By Michael Cummins, Editor, October 20, 2026

Put your phone face down on the table and read to the end of this paragraph without touching it. If you are reading on it, read to the end without leaving the page. Nothing on it is calling you. It is a slab of glass with the lights off. Somewhere before the paragraph ends, your hand will want it, and you will notice the wanting a little after the hand has started.

In its November issue, Scientific American published a long report on a question its headline put plainly: we are addicted to social media, so how do we get sober? The reporter, Allison Parshall, went to a meeting of Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous in Manhattan and sat among people who could not stop. She talked to the neuroscientists who scan their brains and the lawyers suing the companies that built the feeds. She counted her own hours, nearly seven a day, and did not like the number.

To get sober, there must be a drink. Augustine of Hippo would have recognized the figure. Writing around the year 400 of a young man at the Roman games, he said the man drank in the madness and grew drunk on the pleasure of blood. What he would not have recognized is where the magazine puts the fault. His drunkard was guilty. The magazine’s is sick. Between the two verdicts lie sixteen centuries of panic about the same hole. Follow the hare back through them, and the question changes from how to get sober to who dug the hole.

I

The Lust of the Eyes

Alypius was a young man from Augustine’s home town, and he had been caught once before. At Carthage, as a student, he had been swept into the madness of the circus, and Augustine, who was teaching there, had cured him by accident: a mocking remark in a lecture, aimed at nobody, that Alypius took to heart. He gave up the races. So when he went to Rome to study law, he knew he was safe from the games there, and said so.

In Rome, Augustine writes, Alypius was seized by an incredible gaping for the games, and this is how it happened. Some friends met him in the street after dinner and carried him off to the amphitheater by force and good humor, and perhaps to see whether he could do what he said. He told them they could drag his body in but they could not make him look. He would sit with his eyes shut and be absent while present, and they took him along.

He sat with his eyes shut. The crowd roared at a fall, and the roar got in. Augustine wishes, writing it down fifteen years later, that his friend had stopped his ears too, because the cry came through them and unlocked the eyes. Alypius opened them, overcome, Augustine says, by curiosity, and the moment he looked he was wounded, more deeply in the soul than the man on the sand was wounded in the body: drinking in the madness, and not knowing he drank. He watched. He shouted. He burned. When the games ended he carried the fever out with him, and he came back, not only with the friends who had dragged him but ahead of them, dragging others.

He had walked in sure of himself, and the certainty was the trap. Augustine’s diagnosis is not that his friend lacked willpower. It is that Alypius fell because he relied on himself, on the strength that had held at Carthage, and that it was a long while before he learned otherwise. When he did get out, it was not by trying harder. It was by conversion, which, whatever else it is, is one total attention replacing another. Augustine credits God, and says the lesson was that self-reliance had been the whole mistake.

The arena itself ended in a story. A monk walked out among the fighters to stop them, the crowd stoned him, and the emperor, shamed, closed the games. The date usually given is 404, and it is a guess; a priest in Marseille, writing some forty years later, says men were still being killed by beasts in his day. What the record supports is that within Alypius’s lifetime men had stopped killing each other for a Roman crowd, and that the spectacle had an organizer who could be told to stop. Alypius by then was a bishop too.

In the tenth book of the Confessions Augustine turns the examination on himself. He no longer goes to the games. But sitting at home, he says, a lizard catching flies will hold him, or a spider wrapping what has blundered into its web. He does not go out to see these things; they are in the room, on the wall, and his eyes go to them. And if he passes a field where a dog has put up a hare, the chase draws him, and it turns him from some great thought. He is not describing a weakness in Alypius. He is describing a faculty in everyone, the one that makes a hand move before its owner has decided, and he is describing it in the first person.

He gave it a name and a verdict. Curiosity, the lust of the eyes, a sin. It was the seventeenth century before the verdict was reversed and the name became a virtue, and the hare had not changed in the meantime.

