One striking phrase kept coming up in the landmark personal injuries lawsuit awarded against Meta and Google this week. Twenty year old Kaley – referred to in court by her initials, KGM – won her case after a jury agreed Instagram and YouTube were designed to be addictive. It awarded her damages of $6 million, with Meta to pay 70 per cent and YouTube the rest. More importantly, it cleared the path for a raft of other lawsuits.

The phrase in question is “infinite scroll”. It could have been the name of an experimental art rock band formed in a New York basement in the 1960s – but what it is, is a devious little innovation designed in the early 2000s by a Silicon Valley wunderkind (a label that is generally overused, but in this case earned by giving his first tech talk at the age of 10) called Aza Raskin. You may never have heard of Raskin or his innovation, but infinite scroll has had such a profound impact on our lives that he felt compelled in 2019 to publicly apologise for having invented it.

It is one of the reasons why I – and possibly you – have troubled relationships with smartphones.

Before the age of infinite scroll, if you wanted to keep looking at something on the internet, you had to click through to the next page, prompting a subconscious decision: do I want to keep doing this? When Raskin was working at Firefox, he figured out that allowing people to keep scrolling downwards instead of clicking through would make life easier for everyone.

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What was meant to be a small but significant improvement in the user experience quickly became integral to social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. In his book, Stolen Focus, Johann Hari recounts how Raskin “watched as the people around him changed” because of his innovation, increasingly unable to pull themselves away from their devices.

Raskin once calculated that people were now spending an equivalent of 200,000 more human lifetimes online as a direct result of the code he wrote.

“It’s like their entire life – poof,” Raskin told Hari sadly.

Raskin shouldn’t be too hard on himself. Infinite scroll is, of course, just one of the things that make smartphones so addictive. Autoplay, a variation on the theme, is how YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat keep you hooked, automatically playing the next video in your feed. Algorithms are designed to feed you more and more of the same content.

Some – mostly some senior tech executives – say personal responsibility is the answer. They offer techniques focused on self-discipline: sit with the craving for 10 minutes! Use the Do Not Disturb function! Set screen time limits! Turn off your notifications! Turn your phone to black and white! Put your phone in a lunch box, leave it in the car, or place it in a padlocked cash box and hurl it to the bottom of the sea! And so on.

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Some of these are helpful hacks. Maybe they help to claw back a bit of your day, or give you a temporary sense that yes, perhaps better willpower is all you need.

But smartphones, as the jury in the California Superior Court of Los Angeles heard, are designed to be digital casinos. The house always wins. You are the person perched on the edge of a stool under the sickly light of a Las Vegas casino, infinitely scrolling.

Ultimately, that’s why the verdict in the case heard in that Los Angeles courtroom was so significant. Until now, big tech has successfully argued that it has no liability for content posted by users. But here the jury agreed that the issue is not about the content people post, it’s about how the technology is designed.

Jurors found Meta and Google had created addictive products that caused KGM’s mental health problems. Many more lawsuits are pending; the companies have already said they will appeal.

Some of the most damning evidence came from inside the tech firms, in the form of internal emails and memos. These showcased more clearly than any stilted mumblings by Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg about “freedom of expression” the disdain big tech has for us. One Google memo described “viewer addiction” as a goal, and Meta researchers characterised Instagram as “a drug” and employees as “basically pushers”. Meta made no bones about targeting tweens, “the highest retention age group in the United States”. When Zuckerberg was making a decision to reintroduce beauty filters to Instagram in 2019, a senior executive wrote to him imploring him not to and pointing out how toxic these filters are for young girls. She said her own daughter suffered from body dysmorphia. The filters were reinstated in 2020 regardless.

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The case achieved something significant: it exposed the lie that personal responsibility or better parenting is enough to regulate big tech.

Kaley’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, cited an internal Meta study called Project Myst which found that parental supervision and controls – including setting time limits and restrictive access – are helpless against the addictive power of social media. He said: “The moment [Kaley] was locked into the machine, her mom was locked out.” Many parents, unfortunately, will identify with that sense of their child’s phone as a locked black box – a portal to all the horrors of the human condition.

The real win from this won’t be about a single case, or many cases, or any sum in monetary damages: it will be if tech firms are forced to change the way their products are designed, so that another generation is not condemned to grow up infinitely scrolling their way into a doom spiral of self-loathing, body dysmorphia, isolation, resentment, permanent distraction and misery.

© The Irish Times