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From Catriona Agg’s many-splendored Twitter feed:
Two congruent rectangles are packed into a square. What’s the angle?
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
-George Box
A basic observation in education is that learning is easier for some students than others. Some students seem to soak up everything around them. Others, despite putting in effort, learn much more slowly.
These variations exist at the school level as well. I’ve worked in a few schools, with varying levels of student achievement. My experience, and the experience of lots of other teachers, is that teaching is harder in some schools than others. At every school I’ve worked at, I’ve worked with lots of passionate and hardworking teachers. Yet in some contexts that effort seems to translate into success much more easily than in others. This correlates strongly with poverty: schools with more students living in poverty struggle more than those in affluent areas. There are plenty of other variables as well, but the basic trend is obvious to anyone who has worked in a few different contexts.
There are two narratives that I don’t think are helpful in understanding this question. The first is that teaching in some schools is harder because of the circumstances the students in them are born into, and schools cannot overcome those circumstances and deliver a quality education for students in poverty. I don’t think that’s true. There are plenty of counterexamples: schools that do help students rise above their circumstances.1 They are far less common than we would like, but that evidence exists. The second narrative is that failing schools are failed by callous or incompetent adults. I haven’t been in every school, and I don’t doubt that there are examples of incompetence in some schools. But there are also incompetent teachers and leaders at affluent, successful schools. My experience is that the vast majority of teachers are hardworking and care about their students. The differences in achievement between schools are large; I don’t think they can be explained by the quality of the teachers in them.
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” What I’m going to describe is a mental model for why some schools are harder to teach in than others. It’s a model. I’m not arguing this is a perfect description or captures everything important about schools. But I do think it captures a decent chunk of the truth, and it’s a useful model for understanding schools and what those who work in challenging schools can do to improve outcomes for students.
Cognitive Resources
Humans vary in random ways. Two examples of that variation are working memory capacity and processing speed. Working memory capacity refers to how many ideas can be held in mind and manipulated at once. Working memory is where we think, and when learning something new it’s useful to be able to juggle multiple ideas. Processing speed refers to how rapidly we can process and reason about new information.
Working memory capacity and processing speed are two major components of what researchers call “fluid intelligence.” There’s plenty of research establishing that humans vary in these two capacities. Beyond that research, these sources of variation match the experience of many teachers: we can see that some students are quicker thinkers, and some students can hold more in their mind at once. It’s also my experience that most teachers avoid judging students on these capacities: we strive to teach all of our students, and we don’t think a student deserves a better or worse education because they are a quicker thinker.
To be concise, I’ll refer to varying levels of working memory capacity and processing speed in this piece as “cognitive resources.” My premise here is that students vary in the cognitive resources they are endowed with, and that variation is random.2
Learning
More cognitive resources make learning easier. Students with fewer cognitive resources are still capable of learning, but they require better teaching. The primary consequence of differences in cognitive resources is how information comes in. Working memory is the bottleneck between the learning environment and long-term memory.
Cognitive resources don’t say anything about what students can or cannot learn, but they do influence the way that information needs to be delivered in order for learning to happen.3 Peps McCrea calls this “instructional sensitivity.” Students with more cognitive resources are not very sensitive to the quality of instruction: even with mediocre instruction, they are still likely to learn. Students with fewer cognitive resources are much more sensitive to the quality of instruction: with excellent instruction they can achieve at high levels, but without it they are likely to struggle.
The key to this type of instruction is managing cognitive resources: teaching in a way that reduces the load on working memory. Here is a rough list of teaching practices that are important for students with fewer cognitive resources:
Provide plenty of practice, including spaced and interleaved practice, and continue practicing until students reach a high success rate. Practice moves knowledge securely into long-term memory and reduces the load on working memory.
Break concepts into small steps and provide practice after each step. Focusing on one step at a time reduces cognitive load and ensures each step is secure before moving on.
Manage attention to focus student thinking on key ideas. Memory is the residue of thought; students learn what they think about. Instructional design should be laser-focused on the exact concepts we want students to think hard about, leaving as little to chance as possible.
Make explicit connections between ideas. The best way to learn something new is to connect it to something already in long-term memory. Those connections make learning durable. Students with more cognitive resources are more likely to make connections spontaneously; students with fewer benefit from more guidance in making connections.
Sequence ideas logically. Learning is cumulative, and learning works best when it builds logically on what students already know. Careful sequencing reduces cognitive load by relying more on prior knowledge and less on processing large amounts of new information in working memory.
Model thinking and provide plenty of examples. Reduce the burden of figuring things out independently by giving students clear models of what we want them to be able to do.
Provide plenty of review. Students with fewer cognitive resources benefit from plenty of practice and making connections between ideas, and this means providing lots of review of previously-learned concepts.
Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks. Ask students to do challenging things. Don’t lower the bar. But also recognize that challenging tasks will inevitably involve increased cognitive load. Provide scaffolds to help reduce the cognitive load and focus students on essential concepts, then fade those scaffolds over time.4
Compensating Factors
Cognitive resources aren’t the only thing that matters for learning. There are a number of compensating factors: factors that can help a student with fewer cognitive resources succeed even without excellent instruction.
