You're Wrong About - How Email Took Over the World with Anne Helen Petersen

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

How did the information superhighway get so gridlocked? Guest Anne Helen Petersen tells Sarah the story of how email took over the world and our working lives, and what it would mean for us to get a little of our lost time back. Plus, a Kurt Loder cameo.Here’s where to find Anne:TwitterSubstackSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase Links: https://twitter.com/annehelenhttps://annehelen.substack.com/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

I wonder if Ray Bradbury ever had Gmail. Probably not. Imagine a world where every word ever written could be viewed instantly in your home via an information super highway. Internet is that massive computer network. The one that's becoming really big now. Call now for your free America online startup kit

and get free software in 10 free online hours. Welcome. You've got mail. Hello, I'm Sarah Marshall. Welcome to You're Wrong About. Today we are talking about e-mail with Anne Helen Peterson. I realize we've talked about some scary topics on this show, but this one leaves them all behind to quote the princess bride. The question I really wanted to answer in this episode

is how did the technology go from something exciting and fun and seemingly something that would allow us to connect and communicate more with people, turn in a mere 20, 25 years into the rest on the machinery of all of civilization. Sorry if that sounds dramatic. That means we're also talking about the technologies that e-mail is shaped and that shaped e-mail in turn

and ultimately the technological world that we live in today and what it means to try and live and work and communicate in 2022. Anne Helen Peterson, my guest today, is a writer, public intellectual. She writes currently the newsletter Culture Study, which is one of the few things that I am happy to receive in my inbox. And I thought she would be the perfect person

to talk us through this strange, scary, ultimately hopeful story of technology and work and the future we have to try and build. So I hope this episode gives you a feeling of relief if this is an area of stress for you. And if you're waiting on an e-mail for me, I'm very, very sorry. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where sometimes we talk about a topic

that is of great relevance to literally everyone listening to this, I promise. I'm Sarah Marshall, and this is Anne Helen Peterson. Hello. I am so happy to be here to talk about my biggest foe in the world. And Anne Helen Peterson, for those who don't know who you are, inexplicably, to me, you're very famous. Who are you and what do you do? I am a culture writer. I used to work for BuzzFeed News,

and before that I was a college professor, and I have a PhD in media studies. I have written four books, and the most recent I wrote with my partner, it's called Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. And the only thing famous about me that I feel like you would really appreciate is like three days ago, Josh Charles retweeted me.

Yes, I appreciate that so much. I think most people know, if they have any familiarity with either of our work, that we are prime millennials and thus have a certain positionality towards e-mails. So I just kind of want to start with some nostalgia to get it out of the way so that we don't continually go back to this, but do you remember when an email ruled?

You know what springs to mind immediately when I think about email nostalgia, is that when I was, I think, in sixth grade, so this would have been 1999 or 2000, I discovered e-cards, often like a little animated, like a gif, basically. And I remember sending one where the theme was congrats,

like congrats, but it was little rats in a conga line. They had like small animations and they often played like 8-bit sound. Yeah, I feel like the two concepts that the internet, you know, certainly AOL was sold to us on, as I recall, it was like, you can talk to anyone in the whole world at any time and you can shop at any time.

Depending on where you lived was like a massive bonus, like changed our worlds, but did you like flirt on email? I think probably I was flirting on email like 10 years before I was flirting in real life. Uh-huh, yes, 100% same. Yeah. I am an elder millennial,

so I was born in 1981 and I was a senior in high school when you were sending congrat email. But I started using email actually when I was in junior high because my mom taught math at the local college. We had like a book that was the internet for dummies, essentially. You know, those like, I don't think it was one of the standard yellow books, but it was along those lines.

It taught you about like, what is a BBS? What is an FTP? What are listservs? Like all these ways that people navigated the internet before we had search engines. And I was a precocious junior hire and taught myself some stuff and I also saw in the back of the book, it had all of these email addresses listed for famous people,

which wild, right? But I guess not that different from the way that you'd buy a fan magazine and would have like the actual street address, not their real address, but their fan mail address. You just always found ways to be weird towards celebrities. So that's kind of consistent. That's nice.

But so seventh grade me from my mom's email address, emailed Kurt Loder and Bill Gates on the same email. On the same email. And I said, Bill Gates, why don't you donate more of your money to charity? Oh, that's so great. Sarah, Sarah, he responded. Bill, what did he say?

How did this go? He was like, actually, I donate a lot of my money to charity. I think this was like the early days of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or what became the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He was like, I'm a very normal married man with a very normal married marriage. But that's my very early email story. None of my friends had email until late high school.

I remember I had like a group of friends that I would regularly exchange long, interesting emails with and you would fire up the modem and it would make the modem sound and you had to figure out what is a healthy amount of time to wait between logins because you knew that it felt better when there was more mail there. Yeah, that's the central paradox. And I think that what makes your story believable to me,

that this was really like, that you literally just like CC Bill Gates and Kurt Loder and they all got on the chain, is that like, I bet each of them were getting maybe like 12 emails a day. Right. You know, this was the novelty of email at that time, was that there were very few of them. And I started my first like long distance relationship

with someone who had like already gone off to college. Like we started flirting via email and exchanging long emails and that felt really special to me. I guess watch the social network for the first time. Oh yeah. I still think of it as a relatively new movie. It came out 12 years ago. It feels very new to me.

You know, that takes place in like 2003, 2004. I went to college, I started college in 2006. It's incredibly hard to get back to a time when Facebook was cool. Yeah. But it was. It was absolutely the coolest. And I would write these emails to my friends back home and it was like, it felt very little womeny, to be honest.

It was epistolary and in a really interesting way that required each of us to document our lives in sort of an artful way. Right. Like you had to craft a rendering of what was happening in your life. And that took time and thought you wanted to be like witty, but also emotional. And it just, it took time.

