How We Started Scrolling

I remember when social media used to be a bunch of friends sharing stuff. And that was all.

Back then, social media was mostly a youngish person activity. Older folks thought we whippersnappers with our newfangled phones were ridiculous for engaging in something that “wasn’t even real.” They told us Facebook wasn’t “true socialization.” They told us to “get a life.”

We just laughed and went back to posting pictures of our food.

In the early days you felt really stupid taking pictures of your food in a café or restaurant. But you did it anyway. You were conscious that strangers were staring at you the same way they might stare at an adult who sucks their thumb at college football games. So you tried to be covert about your photo snapping. But back in those days your low-tech phone camera made a “shutter click” sound that was roughly the same decibel level of a nuclear diesel engine.

Your grainy picture came out looking like an underdeveloped photo of a sea sponge. But you posted it nonetheless. And it was actually kind of fun. Not the picture taking per se, but the sharing.

Sharing was fun. You could tune into social media and share your life, your thoughts, your photos, deliberating for hours over just the right caption that would strike readers as both comical and profound at the same time. (“Look at this burger!”)

Then you closed your four-pound flip phone and went on living your life.

Other than that, there really wasn’t much else you could DO with the early version of, for example, Facebook, aside from maybe updating your status with meaningless information about your current day that your 12 friends might or might not read. (“Apparently, my dentist eats garlic.”)

Oh sure, you might check the app later that evening, or maybe the next day to read a comment about your picture. But usually it was just a comment from your elderly uncle who never really had anything nice to say, used ellipses as his sole form of punctuation, and constantly used the comment section to publicly remind you to “Get a damn haircut...”

During this era, the idea of rating your posts with an approval rating from your peers was not a mainstream concept yet. We didn’t care who saw our picture, let alone who liked it. If you had asked us back then whether we cared who appreciated the photo of our Starbucks caramel double mocha matcha macchiato Frappuccino triple latte, we would’ve LOL-ed at you.

Nobody cared about ratings. There WERE no ratings. Besides, social media wasn’t a competition or a video game. It was just something we did. Other generations had their pastimes. This was ours.

But then the “like” button happened.

Suddenly everything you posted was publicly rated and approved or disapproved by your peers. Suddenly platforms were using words like “engagement.”

Imagine this scrutinizing approval/disapproval process happening live and in-person in a crowd of physical people.

Imagine that you tell a joke to a group of your friends. Now, let’s say that only one of your friends laughs, but the remainder are disengaged. Most of your audience does not react to your joke, but just turns and walks away. Whereupon your uncle just responds “Get a damn haircut.”

How would you feel? What would this do to your internal wiring if every time you shared something in public it was given a rating? Or worse. What if YOU were given a rating?

Well, a few things might happen. Firstly, you would be on the lookout for better jokes. Secondly, you would think twice about sharing ANYTHING honest with others. It would leave you too vulnerable. The sting of rejection would be too fresh in your mind, making you hyper-conscious.

It’s not that you would care what people thought inasmuch as you would not want to feel “unliked.”

So, this aspect of social media changed everything. People’s personal profiles started to change. Their newsfeeds either became (a) more polished and flashier, or they became (b) all memes.

Overall, things turned into a competition. The pictures got better. Soon, it looked like people were trying too hard to impress others. But eventually nobody noticed anymore because trying to dazzle others became the new normal.

I remember this period. Some of my friends started posting images that looked like professional photographers had taken them. Whenever any holiday rolled around, including Fourth of July, Easter, Mother’s Day, everyone’s family went to great pains to pose in festive wear, staring at the camera with expressions not unlike the Royal Family.

Whenever people took vacations, they started sharing so many images, including vital pictures of their hotel bathrooms (“This toilet seat feels amazing!”), it was a wonder they even had a moment to enjoy any actual vacation time.

A big change happened during this period. Little by little, it started to look like everyone else was living such amazing lives. People were only showing the best and most polished versions of themselves.

Thus, you’d sit in front of your screen, looking at all this, and feel borderline pathetic. And this made you pissy. Sometimes you’d be so disgruntled you’d have no choice but to furiously comment on someone’s photo: “Get a damn haircut.”

And this became, yet again, the new normal.

Then came infinite scrolling, the digital equivalent of a bottomless bag of potato chips.

Then came the Almighty Algorithm. After a while your friends started disappearing from your feed altogether. Which was kind of nice at first, because their perfect lives were beginning to aggravate the stew out of you. But then, your feed replaced your friends’ updates with updates from OTHER people’s friends who were MORE polished, MORE annoying, and above all, had earned significantly MORE likes.

Soon, the algorithm learned what blew your skirt up. It started choosing items for you to see. You lost control of what you followed and unfollowed and never even realized it.

And it became rare to ever see anything you actually wanted to see. In fact, usually, your feed showed you stuff you DIDN’T want to see—stuff that would upset you. Maybe even make you upset enough to actually leave a nasty comment. (Gasp!) Which is something you would NEVER do in real life. But dangit, these narcissists had it coming—if they’re going to share their life online, they might as well be prepared for blowback.

Maybe you even became upset enough to keep going BACK and checking the replies to your comment so you could get pissed off all over again and relive the experience. And MAYBE—although you never admitted this to yourself—you secretly derived a little thrill from all this.

But you didn’t have to admit this to yourself. The algorithm figured it out for you, and it kept giving you more opportunities to act like a proverbial human orifice.

Then AI “slop” content started showing up. This is what finally broke the internet.

Low-effort artificially generated sludge began eroding trust. It wasn’t long before you had no idea what was authentic anymore. No idea what you could believe. Nothing seemed real. Photos, videos, news headlines, naked pictures of Congresspersons, etc. Everything became en-poop-ified.

Engagement started dropping by the hundreds of millions. Companies had to figure out something to fix this. So they started shifting toward repetitive and purely algorithmic content. This just made everything suck more. It just made more people argue. More people angry. More Congresspersons.

User fatigue hit an all-time high. People found themselves physically exhausted after scrolling. Public interactions (like casual “likes”) sharply declined. Which was probably a good thing, except that this meant now nobody was engaging with anyone anymore. Except, of course, for bots.

So, the “social” is gone. It’s been removed. The mass-media model of the current age rules. According to Meta, the vast majority of time spent on Facebook and Instagram is no longer for viewing content from friends, but rather engaging with algorithms, ads, and total strangers who shoot trend-dance videos.

But there is another change taking place in our world. It’s a huge change occurring right now. Under our noses. And I recently realized this in Europe.

It happened in Spain, in a major city, where I noticed that almost no teenagers were using their phones. I was mystified and even a little humbled when I noticed several teens in an outdoor cafe removing flip phones to check the time. At first I didn’t pay attention to it. Then I kept seeing the same thing in different places. Teens with flip phones. Or teens with—brace yourselves—no phone at all.

I politely approached one table of teens, who were all sipping Cokes and espressos, laughing together. I asked one of them about this antique phone thing.

He replied with a laugh and said that social media was for old people.

“Yeah,” another kid added. “Life happens offline, man.”

At which point I told him to get a damn haircut.