Attributed to William A. Mitchell: Rack Picture for Dr. Nones (1879)

The final writing week of my Unscrolling Series snuck up on me, even though I could have sworn I was paying close attention. I’d hoped to bring it in for a near-perfect three-point landing, but then I can never know until after I land whether or not that will prove possible. I feel very positive about how this series seems to be ending, with the JuryStillOut. This last week, I waded through Plopaganda into ConspiratorialCertainties. I felt like DickTracy tracking down the usual suspects. I created my most romantic story title ever with FlurriesWithTheCertaintyofSnow, though it spoke to neither flurries nor snowfall. I declared the Nature of Social Media and ended wiser than I’d started this series, thirteen long weeks ago, just before Christmas. Thank you for following along!

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Weekly Writing Summary

Plopaganda
“Social Media’s way more scary than it first appears.”
This Unscrolling Story reports on the Plopaganda Social Media spreads.
Social Media has become the most efficient disinformation delivery system ever devised, and attempts at regulation — from Meta’s First Amendment shields to the EU’s largely ineffectual rules — have done little more than natter around the edges. I keep wading in anyway, like RFK Jr. swimming in Rock Creek with his grandchildren, knowing the water’s contaminated but lacking any viable alternative. I tell myself vigilance offers some protection, while knowing my native gullibility will occasionally defeat me regardless. The malign actors who flooded Social Media to elect our current incumbent won’t stop — they’ll only get more efficient. So I splash around in the creek, hoping for the best, expecting some of the worst, and reminding myself that anything that seems too good to be true almost certainly is.

The Fords, Rock Creek Zoo Park, Washington, D. C. - Detroit Publishing Company postcards 10000 Series (1898 - 1931) — The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “The Fords, Rock Creek Zoo Park, Washington, D. C” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed March 14, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c18e35e0-c62e-012f-caa8-58d385a7bc34)

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ConspiratorialCertainties
“The meanings could not be clearer if they were written on the mirror he’s pretending to peer through.”
This Unscrolling Story offers some hope for those bedevilled by conspiracy theories in their Social Media feeds. Most of them seem to have become benign ConspiratorialCertainties now.
Conspiracy theories have metastasized into ConspiratorialCertainties, so reliably wrong that they’ve become their own refutation. What once blindsided us now barely warrants a yawn. So much projection goes into their telling that they almost always amount to confession rather than accusation. We’ve developed extremely sensitive sensors by now, capable of smelling what’s stuck to the bottom of their boots even when they can’t. Social Media’s firehose of pseudo-conspiracies has, paradoxically, inoculated most of us against further infection. A few years of disappointing practice left us scrolling smarter, less likely to swallow rubber worms with hooks inside. Our incumbent, still blaming Biden and trotting out his familiar hobgoblins, now serves less as a threat than as the best available vaccine against renewed contagion. The meanings couldn’t be clearer if they were written on the mirror he’s pretending to peer through.

Lucas Emil Vorsterman: Jan Lievens (1630/45)

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DickTracy
“The human condition remains, perhaps improved but also little changed.”
This Unscrolling Story tells a story of unrelenting change that seems to make little difference. The promise of two-way wrist radios never fully materialized, and couldn’t.
I remain amazed that Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio has become my everyday lived reality, though its arrival delivered considerably less transformation than I'd imagined. Chester Gould and Buck Rogers projected futures that proved too modest technologically while remaining surprisingly accurate about human nature — we're still contentious, the villains still tenacious, the world still largely indifferent. Tracy never managed to retire however many evil-doers he retired, and instant communication promised more than it ultimately delivered, precisely like Social Media has done. My disappointment with what Social Media became traces directly back to my own transformative fantasies — I chose delusion over probable reality and pinned my hopes on something no future has ever managed to deliver. Not every technology transforms, and even those that do often achieve it invisibly over decades, leaving us curiously more disappointed upon arrival than before. The human condition remains, perhaps marginally improved but little fundamentally changed — change itself bringing surprisingly little difference.

Dorothea Lange: Tracy (vicinity), California. Missouri family of five (1937)

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FlurriesWithTheCertaintyOfSnow
“The worms in our apples might keep us human…”
This Unscrolling Story tells about how we tend to hope in fewer dimensions than our futures unfold, thereby disappointing ourselves.
Social Media represents just another instance of us getting precisely what we insisted upon but nothing like what we’d expected — which turns out to be less an exception than an immutable rule of human aspiration. We specify expectations on one or two dimensions while leaving the bulk to default to what usually happens, then reliably surprise ourselves with the results. The internet promised more than the Enlightenment — universal connectivity, tyranny’s end, direct democracy without contention — and we collectively crushed that potential in sloppy, all-too-human execution, recreating our same-old Earth while reaching for Heaven. Yet cynicism remains the wrong response, for aspiring lives in imagined futures and serves as the only available antidote to a disappointing present. We will address what Social Media has injected into our freshly threatened civilization, ratcheting ourselves forward on disappointment as we always have, flailing in the general direction of salvation, never directly. The worms in our apples might keep us human.

Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広重: Sparrows and Camellia in Snow (c. 1831-33)


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Nature
“…a singularity of sorts, utterly unusable.”
This Unscrolling Story finds me contemplating the underlying Nature of Social Media and what that DNA might say about its future.
Social Media seems destined to become ever more of whatever it already was, its DNA programmed toward increasing distraction and intrusion. Autoscrolling, ambient audio, AI-prompted conversations, heads-up displays, preprogrammed dreams, collective dreaming through clever networking — the separation between self and app will continue dissolving until thinking itself becomes genuinely optional and most simply link into the HiveMind® to better coordinate. Those present days of seemingly overwhelming Social Media will seem crude in comparison to what's coming. I'm not wishing this future upon anyone, only projecting based upon what typically happens as any convenience matures into essential unusability — subscription fees replacing free features, preferential algorithms available for modest monthly charges, advertisers finally admitting what everyone already knew, that nobody ever remembered a single Social Media ad. We do not yet inhabit our future, however futuristic our present feature set might seem. Think of what's coming as electronic hip-hop — not actually music, but utilizing identical rhythm and melody for every track, a singularity of sorts, utterly unusable.
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”

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JuryStillOut
“Scrolling holds deeper purposes than escape and addiction.”
This final installment of my Unscrolling Series finds me still scrolling while acknowledging that the jury’s still out on whether scrolling’s necessary now or merely an unnecessary evil.
By pure Kismet, a landmark Social Media trial unfolded in Los Angeles while I created this Unscrolling Series — the jury still deliberating as I wrote this final installment. The case bypassed Section 230 protections entirely, focusing instead on platform engineering and design: should Meta and YouTube have known their services posed dangers to children? The result may establish an entirely new understanding of product design liability. Meanwhile, my own quarter-long deliberations have reached similarly unresolved conclusions. I've rendered myself a more circumspect scroller, incapable of the mindless scrolling I practiced before, though I still can't quite draw anything resembling a definitive resolution. I've adopted greyscale scrolling, which helps only slightly. With Spring approaching, my attention extends naturally back to gardening — decades of dedicated practice having left most beds perfectly friable, the cheatgrass mostly at bay except along the back fence bordering that neighbor's yard. I have a viable alternative to scrolling ever more inward. Scrolling isn't merely mindlessness and streaming cat videos, though. Synchronicity frolics there too, and more than a few stories in this series started with some half-baked inspiration stumbled upon while scrolling. Social Media holds deeper purposes than escape and addiction. It has been a comfort through the cold.

Juan Gris: Still Life (1922)

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The Creator's Clueless Like Me
I feel so distant from my Cluelessness manuscript that I’m probably less ready for its publication than I’ve been since I began readying it for publication. The many proof readings, the professional copyediting followed by yet another careful proofing, the galley proofs, and the hundred and fifteen little inconsequential decisions have all conspired to leave me … Clueless about the end product. I believe, as of this writing, that I’ve finally managed to submit my next-to-final copyedits in a begrudgingly acceptable manner, by which I mean the only manner in which I proved to be capable of submitting them, though I continue to wait for final confirmation. I have not yet permitted publication, though I suspect the lengthy final review dance nears conclusion, seven weeks after starting.

There came a point in my professional career after which I proved to be inflexible. I didn’t try to seize up; I just became incapable of fluidly complying. Maybe I started overthinking routine questions, creating mountain ranges out of gooseflesh. I don’t know. I became Clueless, though I suspect I might have been deep down clueless all along. I might have developed compensating behaviors that successfully prevented others from discovering that about me. Then, one day, that subtle ability abandoned me. leaving me with forms I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to complete. Not yet a complete idiot, but apparently well on my way, I retreated from public life to become the most clueless professional of all: a writer.

I became my own supervisor, one that would never, as a matter of simple principle, expect his subordinate to fill out even the simplest forms. I insisted upon production, though, every damned morning, twenty-four/seven. And I slowly became the writer I’d long aspired to become. Not a frequently published one, since publishing requires many abstract forms to be completed and picky decisions to be made, but a consistent and satisfied one. The worst part about writing comes from the processes associated with sharing the result. Writing seems much easier than posting the result. Posting’s easier than creating weekly writing summaries. Hundreds see my products every week, but few suspect what it takes to share this stuff, especially if the creator’s clueless like me.

Publishing something entitled Cluelessness inescapably classifies its author. I will announce publication just as soon as I know when! Thank you for following along!

I employed Claude.ai, a commercial AI-powered text editor, to create the above story summaries, prompting with: “Please briefly summarize this story in the first person while retaining the original voice.” I manually copy-edited each result.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz