We tend to think of social media as something that happened to us. This talk traces how it was built, from the early web's clicking-through-pages problem, to the invention of the infinite scroll, to the moment social platforms realized that a feed with no bottom is a feed you never leave. Kayla follows that thread through two decades of platform evolution to the AI-generated present, and asks the question we're now overdue to answer: what do we want this thing to be next?
We tend to think of social media as something that happened to us. This talk traces how it was built, from the early web's clicking-through-pages problem, to the invention of the infinite scroll, to the moment social platforms realized that a feed with no bottom is a feed you never leave. Kayla follows that thread through two decades of platform evolution to the AI-generated present, and asks the question we're now overdue to answer: what do we want this thing to be next?
October 1, 2026 7:00 PM
Fort Vancouver Visitor Center
In 2006, a designer solved a small annoyance: having to click "next page." The infinite scroll was elegant, invisible, and (by his own later admission) one of the more consequential design decisions of the century. We'll trace how a fix for a minor inconvenience became the default shape of modern attention.
MySpace to TikTok, organic reach to the algorithm, posting to feeding. A working practitioner's tour through two decades of platforms rising, mutating, and occasionally collapsing.
The feed is full of machine-generated content and the humans are getting tired. We'll end where the history leaves off: what this thing is actually for, and whether we still get a say in what it becomes.