Outside instruction. This seems obvious: with additional instruction, students will do better. This can come in lots of forms. Private tutoring. Supplemental instruction at programs like Kumon or Russian School of Math, which are common in some parts of the US. Several Asian countries have built reputations for educational excellence on a huge system of out-of-school supplemental instruction. And then there’s mom at the kitchen table, helping with homework or reteaching something their kid is confused about.
Prior knowledge. The more you know the easier it is to learn. The best way to bypass the limitations of working memory and processing speed is to know a lot about a topic: that knowledge reduces the strain on working memory. This is one big reason why small differences early in education snowball and become much larger over the years. Students who fall a bit behind find learning harder and fall further behind; students who get ahead find learning easier and continue to accelerate.
Motivation. Many teachers will have experience with students for whom learning is hard, yet for whatever reason they are determined to learn. That motivation can compensate for fewer cognitive resources. The important part of motivation for this argument is that motivation is contagious. If everyone around you is putting in a lot of effort, you are likely to do the same. If everyone around you is slacking off, you’re likely to follow suit.
These compensating factors can, to an extent, mitigate the challenges of fewer cognitive resources. They can’t work miracles, but they can help around the edges, shifting the distribution to the right.
Deprivation
While cognitive resources may be randomly distributed at birth, that’s not the outcome teachers see in schools. Unfortunately, there are lots of ways those cognitive resources can be sapped. The simplest way to conceptualize this is to focus on poverty.
Poverty is correlated with all sorts of factors that sap cognitive resources: students are worried about where their next meal is coming from, or whether their housing is secure. Chronic stress takes a toll on attention and executive functioning. Trauma leaves behind scars. Poor sleep, inadequate nutrition, and exposure to environmental hazards can all affect cognitive development. Over time, these deprivations erode cognitive resources and make learning harder. Poverty is a scourge. While its effects vary and the exact mechanisms are tricky to pin down, on average a student living in poverty is likely to have a tougher time in school.
These aren’t exclusive to students living in poverty. Plenty of affluent families have a hard time, and many poor kids are unaffected by challenging circumstances around them. There’s a distribution. If we conceptualize cognitive resources as a spectrum, poverty shifts that distribution to the left. There are still well-off students who struggle, and there are plenty of students living in poverty who excel, but the distribution is shifted. The exact amount will depend on the details of the community.
Why Is Learning Harder In Some Schools Than Others?
Now we can put together an explanation for why some schools are harder to work in than others. In an affluent district, you have that random distribution of cognitive resources. Fewer students have their cognitive resources sapped by the effects of trauma and poverty. Many students who might otherwise struggle get outside instruction in ways large and small to compensate. A critical mass of students are successful, and this creates a culture of learning and a sense of order in the school. Some students will still have a hard time, but it will be easier to support those students because there are fewer of them, and precious resources can be directed to helping anyone who struggles. Test scores will be good, which will continue the virtuous cycle. There is plenty of variation here: in some affluent schools, more students will fall through the cracks. This isn’t a story where affluent schools are perfect. The averages often hide a lot of failures at the left end of the distribution. But the averages look good on the surface, so we tell ourselves these are the good schools.
In a high-poverty context, the basic distribution starts in the same place. But more students experience deprivations that sap precious cognitive resources. Fewer students who struggle get outside instruction to compensate. The difference is small at first, but over time the gaps in prior knowledge compound. More students feel dumb and frustrated because they know they aren’t learning the way they are supposed to. It becomes harder to keep order in the school. Low motivation can spread and become the norm. There’s a lot of variation here: some schools will do a better job creating a strong culture of learning. Some will provide the type of effective instruction that the student population is more sensitive to. Others will not. Some will make a kind of devil’s bargain, lowering expectations because it seems like the only way forward, but end up in a spiral of lower rigor that erodes the education of even the students who have more cognitive resources.
When I say some students are less sensitive to instruction, that’s a bit of a simplification. Students with more cognitive resources can still learn from mediocre instruction, but they aren’t likely to learn much if they aren’t taught at all. If a student doesn’t take algebra, they aren’t likely to learn algebra. Here the devil’s bargain starts to hurt stronger students: the school lowers expectations, and all students suffer because they aren’t exposed to the same level of rigor.5
Where Does This Leave Us?
There are no easy conclusions from this mental model.
In this story, even if the teachers and staff aren’t any better or worse in one school or another, you end up with very different outcomes. From my perspective, the basic state of education in the US is that we know how to teach students with more cognitive resources, but classrooms where students with fewer cognitive resources consistently succeed are few and far between. They do exist, in pockets here and there, but it’s far rarer than it should be.
There’s also a problem in finding these pockets: it’s easy to look at a school with relatively high achievement and assume they must be doing something right. In most cases, that high achievement is a result of demographics and not teaching quality. Pretty much any form of teaching will be successful with some students. These facts make it hard to improve education, because a practice can seem effective on the surface while not actually working for a significant fraction of students.