My college email, when we first arrived, there was no way to access it using what we now think of as like a web client. We used Telnet to access our email through an FTP server. I think this is correct, but we just called it Telnet. All of your emails came in just black and white. Like there was no images. There was nothing to complicate it other than the words on the screen. You didn't even have like threading the way that we think of this.

And we'll talk about this, you know, as we keep going about how Gmail changed all of this stuff. But you also had a function in this email client where you could type in finger and then the person's email address, like the first part of their email address. And it would tell you the last place that they logged on to check their email. Fascinating. So it was like red receipts many, many years before red receipts.

And also, you know, someone who said like, Oh, I'm not back in the country yet. This is like after studying abroad. We fingered him. He was in Montana. He was totally back. And so like it just created the sort of like, Oh, I sent this email.

I don't know if they've received it yet. Have they read it? Did they read it? And that respond to me. The drama. That sort of drama. But it was for much longer missives than what we use for text messages. Do you know what else was great?

Star 69. Oh, yeah. Something I used to do when I taught comp classes that didn't maybe fit with comp as well as if I were teaching a class on this somehow was just show commercials from different time periods to try and get a sense or give students a sense of like, this is what people like dared to dream to imagine. And so like one of actually let's just watch one. Okay, I'm going to count us down three, two, one, go.

Three, two, one, go. Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away or sent someone a fax? I mean, all of those things came to pass. I don't know how great they are though. Because it's like, yeah, you better be able to talk your baby in from a phone booth because you're going to have to for two years. So do we want to backtrack now that we've been nostalgic about email? Now that we've given email the honor it deserves, which is like, yes, you're a beautiful thing

like the fire and we are arsonists. So let's hear the story of the arson. And I mean, I want to know when was email invented? Like how long has email been with us? The way that the development of email is generally narrativized is that it starts in the 1960s and was only available to people to like essentially send a message to other people who are using the same computer. It was effectively the same as like leaving a sticky note on the computer itself. So like why invent it?

Right, right. I think there was one of those things where they were just like, how do we experiment with things that this computer can do? In 1971, this guy named Ray Tomlinson is generally credited with inventing networked email and something called ARPANET and using the at sign so that it would teach the computer to how to guide the email to the server. Throughout the 70s and 80s, it was really something that was used essentially people who were interested in tech, but then also people who worked for the military, people to some extent who worked in governmental agencies, people who worked in education and some capacity higher ed. But I don't think that it really caught on in any meaningful way outside of those parameters until the development of AOL.

When I think of the beginning of the internet for me, I think of AOL because that was how my family first got the internet. To me, the two key things about AOL was that it was a user friendly way to access the internet and that was how it was sold. And as far as I can tell, it really did work and like normal adults and old people and kids could navigate it and were very enthusiastic about it. Also that AOL sent you floppies and eventually CDs with new versions of the software. Like once every 25 minutes, it was incredible. Yes. And they always promised 10 free hours. That's right, yeah.

And then you could stop and then you could do your trial again. Right, good old AOL. If you had a PC at home in some capacity, which was not something that most people had for a long time, but if you did, you could load this on there and you could monopolize your family's phone number for hours on end and like really piss off your parents and access this other world and part of it was email and part of it was the chat rooms and part of it was like dinking around in these weird spaces for sports and entertainment and all that sort of thing. But what starts to happen around the late 90s and I think it was less of a thing for us because we were younger, but you start to get what we think of now as spam and you also start to get mass emailing.

So the way I want to think about email like as we progress through this conversation, it's not that email in and of itself has ever changed, right? Like it's always just a way to communicate digitally. It is electronic mail, but its function has changed where it can travel has changed the way that we think of it in our lives and within this larger sphere of work has changed. Like all of these other characteristics contextual things about it has changed. And so we can kind of look at these various shifts as ages of deterioration in terms of our relationship to email. Great.

And so the first one happens when people realize that they can direct market at an incredibly low cost. When does that happen really early? I bet. Yeah. Well, you know, people were using email as listservs, right? As like user groups very early on, especially around fandoms. Like if you look at the history of any of the long term fandoms around say like Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever, like they had these really rich listservs and user groups where people made meaning around these texts. And I think really pretty interesting ways. I asked online actually earlier today, I said, if you were born before 1980,

when did the feeling of email begin to change for you? And one of my friends, Siva, who is a media studies professor at UVA, he said that it changed for him in the mid 90s when his like discussion using that board around Melrose Place, which was dominated by graduate students, got dominated by high school students. So that changed the character for him. For me, like my formative high school experience was being part of the Newsies fandom on fanfiction.net. Phantom is just clearly one of the most vital forces in the universe. Yeah. Yes. And it has such a long history too,

but was facilitated in such meaningful ways by you being able to find other people who liked Newsies. Exactly. I never would have found other people who liked the things that I liked living in my small town. Right. In order to find people in real life who like Newsies, you have to go around advertising yourself as someone who likes Newsies, which is not the hardest thing to do, but it's still pretty hard when you're 15. But it's easy if you have this like locating beacon on the internet. Which is also, I guess, how the spread of white supremacy works. The way radicalization on the internet works.

There are similar forces to the way deepening your interest in something that will work out to be really positive for you will happen. The anonymity of it and the idea of like suddenly finding yourself in a crowd of entirely like-minded people. Anything that I think of in my life as like a technological advance, I then think of all the ways that it has been used in destructive ways too. I mean, it does make me think that like the story of email really begins when Prometheus stole the internet from the gods and then brought it to humans. And the gods were like, foolish Prometheus, they cannot be trusted. So, if you're a marketer, you are trying to get your product in front of the eyeballs of people who would buy it, right? And what you would do before is you would make literally thousands of mailers and you would pay for bulk mailing, which is very expensive.

