🇺🇸 Aza Raskin

Somewhere in the interface logs of 2006, buried in the commit history of a long-forgotten Humanized codebase, is the moment a twenty-something designer named Aza Raskin solved a problem that had not been solved before. He was working on a web interface that needed a better way to display long lists of content. Clicking through pages was clunky. Loading all the content at once was slow. The elegant solution — so elegant it could be implemented in fewer than ten lines of JavaScript — was to load new content automatically as the user scrolled downward. No pagination. No clicking. The content simply continued, seamlessly, as long as the user scrolled. He called it "infinite scroll." It was fast, frictionless, and beautiful. He had no idea what he had done.

Aza Raskin was born into the design conversation. His father, Jef Raskin, was one of the most important human-computer interaction thinkers of the twentieth century — the man who initiated the Macintosh project at Apple in 1979, who coined the term "zooming user interface," and who wrote "The Humane Interface," one of the definitive texts on designing technology that respects human cognitive limits. Growing up in a household where interface design was dinner-table conversation, where the central question was always how technology could serve human beings rather than frustrating them, Aza Raskin absorbed a design philosophy that was, in the deepest sense, ethical. Good design meant design that worked for the person using it.

That philosophy guided his early career. He worked at Mozilla, improving Firefox's interface. He co-founded Humanized, a design consultancy focused on creating software that was genuinely easier to use. Infinite scroll was invented during this period — a solution to the specific, practical problem of paginated web content. It was published, adopted, widely imitated, and spread across the internet within a few years. Raskin had not patented it. He had not built a business around it. He had simply solved a problem and shared the solution.

Then the social media companies found it. Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. TikTok. Pinterest. LinkedIn. In their hands, infinite scroll was not just a content delivery mechanism — it was an engagement trap. Removing the friction of pagination meant removing the natural stopping points that gave users a moment to ask themselves whether they wanted to continue. The scroll became not a tool for accessing desired content but a mechanism for keeping eyeballs attached to screens as long as possible, generating advertising revenue for every additional second of attention. Raskin's elegant solution had become the engine of a global attention economy whose costs — in lost time, degraded focus, compulsive behavior, anxiety, and political polarization — were still being tallied.

When Raskin began to understand what his invention had become, his response was not to retreat into technical detachment. He became one of the most articulate critics of the technology industry's engagement-maximizing design philosophy — a movement that had weaponized his clean, user-friendly innovation against the very users it was supposed to serve. He testified in legal proceedings against Meta. He estimated that infinite scroll wastes approximately 200,000 human lifetimes per day — a figure derived from the aggregate time humans spend in mindless scrolling that they themselves describe as wasteful. He called it his biggest regret.

With Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist, Raskin co-founded the Center for Humane Technology in 2018 — an organization dedicated to changing the technology industry's relationship with human attention. He has since expanded his work to the Earth Species Project, an effort to use artificial intelligence to decode the languages of non-human animals. The child who grew up thinking about how technology should serve human beings has spent his adult life trying to repair damage he accidentally helped cause — and asking, with increasing urgency, what it would mean to design technology that truly respects the minds of the people who use it.