Henry Fuseli, artist; Moses Haughton, engraver:
The temple of nature: Frontispiece
from the Collection:The temple of nature; or,
The origin of society: a poem, with philosophical notes
(1803)

Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New York Public Library. "The temple of nature: Frontispiece" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 18, 2026. 'https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8f556120-c604-012f-eb75-58d385a7bc34'

"…a singularity of sorts, utterly unusable."

It seems to be the Nature of things that they become ever more complex as they age. Maturity rarely brings clarity. It most often introduces obfuscations unimaginable earlier, as if accompanying sophistication. Social Media seems destined to become even more of whatever it was before. Through upgrades and legislation, specifications will more than merely morph over time, but will very likely utterly transform these platforms into the unrecognizable, and for some, into utter unusability. We’ve seen these evolutions before, and they do not bode well.

If Social Media presently seems mildly distracting, it seems destined to become ever more so into the future, for its DNA seems to be programmed that way. Unsatisfied with the results simple scrolling provides, expect some autoscrolling features to appear in upcoming years. It should become possible to run most Social Media in something resembling a background mode, where sessions will not have to be interrupted to transact most business. Bone connecting headphones will allow ambient sound to slip in around most audio tracks, so communication can continue regardless of what’s going on back there. Isolation will be possible while carrying on realistic-seeming conversations. Prompting apps will use artificial intelligence to feed a predictive script to a user to free up their attention for more critical activities, like scrolling through cat videos.

Map apps will feature spot ads for businesses we’re passing by, in real time, encouraging their further use regardless of traffic or time. It will be possible to tune into virtually any proceeding while driving. Church will simulcast or stream according to your preferences. Heads-up displays in cars will finally allow drivers to watch movies without materially affecting their ability to safely drive, thanks to AI. It will even prove possible to continue scrolling in your sleep, to essentially preprogram your dreams, employing most social media apps. Tandem or collective dreaming should even become possible through clever new networking strategies.

If you’re presently overwhelmed with Social Media’s presence in your life, prepare for much worse into even the near future. Any sense of separation between self and app will continue disappearing. The need for thinking will evolve to become truly optional. Most will opt to link into the HiveMind® app to better coordinate and communicate. Those going it alone will be a negligible proportion of the overall population. The whole notion of family will be supplanted with a more fluid notion of tribe. Those who share your platform will become more important to you than those who share your DNA. We will quietly float away from each other on bandwidth presently unimaginable. These present days of seemingly overwhelming Social Media presence will seem to have been crude in comparison. Some will pine after attention span lost, but if the past proves to be prologue again, most won’t notice. They will be so focused on whatever’s coming next that they’ll very likely miss their own presence.

I’m not wishing this future upon anyone, mind you. I’m only projecting based upon what’s typically happened before, as a convenience matures to ultimately become essentially unusable. I am currently avoiding upgrading my Pages app because I’ve heard that the new release changes much of its functionality into a subscription basis, so that I’ll have to pay extra to perform what I currently accomplish for free. How many apps have I had to delete because they discovered usage fees? Many, and apparently still counting. I will not be surprised when Meta offers a preferential algorithm service for a fee, providing guaranteed rather than randomly provided access for “small” monthly charges. Eventually, all apps will probably require user payments, once advertisers finally figure out that everyone long ago mastered the ability to blank out all Social Media ads. No user ever remembers any of them, and never has.

We do not yet inhabit our future, however futuristic our present feature set might seem. There’s definitely more to come, and some, if not most of it, will deeply dissatisfy most current users. This won’t matter because Social Media was designed for future users, never the present ones. We present users imprinted upon features that cannot age well, and impressionable new users remain capable of imprinting on ever more intrusive features the rest of us will likely remain blind to, or too overwhelmed to comprehend. Think of the future of Social Media as like electronic hip-hop. Not actually music, but something utilizing identical rhythm and melody for every track, a singularity of sorts, utterly unusable.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz