Notes on this chapter.
This is Chapter 5 of my new book, Be Kind Rewind. I am feeling brave on this one, hopefully not dark brave, but creative brave.
The first four chapters explore how we learn through friction. Chapter 1 was the body. Chapter 2 was our patience and our minds. Chapter 3 was our environment. Chapter 4 moved into the thing that now shapes most of us, our screens and the tech behind them.
But to understand the screen, I needed to understand the biggest force on it. Social media, where it comes from, and how it reshapes us once we let it in. I also wanted to share a personal experience of loss. Not the loss of a person, but the loss of a connection, a relationship dismantled slowly by what the screen kept feeding into the room. I have called this the Affinity Trade. The never-ending rabbit hole that can quietly reshape your thinking, and eventually your life, if you let it.
This was a hard chapter to write because it involves real people and real lives I love deeply. But if I am not writing about my own life and my own experiences, what am I really writing about?
From past experience writing Lessons in Creativity, my chapters tended to land at around 3,000 words, and a good editor is brilliant at cutting the fluff. I am not as good at adding things back in once they are cut, so I have written this one a little longer than usual, trusting the editing process to find the balance.
I would love your thoughts. Anyone who comments, gives feedback, or shares a story becomes part of this book. You will be in the pages and listed as a co-author in the back when it is published.
I have written nine chapters so far, and this one and the next have been the hardest to release. The pace is different. The subject sits closer to the bone. I hope it lands as something honest, something insightful, and something inspiring.
Thanks for reading.
Ben
Introduction: Be Kind Rewind Introduction
Ch1: What the Body Knew First
Ch2: Bored to Death!
Ch3: The Places That Shaped Us
Ch4: The Digital Drift
Now, Chapter 5: The Affinity Trade
The Affinity Trade
On a Tuesday morning in 2006, in San Francisco, a young designer named Aza Raskin sits at a screen. At twenty-two, he is the son of Jef Raskin, designer of the original Macintosh interface. Aza grew up in a household where dinner-table talk focused on the relationship between humans and computers. The central question was always: how do we make the machine easier to use and remove friction between the person and what they want to do?
He is working on a problem. It is the kind of small, irritating interface puzzle that fills the working days of people who build software for a living. Users are reaching the bottom of a web page and leaving. There is a “Next Page” button at the bottom that requires a click. That click, that tiny, almost imperceptible moment of decision, is enough of a pause that people are choosing to stop and go somewhere else.
He is not trying to addict anyone. He is a young designer solving the small problem in front of him, making the machine a little more frictionless, a little kinder.
So he writes a small piece of code. When the user reaches the bottom of the page, instead of showing a button, the page automatically loads the next content. The bottom of the page disappears, along with the pause and the moment of decision.
He names it “infinite scroll”, finishes his coffee, pushes back from the desk, and steps into another typical San Francisco Tuesday.
Nobody notices.
Seventeen years after Raskin’s invention, in February 2026, Mark Zuckerberg walks into a Los Angeles courtroom in a dark suit, his expression difficult to read. He takes his seat at the witness stand, folds his hands on the rail, and prepares to explain himself to a jury of twelve ordinary Americans.
