The early web was a bounded place you chose to enter and leave; infinite scroll and surveillance capitalism eliminated that threshold entirely.
Key Takeaways
Web 1.0 required physical presence at a designated machine; GeoCities “neighborhoods” gave early browsing genuine locality and place-based discovery.
Infinite scroll, introduced in 2006, removed the natural page-bottom pause that forced a conscious decision about where to go next.
Surveillance capitalism replaced exploration with algorithmic nudging; today’s web has no exit, only continuous tracked engagement.
The loss of arrival and departure rituals collapses the boundary between private and public life, fragmenting attention and eroding rootedness.
Proposed path forward: device-free rooms, intentional login windows, screen sabbaths, and embodied local community as structural counterweights.
Hacker News Comment Review
The lone comment targets craft, not argument: the essay restates its core thesis nearly verbatim several times without adding new evidence or advancing the argument between passes.
