A closer look
Eric Michelman co-invented the mouse scroll wheel in 1995 specifically to make zooming in and out of Excel spreadsheets less annoying for accountants and business professionals; twenty-five years later, this mundane office tool is directly responsible for our modern doom-scrolling epidemic, transforming a minor ergonomic convenience into a biological compulsion as we sit on our couches for six hours straight, mindlessly flicking our index fingers to consume an endless feed of bad news and controversial hot takes, proving that even the most innocent spreadsheet optimization can easily mutate into a weapon of mass psychological destruction
