will be read and summarized by GPT models all saved in the cloud. Cha-ching!

Is it any wonder people are feeling more burned out than ever? Maybe it's not the workload. Maybe it's the lack of boundaries. The infinite Scroll. Maybe it's living in this liminal space, which has blurred the lines between work and leisure.

So what's our answer? Blur more boundaries by working from home. Cross no threshold to signal the beginning or ending of a phase. The Infinite Scroll is eating our work life and eating our souls. It's making us lonelier than ever, and feeding on that loneliness so that we spend more time stuck. Stuck in the Infinite Scroll. Stuck in our station in life. Stuck in our fear and distrust of a system that has let us down.

What Should We Do?

There's been a lot written about the perils of our distraction economy. We are not short on suggested hacks:

• Delete social media from your phone
• Turn all alerts off
• Keep your phone in a different room
• Limit your kids' screen time
• Limit your screen time

Pete Davis delivered a brilliant 2018 graduation speech at Harvard in which he talked about the concept of Liquid modernity (https://youtu.be/qHMHK4i_oLg?si=Z12lSoGVF-76Ns_s ). Davis claimed that one of the defining traits of this generation is that we've been given so many choices and the algorithms are so good at surfacing relevant content, that we're spending our nights scrolling through possibilities. We're all stuck on the near-infinite Netflix choices, unable to decide or agree on what to watch.

His advice to the Harvard class? Just "pick a damn movie."

It's good advice. All of it's good. And I hope you take some action to improve your reality. But let's be honest, social-media-post soundbites might be perpetuating the problem more than helping us address it. If they are helpful, they're still a proverbial knife in a gun fight that has escalated to surface-to-air missiles and is about to go nuclear with maturing AI capabilities.

While the Infinite Scroll might be a feature unique to this era, we've seen this movie before. Societies fall when nations are over-leveraged, printing money and extending credit, funding military build-ups, and deferring the pain of shorter-term economic cycles. This leverage drives a wedge between the haves and have-nots. Capital's gains outpace labor's, and resentment builds.

These societies slow their investments in education and infrastructure, which had fueled the boom times, instead enabling even more transfer of wealth to those already in power. Once inclusive economies become extractive. Elites re-work the system to ensure they retain their position of power and legalize their retention of disproportionate spoils. Other nations with lower cost structures take advantage of global markets. They may not be start-up cultures, but they become scale-up cultures. Jobs move to these lower-cost countries, furthering the wealth divide. And then, with their own investments in education and capital markets, these countries become hubs of innovation poised to compete for dominance.

The next wave of innovation promises to wipe out what were once solid-paying jobs. Tensions rise at home and abroad. Populist leaders take aim at the elites who have gamed the system for their benefit. Global conflicts erupt and threaten to spread. Countries start to lose their appetite for funding foreign wars, lose their will to stay in the Infinite Geopolitical game. They preach isolationism. Revolution is in the air.

We might recognize these patterns in history, but that recognition doesn't prevent us from repeating that history.

To really make a difference, we need to make changes at a number of levels-- mutually reinforcing changes that have to happen in parallel. I'll offer a brief 50,000-foot tour of some that I'd propose, recognizing that each could warrant its own book-length explanation and also understanding that there's a lot of devil in these details (and maybe a little bit of Moloch). In fact, without a deeper dive, they risk sounding like motherhood and apple pie.

Shifts in Societal Attitudes:

• We need to stop fighting one another, and we need to raise the level of our collective dialogue.
• We need to understand systemic issues, and we need to re-define success and happiness.
• We need to invest in our communities and prioritize social health.We need to rise above the tribalism that's infecting everything we do.
• We need to acknowledge the critical role of the government (and the press and other key institutions) rather than tearing down their credibility. We need to inspire the next generation of civic leaders.
• We need to view taxes as "paying our share" rather than government over-reach.
• We need to recognize that we're a small part of something much larger, and embrace the transcendental (be it organized religion or some recognition of our place in the universe).
• Humility and selflessness need to become more admired than bravado and rugged individualism. No one alone can fix this.

Without attitudinal shifts, we won't have the will to make…

Political Shifts:

• We need to demand more from our leaders, holding them accountable to govern, not compete for clicks that feed the outrage economy.
• We need to starve Moloch of the fundraising oxygen that has poisoned our political system.
• We need term-limits and campaign finance reform and the end of Citizens United.
• We need to curb regulatory capture and close the revolving door between cabinet positions and industry.
• We need sensible reform to regulate social media, inclusive of age-gating and some carve-outs from Section 230 protection.
• We need to re-visit our tax code, simplify it, and redefine what we're trying to accomplish, with a particular emphasis on closing loopholes that turn a progressive tax system regressive when you get to the wealthiest citizens.
• We need to enforce our tax laws and collect from those evading.
• We need to touch some third rails relative to our spending and re-imagine our investment priorities.
• We need to recognize the global nature of our challenges (climate, AI, taxes, autocracy) and invest in global institutions and global governance models.
• And we need real accountability when bad actors exploit the system for their own gain.