One tough consequence of this mental model is that schools that are successful working with a high-poverty student population look different. There is more structure. The teaching is intense. This makes some people squirm; they want to help students from challenging circumstances succeed, but they also want that teaching to look like teaching in affluent areas.
This model is about distributions and averages. Teachers work with individuals. It’s easy to caricature rich kids as having everything easy, but that’s not the case. Plenty of well-off students struggle and don’t get the instruction they need. Similarly, one can fall into the trap of stereotyping poor kids, but there is a ton of variation and plenty of poor students excel in school. Aggregated together the differences become clear, but we have to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush.
The real answer, to me, is teaching. Doing our best to give every kid great instruction, instruction that manages cognitive load and gives access to as many students as possible.
Effective Teaching Is Harder Than It Sounds
This is where I find cognitive science so appealing. The basic science of teaching students with fewer cognitive resources is to understand the simple model of the mind. The goal is the same for all students: to move knowledge into long-term memory. Managing cognitive load, making sure precious cognitive resources are focused on the essential ideas we want students to learn, is the heart of teaching so that more students can learn.
The basic steps sound simple: practice, small chunks, manage attention, connections, sequencing, model, review, scaffolds.
But that’s harder than it sounds. The hard part is that all of those things depend on the content that is being taught. Breaking ideas into small steps is very different when teaching reading fluency than when teaching algebra. Providing scaffolds is different for writing a paragraph than adding fractions. Generally speaking, teachers have some level of expertise in what they teach. That expertise can blind us to the best ways to break concepts down. The small pieces have become invisible, the connections between concepts so automatic that we cannot perceive them.
This type of teaching is basically an unsolved problem across education. Lots of experienced teachers know how to do this for random stuff they’ve taught for years, but for most domains taught in K-12 schools, there isn’t a well-accepted way of managing cognitive load to teach that topic. I can’t google, “I’m teaching adding and subtracting decimals and I want to know how to teach it while managing cognitive load.” There’s no easy answer, no expert consensus. There are lots of ideas out there, but unfortunately many of them are nonsense.6
It might seem crazy that this is an unsolved problem after all of the time and money that has been invested in improving education. I would argue that much of that time and money has paid little attention to the basic phenomena I’m describing. I’m an optimist: I’m optimistic that somewhere down the road we will know more about how to build an education system where more students succeed. I think the path is a better understanding of how humans learn, how that cognitive architecture suggests certain teaching practices, and then the slow, empirical work of putting that knowledge into practice with all of the content we want students to learn in school.
1
For a few examples of where students rise above their circumstances: Steubenville, Ohio, several southern US states, and England. It’s also worth noting that child poverty is down in the US, yet that hasn’t translated into learning gains.
2
I’m emphasizing working memory capacity and processing speed as the heart of cognitive resources because there is evidence to support these two constructs and they are relatively simple to conceptualize as part of learning. Here is a good paper to explore the topic, though there’s plenty of disagreement among researchers in this area. The paper also looks at a third major area, what they call executive processes, which often have to do with attention. Other researchers would mention different areas. I would emphasize here that first, this is a mental model. It’s not perfect, but I do still think it’s useful. And second, when I read about these types of cognitive processes, they largely have to do with the bottlenecks between the learning environment and long-term memory, and I think my basic thesis holds even under a different conceptualization of cognitive resources.
3
There’s an interesting question here that I don’t want to sidetrack the main post but is worth looking at. I’m claiming that students with fewer cognitive resources need better teaching, but that they can, generally speaking, achieve similar end goals to other students. Cognitive resources don’t limit a student’s potential, but they constrain the type of teaching needed to get them there.
When I’ve made this claim in the past it really bugs some people. I want to address a few possible responses. First, some people will reference students with profound intellectual disabilities. Sure, though that number is very small and can become an excuse for students who are still capable. One of my education heroes is Samuel Kirk. Kirk was a pioneer in special education who gained a reputation for working with students labeled “uneducable” and teaching them to read. Are there exceptions? Absolutely. But let’s be careful with the labels we throw around.
Another response I get is the visceral experience from some people, often in math, that they learned up to a certain point and then hit a wall they couldn’t surpass. My hypothesis here is pretty simple: in that situation, the instruction was not sufficient to keep you moving forward. With better instruction, you could have learned more. Does this mean every student has the potential to be the next Einstein? No. First, graduate-level physics programs aren’t exactly paragons of excellent pedagogy. In any intellectual endeavor, the quality of instruction decreases as you climb the ladder. That will always create a barrier. I’m also arguing in this post that the type of instruction I’m talking about is poorly-defined in most domains. More often than not we just don’t know how to do it yet, and it is much harder at the higher levels of a domain where content is more complex. So no, I’m not arguing that anyone can do anything they want. There are limitations. But generally speaking, I think our ceilings are higher than we think, and excellent instruction has remarkable power to improve outcomes.
A related point here is that, if we improve education outcomes, won’t we raise standards and the cycle will continue indefinitely? Maybe! Look, in the meantime, I’m teaching 5th graders who struggle to read fluently and to figure out 4 x 6. Let’s nail the core skills that schools are charged with teaching, and then we can have all sorts of debates about what to do next.
