Giovanni Battista Moroni: Portrait of an Ecclesiastic (c. 1557)

"…the journey seems deliberately designed to lead us nowhere but to keep us endlessly coming back, a Modiüs Strip existence."

Social Media has managed to project a space where neither future nor history exists. It exhibits in a moment, for that moment. It produces no memory nor projects any gonna-be. It exists only for the instant encountered. Once experienced, it might just as well never have been. It takes living in the moment, one click less retentive. It’s outdated before you can finish a single serving, never to return. Because of this, it lacks apparent purpose, deeper or otherwise. It deals exclusively in the superficial. It seeks only attention: not recognition, certainly not retention. It counts its presence in clicks, that most ephemeral of all presences. It collects flashes of fleeting acknowledgement, disembodied, timeless, useless for other contexts.

Try to create a list, in ascending time sequence, of your own postings to your own private Facebook group. You will not be able to do it. Try the same with your postings on your personal SubStack channel. Ditto. The automated assistant will introduce the concept of “tags,” which will be attributes you could have added when you posted each piece, but prove nigh on impossible to retrofit. Maybe you can produce a list of items with an identical title prefix, but it will be presented in randomly sorted date order. Date isn’t considered a worthwhile attribute of any entry within social media’s timelessness. Try to return to a Facebook “Reel” you found fetching, and it will have disappeared, never to return. There never was nor will be, or apparently could be, a searchable database of previously presented Reels. If there is, it’s purposefully inaccessible to the naive user. It could disrupt the necessary trance.

This world might be mistaken for a sort of heaven. No future, no past: nothing within it built with even the most distant intention to last. No history, no prescience: no need for memory or precocity. No retention, no waste: tidbits exclusively consumed in a curious haste. One engages to grow almost instantly impatient. One opens only to close once the punchline discloses that it’s almost over. Nothing’s finished. One survives on an unsteady diet of gists: meanings juxtapose to render each other meaningless, so as not to clog up the recollection circuits. The meals seem just as disposable as recyclable cardboard silverware. One might follow, but only in the sure and certain recognition that the algorythm will decide if you ever see another installment from that “influencer” again. By tomorrow, that instant of attraction will have been forgotten, overwritten by another dozen fleeting impressions.

What happens when one abandons a world disturbingly comprised of memories and anticipations in favor of one completely defined by initial impressions? No relations exist there. No real complications. A soothing, almost silent background noise subsumes the foreground experience. Intelligence proves unnecessary there, replaced with continuous entertainment, a Kinetoscope updated to provide a virtual peephole into an imaginary two-dimensional world without depth or death. A riskless existence beckons, one completely comprised of first impressions, where there are no conclusions to draw or reflect upon. It’s all What If?, meaningless questions intended to remain eternally unanswered. Its deepest purpose, superficial. It exists to collect your passing presence so as to project your commercial preferences. You and I are products, not consumers. No destination exists there, just the journey, and the journey seems deliberately designed to lead us nowhere but to keep us endlessly coming back, a Modiüs Strip existence.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz