PERSON
Aza Raskin
The designer who invented infinite scroll at twenty-two and spent the next fifteen years building the institutional and conceptual infrastructure to prevent the same mistake from repeating at civilizational scale with AI.
Aza Raskin is the conscience of a design culture that optimizes first and reckons later. In 2006, working at a small Chicago interface firm, he solved a problem that nobody had asked him to solve: the bottom of the webpage. The solution —
infinite scroll — removed the seam between pages, eliminating the micro-moment at which a user could decide whether to continue. By his own estimate the invention now consumes over two hundred thousand human lifetimes daily, and he has said so publicly, with a directness that distinguishes his confession from the vague regrets most technology designers offer when pressed. He went on to co-found the
Center for Humane Technology with
Tristan Harris, where he developed the analytical framework that names and explains what
engagement architecture actually does to people — not incidentally but structurally. That framework arrived early enough to illuminate the AI transition before it completed, making Raskin one of the few critics who can say: I built the prototype