The internet used to have an exit. Designers removed it because every logged-off user looked like a retention failure, a leak in the funnel. This piece argues that the disappearance of the log-off is not incidental. It was a choice, made deliberately, at scale.
The argument is structural: always-on presence was never a user request. It was a product decision disguised as convenience. Notifications, persistent sessions, and ambient connectivity were engineered to eliminate the gap between you and the feed. The cost is not abstract. It is attention, recovery time, and the cognitive baseline you bring to everything else.
What makes the full piece worth reading is not the conclusion but the design archaeology. It traces how specific UX patterns killed the natural stopping point and asks what it would actually take to build the exit back in, not as a dark-pattern reversal, but as a first-class design goal.
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