Artist unknown
[spurious signature of Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322), dated 1301]:
A Hunt in the Mountains of Heaven
(Late Ming /early Qing dynasty, 17th century)

"They wandered so far from truth that they cannot relate to it anymore, if they ever could."

The social media world’s content seems defined by an overwhelming presence of SpuriousPremises. It seems unabashedly not whatever it declares itself to be. Headlines routinely misrepresent content. Content often gets continued to pages containing only advertising, rarely the rest of even an enticing story. Pages one might care to revisit usually disappear without leaving even the hint of a trace of their permanent location. Advertising, haphazardly curated for maximum offense and irrelevance, usually interrupts any content threatening to be of real interest. Even the more trusted commentators seem to care more about commanding viewers to subscribe to their channels than they seem interested in imparting their touted important information. They almost always bury their ledes behind an indeterminate length of barely relevant and uniquely uninformative pre-ramble. I can count on the fingers of one hand, with fingers left over, social media posters who avoid such antics.

I like to think of myself as an exception to these apparently otherwise ironclad principles of social media engagement. I only begrudgingly agreed to allow The Muse to set up my SubStack space so that those who feel moved to can support my efforts. I have not and will not advertise my presence. I began this experiment holding the firm belief that internet content should be freely shared and just as freely accessible, insisting that I would not use it to generate revenue. The founders of social media deliberately made it essentially impossible for people like me to track their followers, anyway. Facebook abandoned earlier efforts to render postings trackable except in the most abstract ways imaginable. LinkedIn offers such services for extra charges. BlueSky seems opaque even when compared to Facebook. Google offered traffic tracking services that required a double PhD in Computer Science to invoke. I considered tracking stats to be a joke created to fool advertisers. That’s perhaps the overarching grandfather SpuriousPremise ruling social media engagement tracking. It’s apparently entirely imaginary.

Between the continual baiting and switching and the impracticality of tracking traffic, the whole premise of social media seems deliberately spurious. It’s as if at the dawn of television, programming consisted of first acts of the now-familiar situation comedies, but never the denouements, and even those interrupted themselves with offensive advertising. As if programming consisted of endless promises, rarely delivered, and people basically tuned in because they were mesmerized by test patterns. This seems to be the pattern social media has produced to serve as its basis for future development. It’s like tiptoeing through a septic field, at least ankle deep in somebody else’s shit. Yet we seem strangely, obsessively attracted to it.

It might be that those who can be a little heavier with their subscribing hands receive a better social media experience than those of us who refuse to subscribe to anything charging for the spurious privilege. I might follow some “content creator,” but not if following is contingent upon my paying them something. I’m the same way with apps. I pay for very few apps, since they tend not to provide any easy way to track their charges. They do not announce upcoming charges and only backhandedly explain when and why they decide to increase them. They seem conditioned on the presumption that their subscribers won’t track their charges, as if they’re the sort who won’t insist upon a copy of every receipt, even for a cup of coffee. When a coffee comes to five seventy-five, I’ve got to keep track of the charge. There are no trivial social media charges.

This SpuriousPremise Ethic had bled off into other areas. Our government, over the last year, has increasingly embraced the same notion that they can insist they’re something they’re really not. They describe something close to the opposite of what they actually inflict upon the people, and seem to expect people to swallow that shit. Further, they seem offended when us more reality-based question or complain about their spurious premises. Who do they expect us to believe, our experience or their bogus explanations? (That was a question I didn’t really need to ask because I knew the answer before I asked it.) I’m finding, as I spurn some of my social media engagements, that the real world, by which I mean not the virtual one, does not seem to be so riddled with SpuriousPremises yet. Out here, people seem to be more what they appear to be, and generally still prove to be reliable, except, of course, the poor Repuglicans, who still seem to thrive on SpuriousPremises. They wandered so far from truth that they cannot relate to it anymore, if they ever could.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz