Even with the ancient Netscape web browser, even with data dribbling into your CPU from a telephone line, pumped in from the Bell telephone aqueduct by your dial-up modem, even with the pages taking a minute to unscroll themselves for viewing, often stopping halfway down the screen, the chemical payoff was already enough to flip your animal brain into a foraging jag. You’d focus briefly on the new thing you’d just clicked on, and then ipso facto it was no longer new. What was left was the dying remnant of the secret brain-excitement from the discovery, and the hunger for another hit of this waning thrill, which is to say, the desire to do it again. This sequence of novelty and then boredom and then hunting for more novelty - now neuroscientifically engineered in the platforms and apps that occupy our thumbs - was a basic fuel of mass engagement from the very beginning of the web browser era. The ease of access combined with the sheer number of things there were to click on, the in-effect infinite number of these experiences you could have, meant the tiniest discoveries could keep you clicking after these empty rewards. The evanescence and triviality were key to our deep involvement. Each click, being both a fulfillment and a disappointment, was its own reason to click again.

From Matt Feeney’s Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age 📚.