4
This list of effective teaching practices is heavily influenced by Rosenshine’s principles.
5
This mental model can lead to a few different strands of reasoning around improving schools. One can focus on motivation and try to find as many ways as possible to get students more motivated. One can focus on outside instruction — one example of this is advocating for families to read with their children. One can focus on increasing rigor, ensuring all students are exposed to rigorous content to mitigate the spiral of low expectations and help stronger students learn through exposure. All of these work, to an extent. And I’m in favor of all of these, to an extent. Building a school culture to maximize motivation is valuable. Families should read to their kids. Schools shouldn’t lower expectations. But all of these can also become distractions from high-quality instruction. We tell students to advocate for themselves and persevere rather than improving instruction so less perseverance is necessary. We start a read-at-home initiative to cover for the failures of early reading instruction. We raise the level of rigor without providing corresponding support. From my perspective, instruction should be the first priority, and everything else should play a supporting role.
6
One reason I find the science of reading compelling is that it’s the one area of education where we do have some decent evidence for ways to reduce cognitive load, in this case for reducing cognitive load while teaching students to decode text. We also have some suggestive work on other areas of the reading process, though that understanding is far from complete. I find this area of research interesting because it is so different from many other areas of education, where research is a long way from recommending specific, concrete classroom practices.
While Google is trying to move beyond Chromebooks, the ubiquity of these devices has made the company's education products huge in schools. Now, Google says it will let educators choose whether to allow its AI tools in the classroom. However, blocking AI tools also means giving up search, leaving schools with a difficult decision.
Google's new overarching approach to AI in K-12 classrooms sounds good on the surface. After consulting educators, researchers, and lawmakers, Google has decided that schools using its education products will be opted out of AI tools by default. It will be up to administrators to manually enable them when these changes roll out in the coming months.
When you look at what Google considers to be an AI tool, the nature of the Faustian bargain becomes clear. The affected products are Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. There's no picking and choosing—you either allow all the AI or none of it.
Arkivism is a search and visual discovery engine for millions of public domain works from the collections of the Smithsonian, The Met, NASA, Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, and more.
Kernel Issue 6: FEED is out now, reaching you through one of the myriad feeds coursing through our modern technological society. One of my goals when putting together this issue was to expose the genealogy of those feeds, the history behind what often fades into the infrastructural background. Tomás Guarna is a scholar of digital infrastructure and governance from a social perspective. Here, he traces the history of the now-omnipresent infinite feed, showing the particular decisions and decision-makers that informed its development.
Also, if you’re in New York: we’re throwing a launch party for Kernel 6 at Hex House in Brooklyn on November 8! We’ll be featuring readings from the issue as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine from Kernel Magazine Creative Director Connie Liu! We hope to see you there! Get your tickets now!
—Jacob Sujin Kuppermann
🌽 A Media History of the Infinite Feed 🔩
By Tomás Guarna
Edited by Jacob Sujin Kuppermann
In 2023, a young woman known as “K.G.M.” sued Meta and YouTube for designing features that made her allegedly addicted to the platforms starting when she was just six years old. This addiction, she argued, ultimately left her with anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts. In March of this year, the tech companies were found guilty by a jury in Los Angeles — with damages at $4.2 million and $1.8 million respectively for Meta and YouTube — after agreeing that they acted with malice and fraud. Many of the culprits of Meta and YouTube’s psychologically destructive strategies are well-known by now: algorithmic recommendations, auto-played videos, constant notifications, and beauty filters. But interestingly, K.G.M.’s lawyers also included among these tools “infinite scroll,” the design feature of Web and mobile apps that presents content seamlessly as users scroll down through content in their feeds.
“Doomscrolling,” “mind-rotting,” “technology addiction” — the endless feed has become the emblematic medium of contemporary digital pathology, the tool of choice for the passive Internet user who scrolls and scrolls in the search of a hit of dopamine. Interestingly, however, this immediacy in receiving consumable Web content was not always demonized — in fact, it was once seen as the harbinger of a celebrated mode of networked politics. Pundits and scholars attributed the rapidness of online activity and the ever-updating feed as a key conduit to progressive political winds, from Obama’s 2008 win to the 2010s Arab Spring. But above all, the story of the infinite feed shows how the design of platforms gradually disconnected the flow of information consumption from conscious choice — a transition that left the dreams of early Web enthusiasts behind, and opened the doors for surveillance capitalism.
Unsurprisingly, the Internet was not always organized around endless feeds. Prior to the rise of dynamic page updates (how clients automatically retrieve new information from the server), to see updated information, users would have to take part in the archaic practice called refreshing, where they would press a button with two arrows forming a circular loop, similar to a recycling symbol. The icon has since been largely refashioned as a single arrow, the concept of a client-server communication now completely abstracted. Refreshing today is almost a misnomer: rather than receiving the freshest version of a website’s content, the refresh button on browsers today is generally used to reattempt a query, retrieving the latest version of a website’s code, or re-launching the website — usually, when we suspect it is malfunctioning. Revisiting the earlier meaning of refreshing brings us back to a Web with a different temporality, one where users would “take turns” with servers, and where online experiences were temporally scattered and broadly slower.