A shifting political climate will enable and foster key…

Institutional Shifts:

• We need to overhaul our education and healthcare systems.
• For the former, we should recognize that we've built a system to deliver cogs to an industrial machine that no longer works.A
• nd for the latter, we need to incent preventing disease, not treating symptoms with long-term prescription-as-a-service models.
• Our financial services industry should help us allocate capital to build businesses, not promote speculative trading and conduct financial engineering to maximize short-term bonuses.
• Businesses can and should be a force for good, creating opportunity, delivering value and giving back to communities. I've seen it happen. I've benefited from a purpose-driven culture that helped me see potential in myself.

None of this happens without individual behavior changes, but these behavior changes can happen without all of these macro shifts.

Individual Behavior Shifts:

• We can't let people off the hook.
• We may be victims of the Infinite Scroll, but we can't fall into victimhood.
• We need to seize our agency, re-define ourselves, invest in new skills, take leadership roles in the community.
• We need to prioritize purpose over extrinsic rewards. Invest in the common good while preserving liberties.
• We need to stop yelling at each other online, put our phones down, and be present for one another.We need more empathy, and we need to breathe life into the Golden Rule.

All of this starts with step one: recognizing we have a problem. Like Fight Club, the first rule of Moloch: you don't talk about Moloch. He's the Baudelaire devil from The Usual Suspects who convinces us he doesn't exist. But talk about Moloch we must. When we shine a light on Moloch, we see our common enemy. We stop assuming "they" are the problem, and we start to understand that We are the They.

Moloch doesn't want us to understand that there are ways forward; Moloch wants us to feel stuck. Like we're in a liminal space unsure how to move out of it. The candy conveyor belt keeps speeding up. We keep scrolling with no end in sight. Ruminating. Ruminating on our ruminations. Moloch wants business leaders to throw their hands in the air. "I don't like how the system works, but I don't make the rules." Moloch hopes we have a collection of narcissists aspire to political life, not just playing the game, but exploiting division and hate. Moloch loves the idea that we all feel stuck, devoid of agency.

Until recently, I thought being stuck led to our intense polarization. People who feel disaffected gravitate to right or left wing causes. They needed a villain to blame.

But a team studying who spreads disinformation learned that it was actually worse. In a paper entitled "The 'Need for Chaos' and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors," Michael Bang Petersen writes, "While prior studies have focused on partisan motivations, we demonstrate that some individuals circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos to 'burn down' the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process."

People who feel the most stuck are motivated by chaos. They want to blow up the system. They're susceptible to the siren song of radicals on the left or the right, whoever can punish the status quo. A fringe actor at a Black Lives Matter protest who throws a Molotov cocktail at a police car actually has a lot in common with the white nationalist storming the capitol carrying a noose and searching for Mike Pence.

Opportunists who understand this motivation take full advantage. Those with more radical aims rail against liberal elites or racist institutional leaders. Foreign powers sew seeds of mistrust, feeding our desire to attack ourselves from within. China and North Korea and Iran relish the opportunity. Russia will no doubt unleash bigger and smarter armies of trolls to feed mistrust on all sides, much like they've done through troll farms in our recent elections.

Political opportunists join in, rooting for border issues and civil unrest and debt-ceiling brinksmanship and crime in the cities. They don't want the problems solved because problems are their currency. They love chaos as they embrace Moloch and Moloch embraces them. Moloch grants them power in their filter bubble.

It can all be dispiriting. And the stakes couldn't be higher. We've survived a Civil War. We've lived through Depression. We've fought Wars that were supposed to end all wars. Ray Dalio , and Neil Howe , and Carlota Perez all sound the alarm, giving various names to this critical juncture. We are in the midst of a collapse, the Fourth Turning, on the doorstep of a new world order, but living through the disorder of the liminal time.

Where do we even start?

I'm reminded of a road trip I took in early February of 2021. After dropping one of my daughters off at college, I readied for the ten-hour drive home, pressing play on a Walter Isaacson audiobook about Steve Jobs.

