Many already feel that social media is a rabbit hole. Every post leads to more. You can doom scroll until you pass out from exhaustion. The same is true of the world wide web. For Gary Benfield of Los Angeles, it started out as an interest in milk. He found a story about a dairy in Wisconsin that was troubled by beetles. In order to learn about the beetles, he turned to a page on entomology, and this led him to the invasive species of northern pine forests. It turns out that Gary stumbled on a story that never ends. A team of writers add pages faster than anyone can read them. They are adapting the links in sidebars and footers to keep you engaged, privately betting each other about what direction you’ll take. They begin to learn about you and gradually get better at making the next page even more irresistible. It’s not an accident that every year we spend more and more time on our devices. One reason for this is that many of these teams are watching what you jump to, and are doing all they can to give you what you want.
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