In 1865 an Oxford mathematician put a hare’s cousin in a waistcoat and gave him a watch. A girl sitting on a riverbank, bored, saw him run past, and because she was burning with curiosity she ran across the field after him, and went down the hole.

II

The Reading Disease

On the night of January 16, 1778, a seventeen-year-old lady-in-waiting named Christel von Laßberg went missing in Weimar. She had been at a rehearsal. The play was Goethe’s, a satire called The Triumph of Sentimentality, in which a prince loves a doll dressed as the woman he claims to love, and prefers it to her, and at the end the doll is cut open and a heap of sentimental novels falls out. The one the play judged hardest was Werther. The next morning Goethe’s own servants found her in the Ilm, in front of the bridge below the weir, in the meadows under his garden house, and he came down to the bank.

The story that came down was complete. She had believed herself abandoned by a Baltic baron at the court, and she had drowned herself, it was said, with a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in her pocket. The baron is in the record; he left Weimar in April. The book is not. It does not appear in Goethe’s diary or in his letters, and the word the German sources still attach to it is angeblich, allegedly. Nobody can say when the book entered the story. The panic had a form ready, and it fitted her to it, and the author of the book it blamed was standing on the bank.

He did not defend himself. He went to work. On the evening after she was found he took the court gardener and a crew of men to a spur of rock above the place and began to cut. Two days later he wrote to Charlotte von Stein that he had hollowed out a good piece of the cliff, and that the result would be a strange little spot where the memory of poor Christel will stand hidden. In the same letter he told her that the grief itself was inviting, and drew one the way the water did. The spot is still there. It is a cleft in the rock with a stair through it, and the people of Weimar call it the Needle’s Eye. The landscaped park along the Ilm, the one tourists walk through on the way to his garden house, grew outward from that stair; the official histories call it the park’s first garden scene. That year he wrote a ballad about a fisherman drawn into the water by a voice from it, half pulled and half sinking.

She was one, and the wave was supposed to be hundreds. Werther had come out in the autumn of 1774, a short novel in letters about a young man who loves a woman he cannot have and shoots himself with her husband’s pistols. Young men wore his blue coat and yellow waistcoat. Within months the theological faculty at Leipzig had the town council ban the sale of the book, on pain of a ten-thaler fine, and the ban stayed on the books for fifty years; the coat was driven off the streets by order or by scorn, and the accounts differ on which. Physicians prescribed against novel-reading for young women. By the 1790s the pedagogues had a word for the condition, Lesesucht, which is the ordinary German word for addiction with reading attached, and every complaint of the present day is in their pages: the solitary binge, the candle burning past midnight, the lost sleep, the young and the female as the class at risk.

The deaths tied to the book, when historians went looking, number about a dozen across Europe, and several of those are contested. A handful, inflated into a wave, and one of the handful a girl in a grief the book did not cause. What the panic got right about the few is narrower than it knew: a book can give a sorrow its shape. What it got wrong was how many, and which came first.

Leipzig was not the first authority to try. A century before, in London, the hole had been a room. Men went to coffee houses and stayed all day, reading the news aloud and arguing over it, and on December 29, 1675, Charles II issued a proclamation to shut every one of them, as the resort of idle and disaffected persons who neglected their trades. It took effect on January 10. He withdrew it on January 8. Eleven days, and the king lost. The keepers could be ordered, and were; the custom could not be, because nobody had dug it and nobody owned it. Within a lifetime Lloyd’s of London had grown out of one of those rooms and the stock exchange out of another; the fellows of the Royal Society held their working arguments in a third, and The Tatler, the first of the essay papers, dated its columns from three coffee houses and a chocolate house. The hole became the floor, in brick.

The novel went the same way, more slowly. Within a generation of the ban it was the respectable form, the one in which the culture did its thinking. Jane Austen wrote a novel whose heroine has read too many novels, and stopped the story in its fifth chapter to defend the form from inside one.