And you would just send it to people hoping that they don't end up in the trash and in capacity. You are getting an incredibly low return on your advertising dollar, but there aren't a lot of other options. I mean, you can advertise in the newspaper and magazines, that sort of thing. But if you want to do direct marketing, your options are small and expensive. But if you figure out how to get people to give you their email address if they buy from you, and now with all of those other email addresses that they have, they can send the same thing that they would have printed out and page posted on to every single person. And then everyone sees the sweater. So, if you read, like, there's a bunch of histories of email written from the perspective of mass marketing that look at this late 1990s, really early 2000s period as, like, the beginning.

We can reach so many more people. And even if your open rate is, you know, five to 10%, which is oftentimes what it is, it's still better than the costs that you were getting for mass mailers. So, one of the things I find so exhausting about being a consumer today, and I know we'll get to this later, is, like, when you buy something now, you enter into a sacred trust with the company you bought it from, and they email you every day for the rest of your entire life, and they will follow you wherever you go, and you cannot escape. The way my attention is being preyed on by everything that crosses the threshold of any of my inboxes, basically any email I get, I start internally screaming. You know, like, no one has more consistency in my life than West Elm. That's why the Caleb thing is so ironic. If I woke up in the morning and didn't have an email from West Elm, I would want to, like, check in, like, are you okay?

Right. But it wasn't always that way. When marketers began to figure out that this could be, that email could be a real sight to connect with consumers is when the inbox begins to overflow. The other thing that happens during that time, around this time, is you start getting more and more forwards. Like, this was something that I remember getting early on was, like, and how misinformation spread. Like someone's grandma almost got abducted at a Home Depot parking lot? Or, like, you know, what used to be chain mail? Yeah.

Chain mail for those who are not familiar is operated through the actual mail, and you would get a letter from someone who was part of it, and it would say, you need to send this mail on to 20 people. And sometimes there would be, like, some sort of scam involved. Yeah. But most of the time it was, like, say where you're from, and let's see if we can get this letter to all seven continents. And that crossed over, and to email, of, like, forward this, and if you don't, your household self-distract or something like that. And it becomes so stressful to maintain when you have to save your house from exploding three times in a morning. And when, like, your grandma follows up to say, like, did you get that forward that I say?

Just check it in. I remember an email going around. It had to have been in 2003. So I would have been in 10th grade, and a friend of mine who was also in 10th grade called absolute bullshit on it, which I love that I was friends with sexual critical thinkers. Because at the time I was like, this seems nonsensical, but, like, I don't know. But it was the one, I'm sure you got it, that was, like, men are preying, and it was, like, either implicitly or explicitly men of color, are preying on women who wear overalls and have long ponytail.

Because if you have a long ponytail, they can grab you by your ponytail and get you in the van. So don't wear a long ponytail. And you get all these emails that were, like, never wear a long ponytail. I mean, that's a panic over all sorts of things, but I think, like, calling attention to the way that this early email functioned in a way that's not dissimilar from Facebook in terms of, like, spreading panic. It was a sight of that as well. But it still was not overwhelming, and that shift really happens with Gmail. And that happens in 2004.

And Gmail also used to be cool. What the heck? Gmail used to be exclusive, which is something that I think people forget. So, pre-Gmail, people access their email primarily through a local server, like, whoever they got their internet through. And it was slow and clunky. AOL. Or they had Hotmail or Yahoo. And it's hard to remember, again, that those services were really slow. They were clogged with banner ads oftentimes, which were slow to load. Like, if you clicked into another one, it was weird.

And they also did not have Threading. And this is so fascinating to try to return to this time before Threading. So, like, every time someone replied to you, it would be a separate email. It's fascinating to me that I have no memory of that. And that must have been how I communicated for, like, half my life. And it would have created more email in theory, right? That you have, like, a separate email for every single reply. And yet, I bet it's, like, an impulse by a rack if you're just like,

well, it's already this endless ongoing email, so it changes the nature of the conversation, I guess. So, do you know how Gmail wasn't announced? No. So, do you know how Google just generally has April Fool's jokes? I feel like I know so little about the lore of all these scary guys who control our lives. So, in 2004, they had two April Fool's jokes, or seemingly two April Fool's jokes. And one was something along the lines of, like, we're hiring on the moon. But the other one was we're going to give email with a capacity of one gigabyte to everyone.

And that seems very small now. But at the time, that was 500 times more than what you got with Hotmail. Wow. You had to delete stuff constantly in order to keep your inbox essentially viable. And I think that that's part of the reason why a lot of people don't have much evidence of their pre-Gmail inboxes in any capacity, because you just had, you had to actually delete things. So, I have a bunch of emails that I printed out. I have physical copies of emails from my college years, because I wanted to remember.

Yeah. And because it'll be easier to write a biography of you this way. Yeah. They'll go in my archive, but, like, I'll keep them, you know, closed until I die or whatever. Yeah. That's the classy thing to do. Or with, like, a gig of memory, it changed the way that people even thought about organizing their email. And why did Google want to do that?

Why did they want to do that? So that they could search your email constantly and advertise to you. And there was actually, there was pushback on this originally. They very purposefully tried to be inobtrusive with the way that they marketed to you. So there would be, like, the tiny little ad on the top that's, like, if you had been emailing about concert tickets, they would advertise concert tickets to you, but not in a banner ad. This is, like, if someone's doing, like, a serenade of Bergerac on you or whatever, where they're like, they've done all this research on you,

but they don't want it to be obvious that they're secretly learning about you. But they're like, well, I was going to the Blue Grass Festival on Saturday, and you're like, oh, I love Blue Grass. What a coincidence. I feel very secure with this email platform. Yes. Yes. Well, it's the way that I think the erosion of privacy works in so many cases

that there was pushback against this for several years, that people were like, it's creepy that you're reading my email. And then, like Amazon, like Search, like all of these things, people gradually became accustomed to, oh, well, I'm better marketed to now, so I'm okay with giving away my data in that way. I wonder if Ray Bradbury ever had Gmail. Probably not. He probably did.

He was probably like, well, it is the fastest, everybody. When did you switch over to Gmail? I remember getting it in probably 2005, and I remember it was when, I don't know exactly how this worked, but I had a friend who for some reason had a finite number of Gmail invites, and you had to get one from somebody, and so I got one from her, and so it felt like finding a dragon egg or something. Yes, this is totally how it was, similar to early Facebook in some ways,

except for older people could get in on it. Some of these, the very early invites were auctioned off, and people wanted that sweet, sweet Gmail so badly that they would pay many thousands of dollars. Isn't that incredible from an action now, right? It's like, please, give me the email. I mean, people would do that today, too. Yes, they would.

Anyway, moving on. And so when people lose any sort of restrictions on the amount of email that you can send, or even if you're a marketer, you had to tread that fine line of, like, if I send too many emails, it's going to take up too much space, and the person's going to try to unsubscribe to my email list. But now that their inboxes are what felt like infinite, it doesn't matter how much I send,

because they can just archive those things. Metaphorically, it's like before everyone had this nice little house they lived in, just a little bungalow, and that was where you could put all your stuff, and the amount of digital stuff you could have was just limited by that size. And then one day, everybody was given a mansion. And at that point, you're like, well, sure, I'll just take anything. I'll just keep anything anyone gives me,

because I have all the space, like, who even cares? And you can get it a lot faster, too. This is another thing that I didn't know previously, that the way that email loads on a computer, and I'm not going to try to attempt to describe it, but basically it's using a different route through the internet to load. It has to do with things called, like, IMAP, and this sort of thing. Yeah, so it takes a different route via Gmail than...

It takes the direct route, instead of the roundabout page loading forever route. So that means that your experience of email, especially of Gmail, it feels immediate. I remember this when I was using Yahoo Mail, that, like, when you clicked back to your inbox, it would take a while for it to load. The thing about computers in the 90s is that they were, like,

they were very vulnerable. They were, like, large, and they would whir, and they would get really, like, dusty really easily. You had to, like, cover them up at night sometimes, if you would, like, cover up the keyboard and be, like, night, night, like, you know, you would have to protect them from dust. Just these large, sort of, fragile objects

that would, like, work really, really hard, and, like, get really hot, because they were just, like, whirring and churning and, like, clicking, and they were just trying to show you your email. And there were so many working parts, right? Like, you had the tower. Yeah. You had the monitor and the keyboard,

or, you know, the really, really cool Macs that came out in the early 2000s that had, like, different colors. Oh, my God, what a moment. It was incredible. Yeah. So the other thing that starts to happen in the early 2000s is email starts to become mobile in a way that it absolutely was not.

You could have a desktop, like, and check your email there. I remember we used to go on to campus to check our email once a day, and people had laptops, and the email was not coming with you when you left your computer at any capacity. And, you know, when I asked that question on Twitter about, like, when did your experience of email start to change,

so many GenXers said, as soon as I got a BlackBerry. Did Palm Pilot have email? I remember when Palm Pilot was huge. Miranda Hobbs had a Palm Pilot. I'm pretty sure. You know, I think that they're all the same time, the way you would access email on a Palm Pilot or BlackBerry looked a lot more like how I accessed Telnet email back in the late 90s.

But what mattered was that it was there. And I think the fact that these devices were adopted so swiftly by particularly the American industries that are such champions of overwork is not coincidental, right? They're like, what's another way that we can force people to work all the time, even in what used to be the few interstices of their day

that were inoculated from work in some way. So going from one place to another, being at your kid's soccer game, any sort of obligation outside of work now becomes accessible for colonization by work, right? That is what mobile email does. And this is even before what we think of as the modern smartphone which allows you to browse all sorts of places

and check Twitter and blah, blah, blah. Like this is just having email correspondence available on your phone. One of the concepts of organized labor is that you have eight hours of work and eight hours of leisure and eight hours of sleep. One of the questions and one of the things I mean when I say like, let's talk about email

and how we got here is like, did we run with open arms across a beach toward getting emails all day long and the expectation that you are going to be available essentially if you're awake, you should be answering email. I mean, I think it's part of this gradual change. So there's this guy, Kel Newport, do you know Kel Newport us?

He writes in The New Yorker. He's a professor. He's kind of like an enlightened business book person. He's the sort of guy that people who think they're too smart for business books are like, but Kel Newport really good. Like one of his most famous books is called Deep Work. Part of the way that he gets a ton of work done

is he does Deep Work. Like he spends days without any sort of email communication, communication with anyone else. Okay, I'm into this so far. One of his most recent books is called A World Without Email. In that book, he lays out all of the different ways that we got to this overload. You know, when we talk about email,

what we're actually talking about is a world of hyper communication. And email is just the tool that we have used to facilitate that strategy towards work and towards productivity. And I'm pretty on board with this argument. And I think we can talk later about some of the gendered aspects of why he is able to say, I don't do email. But one of the things he says in the conclusion to this book is he quotes this very famous media theorist, Neil Postman,

technological change is not additive, it is ecological. And new medium does not add something, it changes everything. And I think this is at the heart of the problem of email. Oftentimes we think of it and other technologies in its realm. And I would include Slack in here, other communication technologies as just becoming faster, right? Like just a different way of doing the same thing. But it actually changes the entire landscape.

The same way that the telephone changed the entire landscape of work or the photocopier, right? Like these are paradigm shifts in the way that work is organized. But at the same time, I think that no one has really accounted for that. And instead thinks of it as like, well, it should be making me more productive. And I'm continually frustrated that all it does is absorb the time that I would otherwise be working. It creates more work instead of less.

