The invention of infinite scroll
7MINAPRIL 25, 2026
[ FROM THE NOTEBOOK ]
how two hundred thousand human lifetimes vanish per day
In 2006, Aza Raskin, when he was twenty-six years old, invented infinite scroll. He invented it on a Saturday, by himself, because he was annoyed by clicking. He thought he was making the internet better. He has spent most of the years since then trying to figure out what he actually did.
I want to tell you those two stories together, because I think they are the same story. One story is about incentives
Charlie Munger, the inventor of the term, “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome,” was a strange man. I have been reading him for years now, the way you read someone who you suspect is going to remain useful for the rest of your life.
He spoke in a voice that sounded like he was annoyed at the universe for being so simple and at human beings for refusing to notice.
Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.
He used to say it in front of rooms full of people who were nodding along, and then he would say something that suggested most of them were not, in fact, taking it seriously enough.
What he meant, I think, is something close to this…
If you want to know what a person, or a company, or an entire system is going to do over the next ten years, do not study its mission statement. Do not study its values. Do not even study its current behavior. Study the thing that pays it. Study what activities make up the salaries. Study what cashes in bonuses. Study what gets the founder rich, what gets the manager promoted, what makes the algorithm get a thumbs up from the next layer of the organization. Find the incentive, follow the incentive, and the outcome will be there at the end of the line, waiting for you, often years before anyone sees it coming.
He thought this was the most important sentence he ever said. He thought people massively underestimated it. He said it again and again in case the room had not heard him the first time.
I think he was right.
Now Aza. In 2006, Aza Raskin was sitting at a desk somewhere in the Bay Area, twenty-six years old, working on the design of a search box. He kept noticing, every time he scrolled through search results, that he had to click a little button at the bottom of the page to load more results.
Page two. Page three. It bothered him. It felt clunky. It felt like the computer was making him do work that the computer should be doing for him. So he wrote a very small piece of code that just kept loading more results as you scrolled. He posted it. He did not patent it. He did not think it was anything other than a small UX improvement.
It went… viral.
Within a few years it was on every major social media platform on earth. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, every news site, every shopping site, every pornography site, every place a human being was likely to look, the bottom of the page disappeared. There was no longer any natural moment at which the thing said, here, friend, you have arrived at the end, now you can stop.
Aza has done the math, since then, on what he is responsible for. The estimate he uses is something close to two hundred thousand human lifetimes per day. Time that, before infinite scroll, would have ended at a button, and that now does not end. Multiply that by twenty years. The number gets very large, very quickly, and stops fitting inside the head.
He says now, when he tells this story, that the thing he did wrong was not writing the code. The code is fine. The code is in fact rather elegant. The thing he did wrong was that he assumed the technology, once released, would be used for people. He had a UX-improvement intention. He believed, in some way, that everyone else who picked it up would also have a UX-improvement intention.
He had not yet investigated the Munger sentence.
This story has been sitting in my chest for the last week.
I am building a thing called Serein. It is, in the simplest possible description, one place for you to store your life’s context. Bill, my cofounder, and I think about it as an everything draw for all things that matter to you that you will want to retrieve. But unlike an everything drawer, it is easy to retrieve the thing you need from it.
fig 11.1—THE INVENTION OF INFINITE SCROLL
fig 11.2It holds a person’s captured life: journals, voice reflections, articles, voice memos, intentions, the little fragments of self that usually scatter across apps and notebooks and passing thoughts.
The whole architecture of Serein is designed to get you off your screen and back into your life. To remember the good idea for you and offer it back when you ask. To hold what matters without constantly demanding that you keep looking at it. Not to grab your attention. Not to feed you whatever keeps your eyes open for one more minute.
I believe in it.
I believe the people I work with believe in it. I believe my friends who use it believe in it. I think, at the level of intention, it is one of the most human, attention-respecting products I have ever been close to. The whole point is to give a person more access to themselves, not less.
And still, every time I read the Munger sentence, I get a small cold feeling in my stomach.
Because Aza Raskin in 2006 also believed in his thing. He believed in it before anyone else got their hands on it. He believed he was making something useful, something cleaner, something that made the internet a little less clunky.
But intention at the moment of creation is not what determines the outcome.
The incentive structure the thing enters is.
So the question I have to keep asking, the question I am asking right now in front of this candle, is: what incentive structure am I about to release Serein into?
Because if the answer is the same incentive structure that took infinite scroll and turned a search-box improvement into two hundred thousand lifetimes a day, then it does not matter that I believe in it. It does not matter that the people I work with believe in it. The Munger sentence will arrive in five or ten years, find Serein, and grind it into something none of us would recognize.
This is the thing I cannot stop thinking about.
And when I try to locate why it feels so dangerous, I keep coming back to something my favorite yoga instructor, Margaret, taught me very early on.
She was watching me try to push through a pose I had no business pushing through. I was at an edge, but not the kind of edge that was asking for courage. The kind that was asking for humility. The kind that was asking me to slow the f#*k down.
She walked around the class, looked at me, or at least it felt like she did, and said: “If you’re the type to push through an edge your body isn’t ready for, use this moment as an opportunity not to.”
That line has stayed with me because I think this is one of those moments that drop like a drop of water in a big bucket.
It was an insight that made me realize Serein may be powerful enough to push through. But that does not mean the world it is entering is ready to hold it.
Because the way I am beginning to understand the Munger sentence, not just in my head but in my body, is that the world is full of egos doing the poses they think they should be doing while the bodies underneath them, the actual systems they live inside, are screaming.
And the bodies always win in the end.
Always.
The incentive is the body. The intention is the ego. The outcome is what the body does once the ego has stopped paying attention.
Aza thought he was doing a yoga pose called make the internet less clunky.
A useful pose. A humane pose. Maybe even a beautiful one.
But the body of the internet, the actual system of incentives that code entered, was doing a different pose entirely.
It was doing a pose called maximize attention extraction in an uncoordinated competitive race.
And the pose the body was doing won.
It always wins.
Thank you for reading.
Love,
Lorenzo