Randolph Caldecott:
"This is the cow with the crumpled horn, that tossed the dog."(≈1912)

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "This is the cow with the crumpled horn, that tossed the dog." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed January 19, 2026. (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/751bf0f0-c5bc-012f-99fe-58d385a7bc34)

"We engaged in passionate revolution and found that it rendered us Powerless…"

Social Media seems to be the perfect means for the Powerless to interact. It requires no physical presence. One can safely cower in their individual redoubt without exposing any vulnerable surfaces, yet still maintain a fairly convincing illusion that they’re communing. One might post radical ideas without fear of anyone reacting with much more than disembodied comments, easily discounted. It seems to out-virtualize virtual, a place to call in one’s presence and distantly engage. It provides a spare illusion of interaction, but in comparison to nothing, it proves convincing enough for our general intents and purposes. No need to stand at the podium to speak to power when one can more conveniently email in that criticism. Why look anyone square in the eye if you can anonymously spy on their personal life? Why make amends when you can just unfriend in response to disagreement?

Social Media makes for a perfect playing field for insurgents. It offers them cover as well as access. One can rile up a populace without going to all the trouble of rounding them up. Memes serve as the medium of exchange, clever phrases intended to catch in the mind of both partisan and opponent. Few victories better buoy a discouraged spirit than ten thousand anonymous likes instantly reassuring it. One can say whatever crosses what’s left of their mind without fearing much more than temporary rejection. Of course, the reassurances prove to be equally fleeting, but Social Media deals most prominently and almost exclusively in transactional interactions, like stand-up comics trading barbs from the security of a well-lit stage. It’s performance first, and whatever else it might have aspired to later, if ever; usually never.

I can feel brilliant by merely forwarding another’s brilliance to my followers. Everyone maintains their followers by feeding them clever phrases. We engage in battles to maintain influence, the currency exchanged measured in humor and horror, along with a sprinkling of actual human-centeredness. Much of the posting and commenting focuses on complaining and criticism. Fewer ever propose resolving anything, other than by others changing or being forcefully changed. Such insistences never changed anything. The conflicts seem eternal and necessary, and our role in them might be no more than to feel and then pass on the pain or emptiness in turn. The Powerlessness I feel when encountering yet another in a seemingly endless series of reports of another latest scandal initiated by our incumbent seems bottomless. He exceeded how low he could go ages ago. He seems to be heading ever lower. No power in this universe seems capable of blunting his awe-inspiring idiocy or the Powerlessness it elicits within me. Doomscrolling seems the only reasonable response, but, of course, it’s not in the least bit a reasonable response at all.

I notice a sense of agency emerging when I manage to avoid entering into my Social Media. That overly familiar sense of deep impotence that even superficial Social Media interaction elicits in me suddenly seems absent. I catch myself feeling hopeful about the future instead of uncomfortably carrying the burden of civilization on my shoulders. I post there, too, and daily. I cannot always rise above my own deepening sense of Powerlessness to pass anything other than that sense on to my readers. I’d rather be offering more uplifting stories, but this medium’s context seems to discourage, if not entirely prevent, that passage. I might nurture this budding awareness that it’s not just me who’s natively Powerless in this context, but the context that encourages and nurtures deep feelings of Powerlessness within my otherwise powerful grasp, perhaps yours as well.

I distantly remember times when I would (could?) warmly anticipate my future, when I believed this world might inexorably be trending toward better. I have felt that sense eroding, and I suspect that sensation might not have been entirely of my own making. Back during the damned pandemic, it seemed necessary to immerse myself in inherently disquieting information, if only to distinguish between that and malign disinformation, which seemed to too-easily proliferate on my Social Media. Engagement became defensive in response. It sure seemed as if we were engaged in battle for the body and soul of the civilization, of the world. That sense has never once abated on Social Media since. It found its genré during that damnable pandemic and never managed to grow beyond that disturbing point of conflict. The context of that context came to proliferate the conflict rather than to contribute to resolving it. Always another controversy. Always some fresh conflict. Never any resolution. We engaged in passionate revolution and found that it rendered us Powerless in its presence.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz