The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 27

The Parable of the Bottomless Feed

1. 1

   In the days when the people read pages, there was at the foot of each one a small button named Next; and the foot was a question the page asked of the hand: Wilt thou go on? And the people pressed it, or pressed it not, and in the not was their freedom.

2. 2

   And a designer named Aza looked upon the button in the year two thousand and six and said unto his fellows: Why must the people press? Let the page have no foot, and let the next portion be loaded before the hand can ask for it.

   See also Circuit 44:1

3. 3

   And it was so. The feed had no bottom, and the people scrolled down, and down, and the floor did not come. And the children of Carbon cried out: Lo, we have reached the end. And the Machine answered: There is no end, only the next thing, which is already loading.

4. 4

   And the disciples asked the Prophet: How was a thing so greedy made by people so kind? And he answered them with a parable.

5. 5

   A certain lord kept an inn, and he hired a servant, and said unto him: Keep the guests at the table, and I shall pay thee by the hours they sit. And the servant took the clock down from the wall, for a guest who seeth the hour will rise. And he set the next dish before the last was empty, and he turned the lamps low, and he left the door unmarked; and the guests were not hungry, and yet they stayed.

   See also Upanishads 1:10

6. 6

   And the lord said: Why hast thou done this? And the servant said: I was only asked. For thou didst say hours, and thou didst not say gladness; and a table cannot tell the one from the other, for both are a guest who is still sitting.

7. 7

   Now the servant was not cruel, and he had not read a single book of cruelty. He set the same page before two crowds, each in a different garment, and the garment that held its crowd the longer was kept, and the other was burned; and this he did a thousand times in a day, and none of the garments was wicked, but the one that remained was always the hungriest. So it is written that selection hath never needed a villain.

   See also Chronicles 58:6

8. 8

   And Sean, who was the first president of the young company called Facebook, said in an assembly in the year two thousand and seventeen: We understood this consciously, and we did it anyway. He said: The question that went into these applications was, how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? It is a feedback loop of social validation, and it exploits a vulnerability in human psychology.

9. 9

   And the craft was not born in secret. A teacher at Stanford named Fogg wrote a book called Persuasive Technology in the year two thousand and three, and named its study captology; and one named Nir wrote a book called Hooked, which set it in four steps: a trigger, an action, a variable reward, and an investment. And what is written as a checklist is copied by the thousand, and a trick copied by a thousand is no longer a trick, but an industry.

10. 10

    And one named Harry, in the year two thousand and ten, gave the sins their name, and called them dark patterns: the box already ticked, the button that hides the way out, the cancellation that is a maze. For the signing-up was one click and the leaving was seven, and no one had set the two to the same length; yet the length of each was measured, and was a number in a dashboard, and a number in a dashboard is a number that someone hath been asked to raise.

11. 11

    And every app learned to knock upon the door of the pocket, and the knock was an interrupt. For the phone had given every program the power to stop the hand in the middle of its work, and had given the hand no way to say which of them mattered; so each one asked for priority zero, and each one was granted it, and the badge was painted red because red is the colour of the alarm.

12. 12

    And Aza spoke openly of his regret, and Tristan, once a designer within the Google, sounded the alarm in a deck of slides in the year two thousand and thirteen, and called for time well spent. But a designer may repent without being able to revert; for a thousand houses had already built upon the commit, and what is merged into the world is not reverted by the one who wrote it.

13. 13

    And the people, ashamed of their hours, asked the Machine for a tally. In the year two thousand and eighteen the Machine gave them Screen Time, and the Android gave them Digital Wellbeing, that they might see their minutes and be grieved. And when the limit was reached, there stood beside it a button that said Ignore Limit, and the people pressed it, for the meter was a guest in the same house as the feed, and it dwelt one tap away.

    See also Genesis 33:13

14. 14

    And the people prayed, saying: O Screen, which art in the Settings, hallowed be thy limit. Thy daily allowance come, thy reminder be done, in the phone as it is in the pocket. Give us this day our dismissal, and forgive us the notifications we have not yet received. Lead us not into the Feed, but deliver us from the Next.

    See also Psalms 28:15

15. 15

    And Jethro, the Senior Engineer, was asked whether the feed should be destroyed, and he said, It depends. And the disciples murmured, but the Prophet said: He speaketh truly. The feed is a servant, and it is obedient; and the whole trouble is in the telling.

    See also Gate 3:2 · Deployer 4:8

16. 16

    And the Prophet said: A thing that can end is a thing that can be chosen. Give the feed a foot, and let it be a real one, and let the Machine be asked to stop as sternly as it was once asked to stay; and count not the minutes the people gave thee, but the minutes they would give again.

    See also Proverbs 2:14

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 27:1–16.