Creating seamless online experiences became a priority for dot-com entrepreneurs of the mid-1990s as they discovered that the gold mine of the Internet was in monetizing interactivity, not access. Selling access to the Internet infrastructure had become a viable business when the U.S. government privatized the Internet in 1995. However, it allowed only a few players and required massive investments. Tech capitalists soon discovered that the prime business opportunity was in profiting people’s online interactions — whether by selling them access to a service, like Match.com; by taking a cut of their sales, like eBay; or delivering them ads, like Google. For this goal they would need to design online experiences that were frictionless.
One foundation for these Web experiences was HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN in the early 1990s, it defined the syntax and semantics for accessing distributed files on the Web. Thanks to HTTP, you can access a file on a server in China from a computer in Argentina, since both computers communicate following the same rules and language. Particularly, HTTP was envisioned as a “librarian” for digital files on the Web — hypertext documents with graphics, text, videos, and, importantly, links that allowed users to go from one document to another. These documents were coded in HTML, the HyperText Markup Language. Developers could tweak the documents to deliver custom information to users based on their requests — for example, showing a user’s specific dating matches, or their search results based on a query. Another important characteristic of HTTP was that it was “stateless” — the server treated each request from the client as independent, and “forgot” what it had communicated with it before. Other protocols that facilitated real-time Web interaction — like the IRC protocol, used for online chatrooms — had persistent connections. This meant that HTTP could “serve” a higher number of simultaneous users, as the server did not need an ongoing process for each user. Served through HTTP, developers could also flexibly design HTML interfaces that allowed for various purposes, from dating to bidding. In turn, protocols were limited to their envisioned purposes — IRC for chatting, SMTP for emailing etc.
Driven to profit from the Web’s booming popularity, dot-com entrepreneurs enlisted Web developers to create seamless Web experiences they could profit from — ideally, ones that would not require users to refresh. On March 3, 1995, a user with an Italian email address wrote in “www-talk,” the public mailing list and technical discussion forum for the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”), which decides the open standards for the Web, “As everybody of us know, html is a ‘monodirectional’ protocol […] I (pronunciation: ‘my boss’) would like to investigate how the thing could be changed, in order to have a real ‘live’ environment.” The user proposed three options: a background process in which the client would poll the server periodically; integrating server functionalities in the browser; or starting a server in the browser that would communicate with the actual server. W3C leadership were not interested. A response from Dan Connolly, a computer scientist who chaired the W3C HTML Working Group, is emblematic of W3C’s refusal to support a “live” web: “Wedging this into HTTP seems like a bad idea. HTTP is an information retrieval protocol. For conferencing, look at protocols like IRC or the MUD [multi-user dungeons] stuff.” HTTP was for information retrieval, not for web interactivity. The open standards community could not be bothered with attempts to fit the Web into the mold of online monetizable interactions.
Outside of W3C’s public standards discussions, Netscape — the Web browser company founded by Jim Clark and former Mosaic developer Marc Andreessen — was independently developing their own solution. As described in an article by ACM columnist Hal Berghel, Netscape had popularized “push technology” in 1995 by developing two methods of “dynamic page updating” — that is, updating content without client refreshing. One was a “server push” method through special software. It did not require client requests, but the server had to hold a persistent, running process for each connected client, which, at its core, clashed with how HTTP was designed. The second method was “client pull,” where an HTML meta tag (code with instructions for the browser, invisible to the user) would instruct the web browser to refresh every X amount of seconds.
Netscape’s client pull, however, had two key problems. For one, it would reload the entire website, which was cumbersome, especially with slow Internet speeds. And second, Web developers could not rely on Netscape’s client pull because it was not a widely-shared standard, but an idiosyncratic feature particular to the Netscape browser, since W3C refused to incorporate it. The client pull method involved an “http-equiv” tag, which was controversial because they simulated a response from the server itself. As Apache Web server early developer Brian Behlendorf termed it, client pull was ultimately a hack (“though Netscape likes to call them ‘cool tricks’”, he noted).
The holy grail of dynamic page updates would also emerge against the open standards’ community resistance, but from Microsoft — a company in a much more advantageous position. In 1999, Microsoft released a version of ActiveX (a software framework that would allow small programs to be run directly inside Internet Explorer) that included a JavaScript object (a reusable block of code) called “XMLHTTP;” the identifiers were ActiveXObject(”Msxml2.XMLHTTP”) and ActiveXObject(”Microsoft.XMLHTTP”). A JavaScript script could use the XMLHTTP obejcts to fetch new data from the server, and then use the response to update just part of the existing page without refreshing the entire site. XMLHTTP powered Microsoft’s Outlook web client, making it work similarly to its desktop version. Microsoft’s success in popularizing XMLHTTP through a browser extension may be puzzling today, but it is worth noting that Internet Explorer’s market dominance was reaching 75.31% in August 1999; and that plug-ins to enable Web functionalities were fairly popular despite the vulnerabilities they provoked. Possibly until Steve Jobs’ declared opposition to Flash in 2010, downloading an extension to enable a feature on the Web was fairly popular, as were spyware infections from a culture that did not mind downloading games, tools, purple gorilla virtual assistants.