And to me, one of the insidious things is that it creates different expectations. I spend a lot of my time feeling stressed that people are mad at me because I'm not able to respond instantaneously to every message that I get. And like sometimes they're not and they don't care, but like sometimes they are. And there's not an agreed upon standard of what is appropriate socially or to expect of somebody energetically because the only guideline I think we all have imposed on us is like what is technologically possible?

You know, there's no real limit left at this point. Yeah, everything all the time, right? But then I think the other shift that really changes the character of email happens with the broad adoption of smartphones and texting. All of those good parts of email, all of that flirtation, all of that like narration of one's day, of one's week, they get sucked out of email and placed into text. Yeah, that's true. Oops.

I don't hate text by any means, but at the same time, like it just doesn't, never feels special. Well, that's the thing. We all kind of know on some level that it's bad form to do something major over text because it's a text. Right. And that degradation in forms of like taking all the good stuff away, but then text also adds this other mode of communication.

So the ways that people can get in touch with you proliferates. The number of texts that I send every day, the amount of sheer communication that I do on all sorts of like Twitter DMs, my email inbox, texts, Instagram DMs, like it's just coming in every single direction. And there's no easy way to filter through the urgency of different requests. And this is the other thing too, right? Like it's a flattening.

And so it just feels like everything all the time. And also like it's a lot of writing, you know? Yes. If you write and then you like finish a day of looking at your DMs and your texts and your emails and like sort of putting out various fires. And then you kind of sit down and you're like, well, I've put in a full day. Yes. There's a tendency to brag about how brags may be the wrong word,

but to talk about, oh my gosh, my inbox as a way of like signaling how busy you are and how hard you're working. Yeah, it's misery poker. Yes. You know, sometimes I really like doing that emotional labor of responding to people who have sent me really long messages that are really meaningful to me. And sometimes it feels really overwhelming. Also just like logistical scheduling and stuff to do with what I consider my work work

and then stuff to do with what I consider my life. All the stuff that one has to do in one's life to negotiate the world. I do feel like I need at least a solid day, if not more to deal with my inbox every week. I have a theory that Ivanka Trump converted to Judaism so she could have a day without email. There's actually, there's a really good book. It's called The Sabbath World and it's by Judith Shulovitz.

It is about, the Sabbath was there for a reason. Like if you think about why religions come up with the way that they order things, a lot of it has to do with how do we survive as a people. And in corporations, there is no God. There's only stockholders and they never tell anybody to rest. And they don't care about attrition, right? Like if they can replace someone with someone else for relatively low cost, they have no stake in preserving someone from this sort of burnout

that arrives from constantly dealing with email. You know, like the disaster scenario that I hear from a lot of people who are dealing with too much email is that they spend all of their day dealing with emails and also meetings. And then they spend their evenings and their weekends doing the actual work, right? Right. What was it like in an analog world? We did a You Are Good episode about nine to five recently and I found myself really thinking like, what was that like?

Because obviously it sucked. Like one of the themes of the movie is that it sucks. But was there the same kind of universal burnout? Because I think to me the thing about email and sort of general communication and attention demands of this era technologically that it represents is that like there's never a break, right? Because I think it used to be if you were doing what you do like 30 years ago, I feel like you would write, you would have like a big article that would trend

and it would go in a lot of papers and people would talk about it and you would go on radio shows and you would get like a bag of mail and you'd be like, boy, howdy, this is a lot of mail. And then a few weeks would pass and it would kind of quiet down. But today it's like you do something major and you deal with a lot of communication and the next week nothing really happens for you professionally. You still deal with a ton of communication because you're being screamed at by every place you ever bought a house where from, for example.

Yes, it's a ceaselessness, right? Like West Elm is still there even when you haven't published anything on the internet. Right, they're like, we don't care what kind of a week we had. We are harassing you unconditionally. You bought one bowl one time four years ago and you belong to us forever. I think that like we crossed another line when they put little TV screens on the pumps at the gas station. I don't like it, not a fan.

I think I deserve those 90 seconds to myself. I just want the bad country radio station. That's fine with me. That's a great ambience. But this gets at something else though, I think, in terms of like all the information all the time and the way that work has changed broadly. This also connects with your question about like what was work like?

Yeah. And the character of work has changed so much in part because of stockholder value and the way so many businesses sloughed off tons of labor over the course of the 80s and 90s and then asked the remaining workers to take on the work of the workers who had left. So essentially one person doing the work of that was previously shared by a lot of other workers. In the past, how it worked was that you had an assistant or a secretary

to handle your correspondence. Right, of course. When I asked this question again on Twitter, when did you change your attitude about email? Hank Green replied and said, I love emails still. And I said, Hank Green, you have to tell me if you have an assistant or not, be honest and he did like a little winky face back. So yeah, my experience of email would be pretty different

if I had someone to deal with all of the worst parts of it. Well, yeah, because then it's like you have a farm, but like you're not the on-call person where it's like the calves are birthing. It's three in the morning, got a birth, the calves got it. You just like you wake up and there's a calf and you're like, I love calves. Or like, you know, when I think about this with journalism too, have you seen Good Girls Revolt? No.

It's about the history of Newsweek. And specifically in like the 1960s and 70s, it highlights how journalists at that time, all of them had research assistants who were women who would do almost all of the reporting and the researching and then hand it to the man who was the journalist who would write the story and then put his name on the byline. Of course.

I think one of the consistent themes is whenever you're like, wow, how does that person get so much done? The answer is probably like the labor of another person. Yes, 100%. And maybe you're amazed because they're being actively hidden from you. So in this Cal Newport book, he is always very gracious and thanking his wife for being the person he runs all of his ideas by.

