Honoré-Victorin Daumier: The Print Amateur
[L'Amateur de Gravures / Les Curieux à l'Etalage…]
Alternate Title: The Curious at the Display (c. 1855)

"A marriage created in purgatory."

During The Damned Pandemic, I discovered Heather Cox Richardson’s reassuring voice. In daily “letters,” which she posted to then-budding social media, she debunked the craziness espoused by the then-inhabitant of the Oval Office. I found her to be quietly reassuring and authoritative. She brought her deep understanding of history to the party, usually leaving me feeling better oriented as to how my situation fit into broader historical contexts. She became irreplaceable.

With that incumbent’s surprising return to elected office, her voice took on fresh vehemence, since said incumbent immediately set about trying to make America Stupid Again again. He has been failing, in no small measure because Ms. Richardson continued providing relentless historical context. She became a superstar, publishing an immediate bestseller and continuing her almost daily canvassing, promoting her perspective, which increasingly seems to become our perspective, too. If the incumbent was the voice of insanity, she became the voice of reason. Her anger and reassurances were mine, ours, and her presence took on fresh significance.

How did social media respond? By transforming her reliable postings into intermittent ones. I found that I could not rely upon finding her latest when I logged on in the morning. Not even formally following her there relieved my frustration, for I found that I could muster up a roster of her postings, but they would be served up sorted randomly. Not even the Lord seemed able to find her most current posting. Sometimes, it would rise to the immediate top of my feed, but increasingly, it became impossible for me to find, however I might try.

It became clear that the social media server, Facebook, in this example, was deliberately obscuring her postings. Nothing else could explain my experience. Looking deeper, I found the same principle at work with every poster, even my own work, which I steadfastly post each morning. She has a private Facebook group, as do I, but even when “pinning” a post as “Featured,” group members cannot expect a chance of seeing my latest, just like I cannot rely upon accessing hers.

This might seem to be ACuriousCase… were it not the absolutely common surrency of this particular realm. Why would any self-respecting platform deny its users access to its most popular products? Some blame The Algorythm, that handy catch-all, indefinable. This explanation seems similar to accusing demons or poltergeists. It’s impossible for me to conclude that this state of affairs must be intentional. What Facebook gains from such obtrusion escapes my imagination. Some conclude that Zuckerberg actively sabotages anyone’s feed who disagrees with his political positions. With millions and millions of active postings, how would it even be possible for such a nefarious strategy to even be possible? I don’t know.

Let’s just refer to this as TheCuriousCase…, because we cannot know for certain what might constitute the actual explanation. It’s damned annoying. Heather Cox Richardson and I have both been parallel posting on SubStack, which doesn’t provide access other than a thoroughly humiliating if normal Pastword security regimen. SubStack doesn’t deliver in the old familiar timeframe, though, with Heather’s postings appearing to lag way behind what I’d earlier grown accustomed to.

I cannot say that she, I, or anybody has been uniquely identified for special abuse. I can insist that this is just how social media works. I keep coming back, hoping for better treatment. I earlier concluded that my continued returning, and yours, can be chalked up to cases of Stockholm Syndrome. It might be that social media’s unique attraction comes from the personalized-seeming abuse it doles out to anyone even attempting to keep regular scrolling habits. The pursuit of completeness seems to require continued unrequited posting that, curiously, only encourages ever more scrolling in search of a satisfaction seemingly deliberately withheld. A marriage created in purgatory.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz