The Scroll and the Pause

The phone vibrates on the table. The hand picks it up, the thumb unlocks the screen, the eye scans the content, all of this before any thought of the form "I'm going to look at my phone" has had time to form. A few minutes later, sometimes longer, you look up, mildly surprised by how much time has passed. Nothing extraordinary about this scene: it repeats itself several times a day, for almost everyone, without anyone paying it much attention. It is precisely because it is so ordinary that it deserves a closer look.

❦What the hand just did

There is a word, in the Quran, for this movement that precedes thought: hawā. It is not simply "desire" in the broad sense, but more precisely what pulls, what tilts downward, what acts before reason has had its say. The essay Maîtriser le désir (French) details its nuances across several traditions. The gesture of picking up your phone at the first vibration is an almost too-perfect illustration: you do not decide to do it, you find yourself having done it.

This gesture has a precise explanation. It does not come down solely to the "weak willpower" of the person experiencing it. In the 1950s, psychologist B. F. Skinner showed that intermittent and unpredictable reinforcement — where you never know whether the next gesture will bring something interesting or nothing at all — produces far more compulsive behavior than a reward obtained every time, predictably. That is the principle of slot machines. A news feed, a stream of messages, a list of notifications all work on the same principle: sometimes nothing, sometimes something that holds your attention, and it is precisely this uncertainty that pushes you to check again.

Dopamine is often invoked here, not always accurately. The work of neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz, in the 1990s and 2000s, showed that it is not the molecule of pleasure once a reward is obtained, but of anticipation: it activates mainly in the moment when the outcome is uncertain, not when it is known. What makes a gesture hard to interrupt is therefore not so much what you find as the expectation of what you might find. Hawā, in this reading, is not a metaphor applied after the fact to technology: it is, almost literally, its operating mode.

❦Designed, not accidental

This mechanism is not a side effect that designers stumbled upon by chance. It has a name in the industry: the hook model, popularized by Nir Eyal in his book Hooked (2014), a manual intended for design teams: trigger, action, variable reward, investment, and the cycle repeats. This model itself draws on the work of B. J. Fogg, a Stanford researcher whose Fogg Behavior Model trained an entire generation of designers in how to make a behavior more likely.

What makes this observation hard to ignore is that it also comes from the inside. Sean Parker, Facebook's founding president, acknowledged that the network had been designed from the start to exploit "a vulnerability in human psychology": social validation as a feedback loop, likes distributed sparingly. Other designers followed the same trajectory. The picture that emerges is neither a conspiracy nor an exaggeration: it is a professional practice, taught, theorized, acknowledged as such by those who have practiced it. Hawā, here, has a design brief.

❦What is missing: the pause

One point needs to be clear: nothing in all of this makes pleasure, or dopamine, bad in itself. The problem is not that a gesture produces satisfaction. The problem lies elsewhere. The Quran describes three states of the nafs, the soul: the nafs ammāra, which commands without stepping back; the nafs lawwāma, which turns back on what just happened. These are not two types of people: it is the same self, at different moments. Sometimes the hand picks up the phone without thinking. Sometimes, an hour later, you look up with a mild regret. That mild regret is the lawwāma at work, late but present.

What makes scrolling particular is therefore not that it activates the nafs ammāra (many everyday gestures do, without drama). It is that it is designed so that there is no threshold between one piece of content and the next — and therefore no natural moment where the passage toward the lawwāma could occur. In the past, closing a magazine, waiting for the next page of a newspaper to turn, or simply the fact that a television programme ended, created — without intending to — small thresholds. These thresholds had nothing spiritual about them in themselves, but they left an opening: a moment when you could ask yourself, even vaguely, "what did I just do, and do I continue?" The continuous feed, by contrast, is precisely what has been optimized so that such a question never has the chance to arise.

It is not pleasure that poses the question, but the absence of the threshold that would allow you to return to it. وَاللَّهُ أَعْلَم (God alone knows).

❦Now what?

It would be easy to conclude with a list of tips. That is not the purpose here. The question lies further back: what, in a life, can still play the role of threshold? Not a prohibition imposed from outside, but a moment that recurs on its own, regularly enough that the passage from ammāra to lawwāma has a chance to happen. Religious rituals have long played this role without intending to: prayer five times a day is also, structurally, five interruptions in the feed. It does not need to be "spiritually experienced" to fulfill this minimal function. It creates the threshold. What each person does with it afterward is another matter. What is certain is that the feed creates nothing of the kind. It was designed not to.

The question remains open, and that is probably the only honest way to pose it: neither nostalgia for a world without screens that never quite existed as we imagine it, nor resignation to a feed that has won once and for all. Just the question, to be asked from time to time — perhaps precisely in one of those moments when you close the app and look up.

A pushback, an idea, a different reading? Write to the journal — every response counts.

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