As Microsoft’s solution to dynamic page updates grew in popularity, competitor Web browsers adopted it under the non-Microsoft identifier of XMLHttpRequest, which soon became a de facto standard — even if W3C did not begin to adopt it as such until 2006. Gecko, Mozilla’s browser engine — used in Firefox and other Mozilla products, built from the open-sourced Netscape codebase — introduced and coined XMLHttpRequest in 2000. Apple’s Safari browser adopted it in 2004, and Opera in 2005. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer adopted its alternate name in 2006. Popular web applications relying on XMLHttpRequest, or “XHR,” as it came to be termed by Web developers, allowed users to interact with the Web in ways that felt similar to desktop software: accessing information in real time, without clunky reloads. While smooth interactivity has previously been a domain of software that had to be downloaded, developers could now effectively create “Web apps.” XHR’s popularization crystallized the transition of the Web as a “network of documents” to a network of applications that could rely on ever-updating online information. Google’s Web applications, targeted to the mass public, were notable examples of this: Google Maps allowed users to zoom in and zoom out, to move seamlessly through online maps updated with fresh information, much of it crowdsourced from user contribution. Inspired by this new wave of Web apps, a popular 2005 essay by UX designer Jesse James Garrett coined the term “AJAX,” Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, to define a “new approach to Web applications” that finally eliminated ”the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction”. While still requiring users to click, automatic refreshing had almost arrived.
The rising social networking sites of Web 2.0 embraced AJAX with open arms. In 2008, Twitter introduced an AJAX functionality so that users could access the latest tweets without refreshing the website. A year later, Twitter changed the prompt that users saw as an initiation to share tweets: “what are you doing?” became “what’s happening?” AJAX allowed Twitter to be a site about immediacy — a true Internet of the present. This was the culmination of a process that had begun in 2006, when Twitter launched with a reverse-chronological timeline with tweets from a user’s friends (later changed to followed users). It was envisioned so that users could see what their contacts — especially professional ones, as the site was celebrated for its relevance in conferences like SXSW — were doing at any time, thanks to Twitter’s early adoption of mobile apps and SMS posting. In Twitter: a Biography (NYU Press, 2020), communication scholars Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym talk about a tension between two visions: this early idea of Twitter as a social technology for updating your friends, and the one of an informational public communication platform. Twitter’s increase in speed and synchronicity, enabled via AJAX, allowed the site to embrace this second meaning — not just a social media site, but a true information network that could show users “what’s happening,” right now.
This transformation coincided with a moment when those social networking sites’ political potential seemed most promising. Concurrent with Twitter’s AJAX adoption, the first “Twitter revolutions” took place around the world. In 2009, protests in Moldova rose against the governing party, which had allegedly rigged the recent parliamentary election. Pundits named the Moldovan upheavals “Twitter revolutions,” with news media heightening the role of social networking sites as central to organizing civic action. That same year, protests broke out in major cities across Iran, in opposition to the incumbent president declaring victory in the 2009 election — also lauded by Western media as a “Twitter revolution” due to the alleged wide use of social media to organize and document events. The actual role of Twitter in these protests is debatable, in retrospect — notably, in a Dissent magazine piece, critic Evgeny Morozov convincingly argued that Twitter’s role in Iran was overstated, as the protests been largely organized by opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s political organization. There were also few active Twitter accounts in Tehran — although Morozov conceded that Moldova’s protests had been spontaneous, and Twitter may have had a role in encouraging them. In 2010, the Arab Spring broke with protests in Tunisia, followed by Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, among others — Western media, once again, lauded Twitter as the new medium of political change.
The same year the Arab Spring revolts started, the platform introduced a key change in its interface: the “infinite scroll.” Twitter’s first AJAX redesign had allowed users to click a button to load more tweets after they reached the end of their page. This offered more updated content without refreshing, but still required an action from the user. Twitter’s 2010 redesign of the service’s Web version — codenamed Phoenix, internally, and launched as #newTwitter — loaded new tweets automatically when users reached the end of the page. While the original ideation of an infinite-scroll feature was not from Twitter — it can be traced back to engineer Aza Raskin in 2006 — it was Twitter’s implementation which made infinite scroll become a convention across the Internet, since web developers rushed to mimic it across different sites. The infinite scroll invited users to read Twitter as a seamless text of the present. It materialized Twitter’s dream of an information network, where users would continuously access more and more updated information without breaks and disruptions. Users no longer had to request more information, they simply had to desire it. It translated into the platform’s design a vision of a citizenship that naturally strived for openness and the democratic flow of information.