In Weimar the river still runs under the weir, and the stair still goes up through the rock. Goethe never finished the memorial he had started; the Needle’s Eye was as far as it got. He had cut the girl’s last path into the hillside, and then the whole town had made a park of it, and walked through.

III

The Handle

In 1867 a machine in a glass dome began printing the prices of stocks on a paper ribbon, and within a few years there were rooms off Wall Street where men who could not afford a broker stood all day watching the ribbon come out and betting on the next number, having already learned, over the previous thirty years, to wait for the morning paper. The ribbon was the first feed. None of the men in those rooms wrote down what it was like to stand there. The man who wrote it down was in Germany.

In July 1865 Fyodor Dostoevsky, a famous writer in debt, signed a contract with a publisher named Stellovsky for an advance against his collected works. The contract had a clause: if he did not deliver a new novel by the first of November of the following year, the publisher would own everything he wrote for the next nine years. He paid his creditors with most of it, took the rest to Wiesbaden in August, and lost it at roulette in a few days. He pawned his watch. He wrote begging letters to friends and to Turgenev, who sent some of what he asked. He was forty-three, a widower, a former convict, and he could not leave the table while there was anything on it to lose. Stuck in the hotel, he began the novel that would get him out, writing to an editor in September to propose a story about a young man who kills a pawnbroker; the first draft of Crime and Punishment is still known as the Wiesbaden version. He went home and wrote it, and put the clause off, until the publisher reminded him of it in June 1866, with four months to go.

On the fourth of October he hired a stenographer, a young woman named Anna Snitkina who had just finished a course in shorthand. He dictated The Gambler to her in twenty-six days. It is a short novel about a man who cannot leave the table while there is anything on it to lose, written from inside the hole to pay for the hole, and it was finished on the twenty-ninth. Stellovsky had then made himself hard to find, so that the manuscript could not be handed over in time; Dostoevsky took it to a police station and had it dated and stamped. He married the stenographer the following February. In April 1871, at Wiesbaden again, he lost again, and wrote to her that night that it was over, and it was; he did not play again in the ten years he had left. At the end of the following year Prussia, which had taken the city in 1866, closed the casino.

He had walked away, and the table had not needed him to stay. It was there before he came and after he left, and it had made him wait, every spin, for the wheel to slow and the croupier to call. It had a house and a crowd and a pace that was not his. What was built next removed all three.

Until 1895, nobody had dug a hole for one.

In that year a German-born mechanic in San Francisco named Charles Fey built a gambling machine in his basement, and by the end of the decade he had the one that mattered, three reels behind a window, a handle on the side, a bell painted on the drums, and a cup underneath into which the machine itself paid out. Variable reward, the next spin that might pay, is the schedule of every bet ever placed, and roulette had it. What Fey built was not the schedule. It was the removal of everything that had slowed it. No croupier, no other players, no pace but the hand’s, no room full of people watching you lose. His machine ran at the speed of one person alone, and it went into saloons, where a man who would never have entered a casino could stand at a bar and pull a handle between drinks.

It did not know him. Three reels, ten symbols each, a thousand combinations, and the same thousand for every hand that ever touched it. Dostoevsky’s table had not known him either, and it had not cared. The difference was that the table had to be played and the machine only had to be pulled, and it was dug to fit not a man but the species: the hand, the eye, the next pull. Scientific American’s report puts the comparison in the mouth of a psychologist of gambling, Luke Clark, who sees in the feed what Fey’s machine had, rewards that come at once and in quick succession, and no natural cue to stop.

The machine was not absorbed. It had a maker, and a maker can be told where to stand. The bucket shops where men had watched the tape were prosecuted out of business before the 1920s. The slot machine was walled into the rooms where the law allowed it, and sold to the rooms that didn’t with a few gumballs in the cup so that it could be called a vending machine, and the next man stepped up to it.