But also think about if he is a person who can, I'm going to say indulge in these periods of deep work and really figure out how to live his life without email or interruption. Who's picking up that slack? Who's telling people he's not mad at them. Right. He has an assistant in the form of his wife who is making this possible for him. And so this is why like as much as I idealistically love the idea,

I think in our current environment, there is a real privilege in who gets to ignore their email. Right. And also, you know, who gets to ignore Facebook even, right? Facebook is a scourge and I hate it. And most people I know also dislike it a lot. But then so many of the moms that I've talked to have said, I would quit it in a second.

But all of the information about like, where do I source a babysitter? When does school get out early on this like early closed day? It is all coming from Facebook. They don't have the privilege of leaving a place that makes them feel bad about themselves. I think the thing that's weird about the social network and like, I don't know how much we even knew in 2010. And apparently I remember it as like a mystical far off time when three horns stomped through the Great Valley. But I feel like the arc and theme of that movie is like, wow, he's really successful,

but nobody likes him. It makes you think the end. And it's like, the point is not that nobody likes him. The point is that he's going to become like perhaps the most powerful person in America, if not the planet, just falling ass backwards into like, maybe destroying democracy, you know, it's, no, the point is not, wow, he sucks. It doesn't even matter at this point. The point is just like, how much power can a single person have purely because they have a good business idea, I guess.

Right. Well, and this goes too to the fact that like you can introduce a tool and think that it's, that its ramifications only have to do with like one small corner of the world, right? Like I think he really thinks that it just helps people connect with other people. Right. So it's society. You've just created a society. Yeah.

And he, yeah, he changed the ecology and refuses to deal with the ramifications. And so like, I think about the guy who created, who's credited with creating Gmail. There's this great time magazine profile of him by Harry McCracken. And it looks at all, you know, a lot of the stuff that we've discussed about how Gmail was a real paradigm shift in terms of what email would look like. But then in 2014, the author of this piece is trying to get a hold of the creator of Gmail. Uh-huh. And his name is Paul Busheit. And he can't get a hold of him because he doesn't use email anymore.

This is, when he finally gets a hold of him, I think over, over the phone, he tells the author of this piece in time. The problem with email now is that the social conventions have gotten very bad. 24-7 culture where people expect a response. It doesn't matter that it's Saturday at 2 a.m. People think you're going to respond to email. People are no longer going on vacation. People have become slaves to email. And, and then he says, it's not a technical problem.

It can't be solved with a computer algorithm. It's more of a social problem. Hmm. That seems to be a constant. Something that I have, I think a very outsized reaction to say somebody emails you about something at like, I don't know, say like one afternoon. And then they like follow up with you at like 11 the next day. And you're just like, you have to give me a day for God's sake, give me. And it's like, it's not, it's never about something urgent either.

Never. Both you and I are in a place where if we don't respond right away, it's not jeopardizing our careers. Right. So it's good to acknowledge that. But at the same time, I have, I have regularly refused to respond to emails for a week. And part of it, I think is stubbornness and part of it is like, it's okay. If it's super, super urgent, like, yeah, they'll email back and maybe I'll open it sooner. But sometimes I only have the where was all to get to the stack of emails once a week and it changes it.

I mean, my issue with email, I was excited to talk about this with you partly because email is kind of just like one of the great stressors in my life. I think because to me it's like come to be the site of my constant burnout around communication, which I think the pandemic really brought out in me more because it's like high effort, low reward communication. If you're like interacting with most people remotely, just on a purely math level, it's more energy going out for less energy coming in. It's like, I'm already going to be disappointing people based on like where I am emotionally. And I really want to like keep up with people and have people know that like I'm excited that people want to talk to me or be in touch with me. But at the same time, it's like not only that, but like because of the expectations we have, like I at my absolute best, like 100% full bars every single day would still be disappointing everyone constantly. Because just the volume of communication is too much to keep up with and then do anything else with your time. We're living in this culture now of all of our time is taken up by communication, but not communication that really has any content.

It's like the stuff that you have to get through that is announcing itself as urgent and you're like once I get through all of this, then I'll like actually communicate something meaningful while it's 5.30. Yes. Well, and I think a lot of this is the result of people feeling anxiety about their inboxes and really trying to get to things like inbox zero that inadvertently creates more work for other people. Right. So responses that don't fully answer a question responses that fail to answer a really pertinent part of like what the email was trying to obtain in terms of like availability or whatever. Oh, that makes sense. So it's like someone tosses you a ball and you're like, ah, get it away from me. I can do Tuesday and it's like what time Tuesday?

Constantly or responses that are like, um, thoughts. Just to reply all thoughts. That's just you're just trying to push it off a year plate onto someone else's plate without realizing it's going to come back on the year plate and it's going to like the food's going to be rotted and it's going to be even grosser. And I have tried personally a lot of strategies to try to be more thoughtful in my responses. I also am very rigorous about scheduling emails because just because I am trying to clear my inbox on a Sunday afternoon. I don't want that email arriving in someone else's inbox on a Sunday afternoon. That's just considerate. Yeah.

But it doesn't change the character of email that's in my inbox. It doesn't change the dread that I feel looking at it. It doesn't change those things in the inbox that feel like my inbox of shame that I have avoided for so long that it's just embarrassing to respond to them now. Right. I was looking at something earlier today that was a conversation that I had dropped the ball on like 16 months ago. And I was like, that doesn't even feel like that long at this point. I guess I'm just like, like I would not feel that weird about picking that up and being like, hi. So it's I've had a rough 16 months.

How are you? I feel like I can't resume communication until I'm like going to be able to actually show up to communicate. We just all have a finite amount of social energy, you guys. I'm really sorry. I feel like we're being asked to like, we have technology that like allows us to transmit more than we have to send. I feel like. Yeah. Well, and I think this is what Cal Newport really arrives at the key gestures towards a more anthropological understanding,

which is like our tribal organization means that when someone is asking something of us, we feel like we need to provide that to them. And when we don't or can't for whatever reason, it becomes a site of anxiety. We feel like we are letting people down. Right. Whether or not that, you know, the email in our inbox is actually asking something important of us. It still triggers that same mechanism. I mean, just humans in the Internet.