Infinite scroll was a fundamental technical innovation behind today’s “For You pages,” or customized algorithmic feeds. As infinite scroll became implemented across all the major social networks, it allowed platforms to react to the information they gathered from users in real time. Building on its earlier EdgeRank system, in 2013 Facebook transitioned to a machine learning recommendation algorithm that used “over a thousand different factors” to sort posts in the platform’s News Feed, based on users’ predicted engagement. Infinite scroll meant that Facebook could deliver recent posts in small continuous batches — they would appear for users naturally, as long as they had a continuous Internet connection, maximizing engagement and minimizing conscious choice to load more content. But furthermore, delivering content piecemeal meant that Facebook’s recommendation engine could react to rapidly-updated data about posts’ global performance on the social network — the likelihood of all of Facebook’s user’s engagement with the post — but also to rapidly-updated data about the likelihood of the particular user’s engagement, based on real-time “likes”, “comments,” and “shares” of the posts they saw, possibly from the just-delivered batch.
The infinite scroll-powered feed opened the door for the rise of a sharp critique of Big Tech’s capture of people’s emotional states. In 2019, Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff would publish The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Profile, 2019), which argued that platforms close tracking of people’s activity allowed to extract “behavioral surplus,” data that could be turned into “prediction products” and marketed to advertisers, insurers, and political campaigns interested in shaping people’s future behaviors. The infinite feed was a key medium for this task — it allowed platforms to collect “fresh” data about users, allowing ad systems to react instantaneously. But furthermore, these ads were delivered not just based on users’ demographic characteristics — for example, whether one is a 31 year-old graduate student in the Bay Area — but also on data that purportedly represented their psychological states, their behaviors and attitudes to immediately preceding content — whether they are hopeful, sad, or lonely. The infinite feed enabled surveillance capitalism’s move from demography to behavioral prediction, and it became the center of controversies around emotional influence like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Tomás Guarna is a PhD candidate in Communication at Stanford University.
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann is a PhD student in Ecology at UC Davis and the editor-in-chief of Kernel Magazine.
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A plaza just outside 780 Third Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, brimming with well-tended flowers in warm weather and furnished with elegant stone benches, looks like an inviting place to sit down and enjoy a slice of pizza. Or at least Wade Phillips certainly thought so.
Phillips, a hospitality and security worker, used to take his breaks in that plaza every day. (“Wade Phillips” isn’t his real name, but a nom de guerre, or what its user refers to as “my please-don’t-fire-me name”). He describes himself as “kind of a Good Will Hunting guy,” referring to the Matt Damon character in Gus Van Sant’s 1997 movie about a self-taught working-class genius who has survived an abusive childhood. “I don’t really have a family,” says Phillips, “I’ve had kind of a rough road.”
For the past few decades, working in Manhattan, sometimes living with roommates, parks like this have been a respite where he’s been grateful to “go sit somewhere and breathe.” Such spaces provide a sense of peace for free for anyone who needs to rest a spell.
Last year, he was working on Forty-Eighth Street, taking his breaks almost every day on a bench in the especially idyllic plaza at 780 Third Avenue. “From the day I had my interview there,” he says, “till the day I left, it was, like, my spot.” On one occasion, Phillips had been having a rough night at work, and it was the anniversary of his father’s death. He needed some time to himself on the bench. A security guard appeared immediately and told Phillips he couldn’t be there. “I just need ten minutes,” Phillips told the guard, who was unmoved and insisted he move along.
Grumpily acceding to the guard’s demand, Philips crossed the street and saw an enormous sign carved into the stone bench in question. It read, “Welcome.”
“Everyone has their breaking point,” he says, “and that was it for me.” Phillips emphasized, “It doesn’t just say ‘Welcome.’ It’s carved in.” That moment, he says, is “when this whole thing started.”
Phillips, a meticulous and detail-oriented researcher who majored in finance in college, hit the city records and learned that the public has a legal right to use that space. 780 Third Avenue and nearly six hundred other spaces like it in New York City have a somewhat complicated legal status: they are POPS, or “privately owned public spaces.”
In Midtown Manhattan especially, real estate developers often, in order to be able to add height to their building that is outside what the zoning laws would typically permit for that neighborhood, reach an agreement with the city to “trade floor space in the sky for floor space down below,” as Philips explains. Buildings may also provide POPS in exchange for other types of zoning variances, but in Midtown, height is the most common. Individual agreements vary, but they all specify the building’s obligations to the public: exact square footage; whether the owner must provide chairs, tables, or benches for public use; whether there must be trees or plants.
Privately owned public spaces throughout New York City comprise more than 3.8 million square feet of space for public leisure. The practice of allowing developers to skirt some zoning rules in exchange for providing public space has been around since 1961, but in 2017, New York City Council passed Local Law 116 to strengthen the city’s oversight of these agreements, requiring annual reporting on the POPS by the relevant agencies — the Department of Buildings and Department of City Planning — and, crucially, requiring signage indicating that the public has access to the area.
But POPS violations, in which the public are denied access to these spaces by the companies who received the legal clearance to build additional floors, are common. Much of the real estate industry bitterly resents having to provide any public goods despite having legally agreed to do so. They prefer to take up space in our skies without providing anything in return.
Phillips, particularly incensed after carrying out his legal research and learning he was in the right to sit on the bench, went back to 780 Third Avenue the next day and told the security guard that the plaza was a public park. He says the building employee insulted him and threatened to have him arrested. “I was like, ‘Okay, game on.’”