IV

The Sinful Waste

In the spring of 1976, in a hearing room at New York’s City Hall, a committee of the City Council met to decide whether pinball was gambling. The game had been illegal in the city for thirty-four years, and in Chicago for nearly forty, and in Los Angeles until a court struck the ban down two years before. The industry had brought a writer and expert player named Roger Sharpe, two new machines, and the argument that pinball was a game of skill. Sharpe had practiced for weeks on the first machine. When he stepped up to it, a councilman said that the pinball people might have rigged it, and told him to play the other one, which he had never played.

He pulled the plunger back, said that the ball would go up the center lane, and let it go, and it went up the center lane. The committee voted to lift the ban. In the story the industry tells, the ban fell on that shot, and it is not far wrong; the machine’s makers had spent a generation saying the game answered to the hand, and he had shown a room, though he has told the story since as luck and as skill, depending on the year. Asked what would have happened had he missed, he answered that he was not sure pinball would be legal today. The shot was the plunger, the one shot in the game made without the flippers: the same pull a nickel had bought before 1947, and kin to the handle on Fey’s machine.

The ban had come in with a sledgehammer. In January 1942, a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, Mayor La Guardia had the police seize the city’s pinball machines, had a few smashed in front of cameras, had the metal stripped for the scrap drives, and had the cabinets barged out and dumped offshore. He called it a racket that took nickels from schoolchildren, and he was partly right; the early machines had no flippers, and a nickel in one was a bet. The ban outlasted the flipper by thirty years.

The found hole of the twenties had taken a year. In November 1924 the New York Times called the new crossword craze a sinful waste, and for a winter the city agreed. Public libraries began limiting the time a reader could spend with a dictionary. In the same months the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad put dictionaries in its trains. By the following year the crossword was something a serious person did with a newspaper. The Times held out longer than anyone. It ran its first puzzle on February 15, 1942, a month after the mayor’s men had barged the pinball machines out to sea. The same city, the same winter: a found hole absorbed, and a built one broken up.

A built hole has a second ending, and pinball got that one too. The largest of the game’s makers, Williams of Chicago, brought out its first reel slot machine in 1993, while still building pinball tables, and by the end of the decade had closed its pinball line for good. The mechanical reels of the 1970s had twenty stops each, and the odds were whatever the mechanism allowed; the new machines kept the look of those reels and let a computer choose where they stopped, from a list of two hundred and fifty-six positions the player could not see. The top jackpot went from one chance in eight thousand to one in nearly seventeen million, and the player saw the same three reels he had always seen. The makers of the game that had been freed by a called shot had gone into the one machine built so that no shot could be called. The machines are still on the floor.

B. F. Skinner had shown in the 1950s that a pigeon pecking a key would peck hardest and longest when the reward came on no schedule it could learn, and he had written that the schedule was the one gamblers were on. The engineers need not have read him; the schedule was already in the machine. In 1977 a writer named Marie Winn called the television in the living room a plug-in drug. The words for the hole had been changing for sixteen centuries, and what changed in them was where the blame sat. Augustine’s lust of the eyes put it in the one who looked. The reading-sickness put it in a reader made ill by a thing. The plug-in drug put it in the thing. The report in Scientific American puts it in the tissue. It is the same hole and the same hand.

V

The Digger

In 2022 a man from Michigan named Tom, then thirty-two, flew to a town outside Stockholm and gave up his devices for three months. He hiked, he swam in cold water, he worked out, and he did not look at a phone. It was, Parshall writes, a grand display of willpower, and it worked for exactly three months. He came home sure he could use the things in moderation, and within weeks he was on his back, as he puts it, on YouTube and in a video game, bingeing and unable to stop. What got him out, three years later, was a twelve-step program, two of them, and the thing he says he learned there was how to let go.

The scroll he could not stop was built in 2006. Aza Raskin, then a young interface designer, worked out how to load the next page before the reader reached the bottom of this one, so that there was no bottom. In February of this year Raskin testified in a New Mexico courtroom against Meta, in a suit alleging that its apps were built to addict children, and told the jury that his invention traps users in endless scrolling. What he was explaining to them, he said afterward, was “sort of like if [a] wine glass filled up without you looking at it.” The image of drinking without noticing comes from the man who built the glass.

