The Sick Psychology Experiment That Built Infinite Scroll

In 2006, 22-year-old interface designer Aza Raskin wrote a simple script designed to eliminate friction online. He called it the "Infinite Scroll." But what started as a simple usability tweak turned into the most addictive mechanism ever unleashed on human attention. Inspired by a 2005 Cornell University psychology experiment involving bottomless bowls of tomato soup, Silicon Valley tech giants quickly weaponized this design to remove our mental "stop cues"—erasing an estimated 200,000 human lifetimes every single day. Here is the untold story of how one line of code rewired modern human behavior and sparked the global doomscrolling crisis. 📌 Timestamps: 0:00 - The Bottomless Soup Bowl Experiment (Cornell 2005) 1:12 - The 2006 Internet & The Friction Problem 2:13 - Aza Raskin Invents the Infinite Scroll 3:00 - The Psychology of "Stop Cues" 4:01 - Silicon Valley & The Attention Economy 5:22 - The Regret: 200,000 Human Lifetimes Lost Every Day 6:28 - How to Beat the Infinite Scroll Subscribe to Capital & Crime for weekly deep dives into the hidden business, psychological traps, and corporate stories shaping our modern world. #CapitalAndCrime #TechDocumentary #Doomscrolling #Psychology #SiliconValley #AzaRaskin