I don't know. It's been a very exciting time to be alive. I'm not going to complain about any of it really, you know, I'm sure that in any other time in history, I would have died one of those accidental blood poisoning deaths when I was like 12 or something. So you're very happy with the technologies that we have that keep accident prone people alive and everything like that. But like normal people these days who are on any kind of social media are potentially living in active communication with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people who they can't see or touch or be in the same space with, but whose attention is on them.

That's literally impossible to meaningfully conceptualize, you know, like the fact that we're just all living in a reality that we I think literally that our brains can't really make real for us. Well, and it's ironic that in this time when we are ostensibly in communication with more people than ever, more people feel personally lonely, but also really isolated from the sort of strong ties that create a safety net. Yeah. Right. Like I think a lot of people would be like, I have a bunch of text groups. I don't know that I have anyone that I could ask to watch my kid for an afternoon.

Right. I know you've talked about this to some extent on Twitter, but like we're not meant to have this many inputs from so many people in our life. It's really, it's a lot. We're not meant to be exposed to so many people's opinions. Yeah. I saved you a trip to the library. That's great.

Yeah, downloading is easy too. You know, I can even send email on the internet. Of course, there's my personal favorite live chat. That's how I met my new kayaking buddies. We'll check that out later after the game. So how do you get America online? Oh, that's easy too. You just call the 800 number.

I got to check this out. Call 1-800-614-3434 now for your free America online startup kit with free software and 10 free online hours. It's everything you need to get online. So call 1-800-614-3434. One of the things that I find hopeful about the time period that we're in is the idea that we're kind of forced to live. Well, not everybody, but more people than before I think are forced to live with some

kind of awareness of just the height and vulnerability that we're all subject to. One thing I remember and miss was kind of the email convention of early pandemic days when everyone was up to their elbows and sourdough. People were still emailing, but it was like, hi, are you okay? Well, anyway, we have an exciting new thriller and what we're going through has challenged maybe for a lot of people the implicit assumption that everybody but you was doing okay. And I do think that like really good things come from more and more people getting on the page of like, I'm not okay.

You're not okay. How on earth could we be okay? Look at the infrastructure we're trying to live inside of. Like who could possibly be okay with this? This is where email signatures and auto responders have become valuable tools that not enough people use in an interesting way. I have one that I sometimes think is kind of corny, but other people tell me they appreciate which is my working day may not be your working day.

Please feel free to respond whenever it is your working hours again. You know, trying to relieve someone of the compulsion that it is time for them to respond. I've seen ones that say things like auto responders, especially that say I'm still pandemic parenting. Right? Like I still do not have enough care. And that makes it difficult for me to respond in a quick manner. And what it does is it sets the table stakes in a way that someone would be like, oh, I'm not going to expect something for a little bit. I emailed my accountant the other day to ask a question about something.

And I got an honor responder that she's recovering from an illness. And if it's really urgent, I can call the office. But to please be patient during this time and thank you for your, you know, just setting the expectations in a way that made me feel like this is totally fine. I don't need this question now or in the next week. And if I do have something that's urgent, there is someone that I can reach out to. And hopefully makes my accountant also feel like she's not falling down on her job simply because she's a human and has an illness, you know. And I feel like a lot of good can come from just individuals communicating like, hey, like this may be technologically possible,

but like instantaneous response is not in my expectation of you. Yes. So are there means of systemic change for this? Well, the problem is, is that so many people and you and I are included in this have had a total collapse of like, of work and life in terms of like, we work for ourselves, right? And this is, I think, going to be increasingly the norm. It's part of why we have to really rethink labor regulations. That's another conversation. That's true because I'm really verbally abusive in the workplace to myself and like in another situation I could have sued, you know.

You need a better HR rep for yourself. I do. I need, my HR rep is just like, I don't know what the hell they're up to. Yeah. Your HR rep is not your friend, is not your company. But what that means in practice is that like, I don't have separate emails for work and life. I don't have separate phones or separate computers. You can't make changes in your personal life and expect them to change if like, you don't have those practices in place in your business life.

So people too who like work for businesses in a more traditional sense. Like even if something changes in the way that their business does email or thinks about communication, they're still going to have the communication of their personal life. It's all really intertwined. So part of me wants to encourage people to do things like, you know, nuking email after any sort of PTO where you just come back and you say to yourself, like, if that was really important, then they'll get in touch with me again. But so much of that is predicated on some sort of stability in an industry. These are things that only people who have been in their jobs and know their worth and their jobs can do. And who have other people aware of their worth, which is really the key part. Yes.

It's a sign of what, you know, the workplace has become for people and just this, you know, this overwhelming degree of scarcity. If you miss this email, like this could be a shot that you really couldn't afford to miss. And then that's a symptom of a much bigger problem. Right. Everything seems urgent and pressing all of the time. And so I think sometimes people can work on that like with their companies, with their own families. This is what we use for SOS. This is what we use for just sending it your way.

I don't expect a response. This is what we use for, I really would like to have a conversation with you. This is a nice one because of this forces us to talk about our feelings and stuff and like what we expect of communications with the people that we love. If there's someone you love, then you can talk to them. And if it's a company, then yeah, you really can't have a conversation with the company. But you can't with your manager, right? Right. Every time your manager does that thing where they slack you and say like, when you have a few minutes, just want to chat.

