This morning, upon waking – it’s currently 7:50am as I type, but not as I read – I lay in bed for the first half hour and scrolled through Instagram Reels. This isn’t something I do very often but it’s a pursuit that people around me – ahem – do quite a lot of. To be honest, I still predominantly use Instagram in the old school way, scrolling through my home screen of people’s grid posts, or watching their stories.

But then occasionally I remember the existence of Reels and a few minutes later I’m sucked in. I am served endless videos of dogs, interspersed with memes about the foibles of heterosexual relationships. If there is an alternative algorithmic universe for my Reels feed, I have not discovered it. I have learned that not all dogs can handle stairs and not all men can manage a diary.

Instagram Reels is part of a suite of apps, the most popular apps of the present moment, which include Twitter – or X, if we’re calling it that – and Chinese giant TikTok, governed by a UX principle called “infinite scroll”. Do you remember how there was a time in architecture, a couple of decades ago, when you’d build your $20m villa in the Hollywood hills and just have a beautiful, formal rectangular pool? And then, suddenly, any pool at any pricey mansion had to become an “infinity pool”? It had to give that sense of the pool’s surface being unlimited, in a perfect union with sky or sea…

Well, unlimited is the word of the century. Infinite scroll is a tactic that was deployed predominantly to keep users on the app. Watchtime became the most important metric for apps, and therefore they sought to avoid offering users the opportunity to switch off, to take a break. I’m sure that the internal self-justification involved attempting to give users a more “frictionless” experience, but the impact was clear: people kept scrolling until their fingers and brains were numb.

Infinite scroll is here to stay, I’m sure, but there are also the whisperings of a fight back against the ubiquity of this technique. Daley Wilhelm is a UX writer in the US, and someone who has written about how we can stop the infinite scroll. That piece got a lot of pick-up and suggests – just a whisper – that there is a counter feeling, a sense that maybe we should start to rethink our relationship with endless screentime.

The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by me, Nick Hilton.

The theme music is Internet Song by Apes of the State, used with their generous permission. The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

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