Ten months earlier, we had cheered essential workers and shared videos of New Yorkers clapping for nurses at shift change. We had cried at scenes of overwhelmed hospitals in Italy, and we stock-piled Clorox wipes to do our part to stop the spread. We had found a common enemy and, for most, believed we had a responsibility to flatten the curve. We would get through this. Together.

As I pulled onto the Indiana Toll Road, that sense of community seemed a distant memory. Masks were political statements. Vaccines had become a topic you didn't bring up at your holiday meal. I worried about my parents. We all worried about our parents. The air was heavy with tension and fear. In the battle against the pandemic, it seemed like the disruptive, divisive forces were the only "winners." I look back now and realize people were scared and stuck, and the opportunists were preying on our fears, tapping into that disenfranchised group's urge for chaos. On that long, straight Indiana toll road, I just felt sad. Defeated.

Just West of Pittsburgh, I debated whether I should peel off the PA turnpike to visit the Flight 93 National Memorial outside of Shanksville, PA. I had always wanted to go, and it seemed like a good time to re-center myself. To honor the heroes who had stepped up with no knowledge of the other passengers' political voting records. Heroes who didn't ask if their fellow-passengers drove a Prius or a Pickup. But it was already a long drive, and I really wanted to get home. The forecast called for snow, and I suspected the route to the Memorial would be along some back country roads.

At this point in the audiobook, Isaacson was relating a story about Jobs looking for iPad content partners. Against his wife's wishes, he met with Rupert Murdoch, investor and media proprietor. Jobs told his wife he was not interested in politics. But he looked into her concerns and decided to hit Murdoch between the eyes. Never one to mince words, Jobs told him he was "blowing it with Fox News."

Murdoch, as you can imagine, took issue with this characterization, dismissing Jobs as some left-wing California hippie.

Jobs clarified. "The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you've cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you're not careful."

At that point, I knew I needed to go to the Memorial. I had grown frustrated and cynical, and Jobs had challenged my own understanding of how we had arrived at this unenviable place. Jobs offered a different framework for me to understand our current reality.

Snow started to fall. The road off of the PA turnpike was icy, and I didn't see another car for miles. When I arrived at the Memorial, the visitor center was closed. I was the only person there.

The site was much bigger than I had expected. Not just a monument where the plane had crashed, but a broad expanse with beautiful sculptures and powerful messages all around. I walked the grounds with a sense of awe and a sense of calm and a deep sense of gratitude. I thought about the heroic actions of those on the plane and, with Jobs' axis-explanation fresh in my mind, I longed for a time when we came together and looked for reasons to believe in one another.

I left Shanksville with a sense of hope. A sense that love can overcome hate and that the human spirit will not allow those on the destructive end of the axis to win. I had so needed that reminder.

I've shared the Jobs story a number of times, and, invariably, I get the same response. Whether someone identifies as conservative or progressive, they don't like our current divisions. They don't like the left-right duopoly that dominates political discourse and bleeds into every aspect of our life. They like the axis Jobs suggests. Or they want to discuss other axes. We usually have a healthy conversation about what could be if we just reframed the dialogue.

And then we all go back to living in this broken system where the car you drive or the place you shop or the shirt you wear labels you either Left or Right and evokes a visceral response from those on the other side of this artificial continuum.

Too many people feel stuck. Too many people feel hopeless. Moloch preys on our hopelessness. The Infinite Scroll is eating our mental health and our physical health. It's eating the middle class and it's eating our jobs. The Infinite Scroll is eating our leisure time, and it's wiping it's mouth after chewing up our Democracy.

It doesn't have to be this way. As the heroes who died in Shanksville reminded me, humans have the power to rise above division. We have the power to care for one another and to inspire hope, which Emily Dickinson called "the thing with feathers." We need to start with hope. Those feathers can remind us of our common humanity. Hope "perches in our soul" and "sings the tune without the words."

Hope is the antidote to Moloch and Hope is the starting point in breaking us out of this stuck state. We need leaders who paint a vision for the future. We need leaders in every walk of life. Leaders reminding us of Hope's feathers and encouraging us to fly.

As Admiral James Stockdale told Jim Collins in reference to his time as a POW in Vietnam. "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

The Infinite Scroll might be eating the world, but we have the power to stop it. Or re-direct it. We have the power to build something better. Something more beautiful. Play the right infinite game. Inject morality and practical wisdom into our systems. Define our Just Cause. We have the power to soar above all of this nonsense and hate, to help our brothers and sisters get unstuck. To unstick ourselves. To sing "the tune without the words."

It's time to sing, and it's time to fly. We can, we must, and we will.