From Scrolls to Scrolling in Synagogue

Now we doomscroll through a text without beginning or end, with only the barest physicality: the touch of a fingertip. Scroll, scrolling: and ten minutes, half an hour have disappeared. We scroll to fill, and then to kill, time. It’s the nightmare inversion of Wordsworth’s reveries, technology manipulating the mind’s ability, in wonder or delight, to step outside itself to something perhaps higher. Our self-mesmerism lets us step outside ourselves – to nowhere.