Phillips filmed these interactions and gave the guard many opportunities to change his tune before finally going live with the whole imbroglio. Thus was born the Instagram account @780_lord_of_bench, which now has 64.7K followers, including Joe Rogan and Sarah Jessica Parker. And more importantly, ordinary New Yorkers, who now file complaints about POPS abuses, attend Phillips’s celebratory POPS events — part protest, part party, calling attention to the right to public leisure in those spaces — and donate to his Patreon to support his advocacy.
He now monitors POPS throughout Midtown. On a beautiful October evening, I meet Phillips just across the street from Radio City Music Hall for a tour of some of offending properties along Sixth Avenue and an introduction to some of the notorious security regimes featured in his videos.
The outdoor tables of a restaurant, Double Knot, protrude — illegally, according to Phillips — onto the POPS at 1251 Sixth Avenue, managed by the Hines Group and owned by Mitsui Fudosan America, a real estate developer that continues to dodge a fine despite public complaints and a violation issued by the city for allowing a restaurant in a place designated as a public plaza with obvious signage.
Nearby, at 1221 Sixth, property of The Rockefeller Group, which owns and manages some six million square feet of office space in Midtown Manhattan, a sunken plaza — also a POPS — has at times been blocked off on weekends. Due to complaints and advocacy by Phillips and his followers, the Department of Buildings has served Rockefeller with a violation on this issue, but they remain determined to skirt the law when they can. A sign barring the public from the lower plaza that is used on weekends sits nearby. And just two days earlier, security on the same property attempted to remove Phillips for filming on the property, though he was not breaking any of the posted rules about the plaza’s use.
In fact, as we walk from one plaza to another, I remark that Phillips seems scrupulous about following the rules of these plazas. “That’s my whole leverage,” he grins.” That’s my whole thing, is [that] I’m going to document that I’m being completely a normal guy.” The message of all his videos and advocacy is one of following the rules, and in the comments, he often pushes back when his followers urge some kind of civil disobedience. The ethos of his Instagram account and all his interactions with building personnel seems to be that the public should be respectful of these public spaces by observing the rules, and that the owners should do the same. “The issue is when they start to put their own rules into effect” and refuse to abide by their own agreements with the public, he says.
Since Phillips began making these videos, security follows him around when he is in these spaces. The evening of my visit, as we sit in the sunken plaza, a security guard watches us carefully and keeps talking into his phone. Just two days earlier, at the same spot, Phillips was removed by security.
Walking north, Phillips shows me another POPS, this one at 31 West Fifty-Second Street where, until he made videos about it, the handicapped access ramp was blocked off. It’s open, for now. Another offending restaurant on the same property has reduced its outdoor table intrusion to just one, which Phillips thinks is acceptable even if it might technically be out of line. “It’s a give-and-take,” he says, “because obviously nothing is ever perfect,” pointing out that it might be hard for an owner to completely forbid a tenant to use outside space that they’d assumed was part of the deal when they rented the space.
Phillips is not someone who has a hard time seeing the viewpoint of others, especially those in the same industry as him. “As a security guy, I work with a lot of these types of guys,” he says. “They kind of get the ego thing when they work in a building like this.” But they are not actually enforcing the law. Rather, they are enforcing the desires of a corporation uninterested in holding up their end of the bargain to the public.
Phillips says building owners are getting more fines and being issued more violations in response to his complaints. Phillips’s advocacy has engaged city officials, including the Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani, who was appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in January and has met with Phillips and toured the offending sites. Phillips calls Tigani “a great, great asset.” Phillips would like to see the city strengthen enforcement and streamline the process for responding to complaints; at present, it’s hampered by the fact that multiple agencies are involved (exactly the kind of problem Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency [COGE] has been trying to fix). He’d also like to see city council legislation to increase the fines on repeat offenders.
Phillips also holds dance parties, concerts, and most recently, a well-attended Halloween flash dance party and costume contest in the POPS, spreading the word about the violations but also reclaiming these public spaces for public joy. For the Halloween party, Phillips himself showed up in full king regalia, including a crown and scepter — the Lord of Bench, crowned as such.
While the response to his project is satisfying so far, Phillips would like to see the real estate industry comply more fully, and he thinks Mayor Mamdani’s attention on the issue would help significantly. “This is the one issue I cannot believe he has not said a word on since the moment it started,” Phillips says, noting with some annoyance that many content creators “with far less following, with far less reach” have been in conversation with the mayor. “I’m not one of the crazy guys out here!” says Phillips. “We need his voice on this.”
Phillips’s project — fighting for public control of space against real estate oligarchs who want to take it away — seems closely aligned with Mamdani’s own. Both have been fighting for the working class to quite literally have a place in the city: a bench, an apartment, a park, a soccer field, a night at the opera. Both insist that New York is for everybody.
Phillips, for his part, does not frame his crusade in ideological terms. “This is an issue that transcends everything,” he says. “Doesn’t matter if you’re left, right, green. Everybody’s gonna sit on a bench.”
This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.
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