Why do we scroll?
On one hand, Big Tech has fashioned the perfect erotic device to keep us in its grip. We’re not interested in the content of the next article, image, or meme when we scroll: we’re interested in the moment spent between these things, when the promise that the next piece of content will actually satisfy us, after hours of unsatisfactory scrolling, still lives. In this sense, the scrolling is infinitely erotic: the erotic, flirtatious promise is intensified the more we scroll as our longing and sense of frustration expands past a new breaking point with each new article our thumb lands on.
In another sense, however, scrolling represents a new, transhuman form of eroticism where a minimum level of orgasm is unnaturally suspended long past the moment of its natural death. In ‘normal’ erotic flirtation, we first have to overcome a series of obstacles (broaching polite conversation, broaching impolite conversation, broaching our erotic partner’s interest in us, et cetera). What’s more, the moment of fulfillment–when the erotic promise is finally ‘said out loud’ to one another–is only a moment. Orgasm subsides. But when we step into that transhuman eroticism we all know so well from scrolling, we are catered to as we come: we face no obstacles in the digital pleasure-dome, no artful beating-around-the-bush. And worst of all, the digital act of fulfillment is indefinitely long and without fluctuation, no peaks or troughs to speak of: a minimum, dulled speed is kept so that we can maintain a rudimentary moment of orgasm for as long as we remain in our scrolling flow-state.