I am currently enjoying the rarest of treats for the parent of a toddler: a week to myself. Michaela has taken our daughter Molly on a trip with some family and I have been left behind to bask in the momentary stillness of a usually chaotic home. I’ll get an early night, I thought to myself on Monday, so that I can get up early and take advantage of a free day. What felt like a couple of minutes later, and it was 1am. I was sat on the couch, the programme I was watching had long ended, and without the nudge of Michaela to come to bed or the looming prospect of my daughter waking me up in the morning, I fell into the bottomless pit of scrolling infinitely through social media.

This weekend, the man who created the concept of infinite scroll – Aza Raskin – told The Times that he regretted the damage his idea had done. When he first developed the concept in 2006, it was intended to be helpful. Rather than having to refresh a webpage, or click through to Page 2, content would just keep coming and coming. In the years since Raskin’s first design, the concept of infinite scroll has been built upon, and tech companies have added new features and techniques. Tweets, Facebook posts, videos, search results… an endless conveyor belt to give users more of what they want, and less of the friction of getting there.

The effect, as we all now know, was much more profound. It turned social media feeds into addictive games, massaging our dopamine reward systems, creating an insatiable appetite for more, and dampening real-world experiences too.

It exploits what is known as the Zeigarnik effect. In the 1920s, a colleague of the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a waiter was able to recall with ease the tabs at a restaurant that were still open, but quickly forgot the ones that were paid. Zeigarnik set about studying why, and concluded that our brains create a level of cognitive tension when a task begins that stays alive until it is complete. It’s the reason television cliff-hangers work so well, or why leaving that bowl unwashed in the sink overnight nags at us. Research found that this can be a useful quirk for students, and those who break off from studying to do something unrelated were able to recall material better than other students who had kept reading. It can be helpful for me, too. As I write, I’m about to head out to dinner with some friends. When I come back to this tomorrow morning, it should have spent the evening swilling around my head, keeping this task active until I can finally close it and press send tomorrow.

That’s useful in this context – it’s the next morning now, and this still feels fresh in my mind – but it can be exhausting when the still-active information is a constant stream of videos and news and social media posts. Every time we use an app or website that applies infinite scroll, it stays with us, even when we close them and put down our phones. As far as our brain is concerned, that is an unresolved task. We never got to the end. It continues to swirl around in our brain, tugging at us to reopen the app and try to complete the experience.

Infinite scroll also removes choice. It funnels content to you and nudges you into your next video. One of the most influential books on website design gets right to the point. Steve Krug’s bible for user interface designers is literally called Don’t Make Me Think.

And it’s not just control we lose, it’s also our time. Raskin himself reckons 200,000 human lifetimes are wasted every day to infinite scrolling.

It’s hard to think of another design technique that was so widely adopted, and that has had such a profound impact on our lives and our behaviour.

It’s unfair to describe Aza Raskin as the man who ruined the internet. He created infinite scroll with good intentions, it was designed to remove friction in the way we use websites, and it’s a pretty simple idea – if he hadn’t done it, somebody else would. Raskin also co-founded the Center for Humane Technology, and has dedicated much of his life to campaigning against the corrosive impact technology can have on people, trust and democracy. He’s one of the good guys.

When I was making my BBC documentary about Dark Patterns – a programme all about manipulative website design – I got to know a lot of people in the user design industry. It felt like there was a growing movement of designers who were worried about the impact they were having on people, and the ethics of some of the features they were creating. Many of them felt trapped in companies that were thirsty for growth, with huge pressure to squeeze every possible penny and every last second of attention out of users.

One of the people I spoke to was Pattie Belle Hastings, a professor of media design at Quinnipiac University. I wanted to know what she thought of infinite scroll now, and Aza Raskin’s admission of its impact, so I spoke to her on my Times Radio show this weekend.

“I think we’re seeing an awakening,” she says of the design students she works with, “and I’m definitely seeing it in my classrooms, where students are seeking ways out of the screen, that they know that it’s a problem and they want to change that. I’m actually seeing that shift in the classroom… and they want out.”

“And we’re seeing that in the lawsuits. A lawsuit that Meta and YouTube lost in Los Angeles in March was brought by a young woman whose life was derailed by these applications.”

Pattie Belle teaches 18 to 22-year-olds, a new generation of idealists. What happens when those ambitions collide with a company’s thirst for profit and growth? The design industry is being upended by AI. Jobs are harder to come by. If you won’t get on board with an addictive design, surely somebody else will.

Aza Raskin told The Times he feels it would only take “a couple of courageous companies or jurisdictions” to start regulating social media for others to start to follow. “The countries that do are going to reclaim their kids. I actually think there’s going to end up being a race to the top.”

Pattie Belle agrees. Despite how lucrative addictive design can be, she says that Raskin himself is an example of the new resistance. “Raskin is atoning. He started the Center for Humane Technology, which is going to Washington and is showing up as witnesses in these lawsuits. They are doing the work of atonement for the addictive technologies that they began.”

Getting the balance right is never easy. We don’t want to halt progress, and stifle a new wave of technology that is full of the promise of fixing our problems, from health to wealth. But I think we can all agree that rapid technological change needs checks and balances. The problem, as ever, is that resistance moves slowly, and tech moves fast.

“We’re seeing new forms of addictive technologies coming out,” says Pattie Belle, “and they’re so lucrative, the companies are not managing the ethics. I think in terms of AI chatbots, the addictive qualities of having simulated human connection is the next tidal wave of losing our lives in these screens.”

So if infinite scroll revolutionised the internet, the next frontier could be infinite chat, with more pressure than ever to keep us chatting back.

“I think some companies will be wanting to change because of the backlash that they’re going to experience with people becoming aware of how these things are designed to derail their lives and their pocketbooks, and their relationships. They’re not gonna stick around for brands or companies that don’t have their best interests at heart, and right now they don’t; they just want ways into your wallet.”

This article, however, is not infinite. You have now completed it. It’s over. You can put it down, and go and do something else. Call a friend, get some fresh air, go for a swim. Reclaim your time, and your dopamine.

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