Albrecht Dürer: The Desperate Man (1515–16)

"There seems to be few viable alternatives. Caveat emptor here."

Was it always the case that the exercise of free speech rights attracted dedicated despots? This seems to be the case with our ‘internets.’ That space seems brimming with budding as well as practiced despots plying their slippery trade. The ratio of authenticity to absolute bullshit seems impossible to assess, but the presence of despotism there seems, finally, to be a given. It’s not just the Russians playing poltergeist, either, but what might appear to be upstanding business and political figures. Who isn’t suspected by someone? Whose motives are pure? The chief difficulty of any free speech medium might be that it encourages people to speak freely rather than circumspectly. Free speech has never been the same as loose talk, and social media seems to tolerate altogether too much loose talk. Is this the proper price for this franchise?

The greatest gift The Gods gave humans was the blesséd inability to read each other’s minds. We were born blind to much of what inescapably lies behind much of what constitutes our presence. We might be mostly cardboard cutouts of ourselves as far as most others are concerned. Our spouses might get deeper glimpses, as might our coworkers after many years, but we, gratefully, largely remain sphinxes to each other as well as to ourselves. We do not require access to anything even vaguely resembling whole truths, let alone much in the way of anything buts. We are generally shy and retiring about most things, or at least we were before we started accessing social media.

Suddenly, we began contributing to keeping public diaries. Comments we once reserved for only our own eyes started creeping into our feeds, which didn’t seem all that public at first. We had no idea of the reach any posting might achieve, mostly because reach was out of our control. The medium seemed to have a silent mind of its own, which determined who might access and where it might be served. It was all just so much magic. It mostly didn’t matter. The cynical hadn’t taken over at first, though they were frantically accumulating the means by which they might control the meta-narrative. Like all despots, they sought to manufacture their own truth first lest more authentic varieties render their scam toothless.

We were easily scammed. We still believed in the existence of benevolent billionaires. We trusted in the deep-down decency of most of the people in this society. We acknowledged the theoretical existence of a very few very bad actors without really believing they might be targeting us. The Steve Bannons earned millions teaching the feckless how to more effectively lie to us. An underlying ecosystem emerged, built on the foundation of falsehood. A subculture grew, dedicated to undermining decency for fun, profit, and inhumanity. Its titular leader was even elected president, then elected again, on a platform misrepresenting whatever he actually stood for. Nobody knew and never will.

We hold the absolute right under our constitution to say whatever we think, but we also hold a sacred responsibility not to say whatever we think. Social media enables us to share thoughts better left unthought, let alone widely shared. Yes, we’re scared and seeking allies. The strangers we meet on social media streets are not lost puppies needing shelter from a cruel and indifferent world. Some are operators who know how to pull your strings and push even the most sophisticated of us into shady endeavors. We are accompanied here by DigitalDespots, that’s just the way it is. There seems to be few viable alternatives. Caveat emptor here.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz