Scrolling is a material practice of digital consumption, marked by repetitive, habitual absorption into digital platforms. Given the ubiquity of scrolling as a phenomenon, it is interesting that the practice remains largely unexplored in philosophical literature. This paper explores the relation between contemporary precarity and scrolling via the lens of Lauren Berlant’s notion of slow death. I phenomenologically analyse how fear and what Berlant calls ‘crisis ordinariness’ orient subjects toward scrolling as a salve – a mechanism for relieving the overwhelming pressure on their sensorium. In this context, scrolling can be understood as an attachment which provides for the subject agency in a lateral sense, a kind of empty space-making via distraction, which enables subsistence. I further analyse the temporal implications of scrolling: the transformation of time not only into an eternal present, but a form of dead time. I conclude by briefly considering relevant implications of my analysis for praxis – or, to put it another way, how the material practice of scrolling comes to reinforce the same post-Fordist structures which are responsible for the conditions of contemporary precarity in the first place.
