Against the Infinite Scroll

The feed has no last page. Stop and think about how strange that is — historically, materially strange. Every reading technology before this one ended. The scroll unrolled to a final column. The codex closed. The newspaper, that daily rehearsal of infinitude, still ran out of newspaper, and its finitude was so essential to the form that finishing it became an idiom: you could be done with the paper, and hand it across the table, transformed briefly into a person with nothing to read and a day to start.

You cannot be done with the feed. The feed is done with you — when your attention exhausts itself, when the train arrives, when the phone dies — but the ending never comes from the material. There is always more, definitionally, and this is not a side effect. It is the single most engineered fact of contemporary reading. Somewhere in the middle 2000s, the people who build these things discovered that a pause is a decision point, and that decision points are where users leave, and so the pause was designed out of existence. The bottom of the page — the humble bottom of the page! — was identified as a business risk and eliminated. I want to insist on remembering how deliberate that was. We talk about our shattered attention as though it were weather. It is not weather. It is architecture.

Here is what a last page is, cognitively: it is the moment the material releases you and asks what you thought. Close a book — even a mediocre book — and there is a beat, a little silence, in which the thing you read settles and your own mind resumes under its own power. The judgment that forms in that silence is where reading actually completes itself. My whole life as a reader has been organized by those silences. I can remember specific ones: the five minutes I sat with the closed cover of Stoner; the walk I had to take after Housekeeping. The ending is not where the text stops. The ending is where you begin answering it.

The feed forecloses the answer by never asking the question. Each item hands you to the next item with a smoothness that took billions of dollars to perfect. And the smoothness is the injury. Without the beat of silence, nothing settles; reading becomes a state rather than a series of acts, and a state, unlike an act, has no completions to remember. This is why an hour of scrolling leaves so little residue, why you can consume forty items and retain the emotional shape of maybe one. It is not that the items are trivial — some are excellent; the feed is full of good writing, that was never the problem. It is that excellence requires a stillness to land in, and the stillness has been abolished as a matter of interface policy.

I notice I am angriest about what this does to endings as a craft. Writers labor over endings. An ending is the hardest sentence in any piece and every writer knows it — the sentence that has to seal the whole vessel, that the reader will hear last and carry. In the feed, the ending is the sentence rendered most nearly pointless, because its designed function — release into reflection — is intercepted. You finish the essay’s final line and the next headline is already pressing against it, and the vessel never seals. Imagine composing the last chord of a symphony knowing the hall pipes in the next concert before the resonance dies. That is the condition under which every writer online now works, and then we wonder aloud, in essays distributed through the same feeds, why everything feels both urgent and weightless.

What I have done about it is modest and I make no larger claims for it. I read feeds through an RSS reader that shows a fixed number of items and, blessed be, runs out. The little line at the bottom — no more unread items — is my favorite sentence published anywhere on the internet. It restores to reading its old and honorable rhythm: something rather than everything, and then done. On paper I have gone further, deliberately choosing books over even the best of my feeds in the evening, not because books are virtuous but because books end, and I have come to think the ending is the nutrient. The infinite scroll offers reading as an inexhaustible resource. But I was never starving for material. Nobody alive is. The scarce thing — the thing I was actually hungry for, the thing the feed structurally cannot supply — is the experience of enough.

Enough, it turns out, is not a quantity. It is a boundary, and boundaries are exactly what the bottomless page was invented to remove. So this is my heresy, stated plainly: I want my reading to run out. I want the material to release me while the evening still has some evening in it. I want to be, once again, a person who can be done with the paper — sitting there in the lamplight, empty-handed, full.