I don’t trust anyone who posts two or three times a week as a rule.
That’s not consistency, it’s obedience. It’s dancing without wanting to.
Serious work doesn’t follow a fixed rhythm. It doesn’t conveniently end on posting day just to please the algorithm and keep the body visible.
Prolonged laughter causes stomach pain, intestinal disorder and, unfortunately, like an open faucet, releases an endless stream of silly posts that clog the networks.
And all of it helps structure our habits.
That automatic gesture is the new form of desire.
The pleasure of scrolling without ever arriving anywhere.
We could call it repetition, or a drive without brakes — or simply, design.
Because that gesture didn’t come out of nowhere: someone designed it.
Every everyday motion — the scroll, the swipe, the double tap — is an aesthetic decision turned into a psychic habit.
Social media doesn’t just display content; it shapes behavior.
Vilém Flusser warned decades ago that the tools we create end up rewriting our minds¹.
The infinite scroll is the great invention of the century: a machine for perpetual desire.
It doesn’t promise pleasure but its postponement.
It’s sex without foreplay, food on the run, art without pause.
We’ve grown used to swallowing.
And designers —myself included— those of us who should be thinking, pausing, questioning, have also fallen into the game.
We feed the machine instead of challenging it.
We publish to exist.
We produce to avoid disappearing from the algorithm’s radar.
We’ve become accomplices of the noise.
If design is an attempt to trick entropy², what we do now doesn’t trick it — it fattens it.
We create more noise, more flows, more simulacra³.
Where Does the Pause Begin?
In a context where everything flows, the pause becomes a subversive act.
But not in the romantic sense of “stopping the world,” rather in the contradictory sense of carving out an in-between space amid so much unsteady motion.
Georges Didi-Huberman spoke of intervals as places where thought can breathe⁴ — those spaces between images where a critical possibility opens, a small fold of consciousness.
As a designer, I can understand those intervals not as silences between contents, but as new forms of attention.
It’s not about turning off the screen, but about designing your own rhythm.
The networks aren’t going anywhere.
The problem isn’t their existence, but the way we inhabit them.
Donna Haraway said it best with her famous “staying with the trouble”: not escaping disaster, but accompanying it critically⁵.
Perhaps the digital designer of today is an inconvenient, alarmed companion — someone working within the flow, aware that stopping it is impossible, yet still trying to modulate its speed, to propose alternative rhythms and more human breathing.
The designer, then, shouldn’t aspire to turn off the screens, but to design pauses that can live within them.
Small interruptions amid the noise that don’t aim to spark a revolution, but simply offer a brief instant of awareness.
I don’t trust anyone who posts with mechanical regularity — but even less do I trust those who reject the digital world from their untouched tower of calm.
What’s interesting is to remain within those movements where the crowd pushes — within the commotion — and analyze what’s happening.
To design not to stop the world, but to remind ourselves that we are still inside it.
For better and for worse.
Notes
- Vilém Flusser, Philosophy of Design (1993). Flusser understood design as a form of technological thought that, by creating tools, reconfigures the mental structure of those who use them.
- Ibid. For Flusser, to design was to “deceive entropy,” to fight chaos by giving it meaningful form.
- Fernando Castro Flórez, In Praise of Laziness: Notes Toward an Aesthetics of Fatigue (2016). His idea of “simulacrum” and “aesthetic fatigue” refers to today’s visual saturation, where images cease to generate meaning.
- Georges Didi-Huberman, What We See, What Looks at Us (1997). Proposes the “interval” as a space for critical thought between images — a time that allows us to breathe between stimuli.
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2016). Argues for remaining within the world’s problems to transform them from within, rather than fleeing from them.