In the summer of 1853, when the educated classes of London had taken up sitting around tables in the dark waiting for the tables to move, Michael Faraday built an instrument. Two boards, one on the other, with rollers between, and a lever with a straw for a pointer that would swing if the upper board moved before the lower. The sitters swore an unseen intelligence moved the table. Faraday sat them down at his boards, and the straw showed them that the table moved because their hands pushed it, and that their hands had started before they knew. The hole, he showed them, was in them.

The magazine’s report concedes the same thing. For most of us, Parshall writes, the products may simply be working as intended. The hands are ours. And Faraday’s instrument has been built again: the magazine describes two studies from a laboratory at Chapel Hill. In the first, the neuroscientist Eva Telzer followed a hundred and three children across two years of puberty, scanning their brains while they won and lost a social game, and found that in the ones using social media most compulsively the reward signal peaked early and then fell away, the way a response falls away as tolerance builds. In the second, not yet published, forty-five college students who used social media heavily volunteered to have their phones locked away for a day; she scanned them before and after, and found what the magazine calls signs of withdrawal. Both are findings about the few, and both are in the tissue, and the straw has moved.

But Faraday’s table only moved when it was pushed. This one learns which way the hands lean, and tilts, and it has been watched doing it. In 2021 reporters at an American newspaper built a hundred accounts on TikTok that were not people. Each was given a birthdate, a place, and an interest it told no one. None of them searched for anything or said what it liked. They only lingered: on the videos that matched the interest they slowed down or watched twice, and the rest they swiped past. One, registered as kentucky_96, had been given sadness. Fifteen videos in, it watched a thirty-five-second sad video twice. A little over half an hour and two hundred and twenty-four videos later, ninety-three of every hundred videos the app chose for it were about sadness and depression. Nobody had told the app anything. It had watched where the account slowed down. In 1778 a town fitted a girl to a book. This one fits the book to you.

Half pulled, half sinking: the hole is in you, and it was built, and both are true at once. I counted my own hours before writing this, as the reporter did, and I am not going to print the number.

You cannot regulate the eye. The holes nobody dug could not be governed at all. The coffee-house keepers sold coffee and Goethe wrote a novel, and when a king and a town council went looking for someone to order, that left only the customer, and the customer would not be ordered. The holes with a house could be governed, and were. An emperor closed the arena and Prussia the casino; the states prosecuted the bucket shops, and the slot machine was walled into licensed rooms. New York banned the pinball table and was right for the five years before the flipper and wrong for the twenty-nine after. A digger can be governed, and governed badly, for a long time.

This one has a house, and it is being governed now. In August, facing suits from nearly every state, Meta agreed to turn off the Likes on teenagers’ accounts, cap their time at two hours a day, silence their notifications during school, and let them switch to a feed that is not fitted to them. The magazine notes what the settlement leaves alone: it reaches only teen accounts, and it barely touches the algorithms. A public-health researcher at Harvard and her colleagues have drafted a model law that would send outside auditors into the algorithms instead. The slot machines of the 1990s kept the face of Fey’s reels while a computer chose the stops. The settlement governs the face. Whether anyone can govern the stops, when they are chosen again for each viewer every time a thumb moves, is a question none of the old panics had to answer.

We have had the hole since Alypius. What is new is not the hole but the digger, and the digger learns. Every found hole ended by absorption; the room became an exchange, the novel became the form the culture thinks in. Every built hole, from the games on, was closed or walled off or broken up, or dug under by something deeper. This one is in the pocket, at the end of a walk that began in an arena where a man had to be dragged. There is no room, no door, no floor to see, and it adapts faster than the culture can digest it or a statute can name it, which is why neither ending comes. The few get sober, one at a time, by a conversion or a stenographer or a room of strangers. The many get absorbed, or this time do not.

In Hippo the lizard is still on the wall, catching flies, and the bishop is still looking. The lizard does not know he is there.

⁂