And that sends a spike of anxiety through you so severe. And then they don't respond back for a while and you're like, oh my gosh, am I getting fired? Are we having to talk about my performance? Like what is happening? And most of the time they're like, just wanted to see if we could reschedule our weekly meeting. And how can you be clear with your manager in a way that doesn't, it doesn't have to sound entitled. Just like when you do that, it really creates anxiety and makes me worse at my job. Yeah.

And the idea here then is like, we need to be able to express to people who we work for like how we need to be communicated with, which is something that may or may not be possible in a workplace. But I think what's clear is that like it needs to be possible for us to not drown. Yeah. Slack terrifies me. I'm very lucky to have never had to have a job where I'm on Slack. I would die. Yeah.

Well, so I had a Buzzfeed for six years. It made me worse at my job in a lot of ways. It made me more anxious about my job and also made me feel like I was in high school a lot. And it's basically intro office messaging. Is that how you describe it? Okay. Yeah. And like there's a lot of things where you feel like you have to be present on it and responding things to evidence that you are doing work.

So it's that sort of presenteeism, but then also performing wittiness and like popularity, like people respond to you in some certain way, that sort of thing. But also not being too much on Slack because then you're spending too much time slacking and not working. Right. And there's another means of surveillance as well, which is always fun. I mean, the history of Slack is really interesting because it was marketed as an email killer. Oh. It didn't kill email though. You're not going to get rid of anything when you add another form of communication into the workforce.

Right. Like some technologies make other technologies redundant. But right, it's like you're not going to kill email. Like email has already won. It should be clear that if you invent a new means of technology, it's like, well, now just there's going to be more stuff to have. To be overwhelmed by. We have electronic mail, but we still have physical mail. Yeah.

We have credit cards and we can pay for things with our phones, but I still have to write checks for various things. And maybe it's where we are in this particular moment. And I think this is why millennials and Gen X feel email anxiety acutely is because we know what it used to feel like. No matter what age you were, like even if you were six before it, like you still know what it was like not to have these things as part of your life and not to have screens and communication as such a constant. And then you get to this point where you can like remember back with nostalgia, but also it's something I think deeper than nostalgia. I think it's more just like this is a massive paradigm shift in the way that humans and civilization works. You know, nobody really got to choose that. It was something that happened by degrees.

And it was I think really a largely based on this idea of like, well, we'll have better functionality as workers. So obviously this is good. And then you just keep saying yes to things and then you look up and here we are. And yeah, what I find so insidious about that AT&T commercial we watched, it's like imagine a world where you can travel with GPS in your car. And you're like, oh, that's nice. You can go on vacation with GPS in your car and stuff. And then it's like or send a fax from a beach. And it's like, I get that like it's really great to be able to do that if you have to, like better to be able to than to not.

But also like, it's really bad to sort of be playing this utopian. And you're like, wait a minute, Tom Selleck, why are we sending faxes from the beach? This person is on vacation, right? There was some dubiousness around Gmail originally when it was being developed at Google in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Because people just didn't think there was like that much of a utility to have endless to have infinite email. But the founders got behind it. And in hindsight, people who worked on the project realized that what we thought and what worked pretty effectively was how can we impose the way that we communicate as tech workers for whom our lives are completely absorbed by work?

How can we make that available to everyone else? How can we impose that style of communication on everyone else? Everyone else who isn't having their laundry done by Google. Right, right. You see a really interesting different sort of trickle down over the course of the 70s and 80s as consultants whose understanding of work was work all the time and go into these companies and are like, the people who are the best workers, the people who survive are the people who work like me with no vision of creativity, taking on as many jobs as expected of you. I also like someone who's probably like 24 years old.

The fact that it's actually a young person's game, like that's not good for people who aren't young. I mean, like it's fun to have an all-consuming career when you're 24 because you're 24. Your metabolism, your work metabolism is in a very different place. That is what it is. It's work metabolism. Yeah, because I used to love, I loved to like go in a hole and kind of work like a demon when I was younger. The good work, like creative stuff, writing. And I really don't do that anymore. And I feel like there is, and then there's the fact of like, you know, people start families.

They want to get home and like start the chicken. And I think it's like healthy to have a time in your life when you're like extremely work oriented. And I think it's also healthy for that period to be finite. Yes. But then we don't have a place in society for people who don't have that sort of attitude towards work, right? It's kind of like beauty standards. Because you're like, look at those 24 year olds, because stay at that peak for your whole life. That's all we want you to do. It's fine. That is the expectation, right?

It's like work like you're 24 until you're 75. And then you can retire if the planet hasn't died. Yeah. But I also think it's exclusionary in other ways because there are people who can still work like they're 24 and there are people who can afford to have all of those other things taken care of for them. And they're high. But like whether it's whether it's in a like an actual person who does it for them in the form of a partner, which is often only possible if they're making enough money so that the other person doesn't have to work full time.

Right. Or they're able to pay for a ton of labor that accounts for all those other things. So I just continue to continually come back to this idea that like the way work is built today is to promote and incentivize like a certain strategy towards work. And it's that we all are the Silicon Valley 24 year olds. Like if you work at Google today, I wonder if you have the same problem with email that we do now, right? Like or if they've like passed it down onto us and they have figured out other ways that they're communicating on a higher level. It would be an interesting way of thinking.

But like it's created this paradigm for excellence that expels so many people. Yeah. And that, you know, you can either afford to be spat out or you can't afford to be spat out. I wanted to do this episode partly because I think it's more dystopian than we can immediately afford to realize that our attention is being preyed on this way and that it's become so normalized. You know, you talking about how like difficult it is to reenter that absorption cave, I feel the same and I miss it. And it's not just me like looking back on like, oh, wasn't it great when I had no responsibilities and like I wasn't calling the plumber and wasn't tasked with all these things. It's more like it's really wonderful to be deeply absorbed in something like an idea, a world, a creative notion in some capacity.

Like that sort of absorption is life giving. It makes us feel like, I don't know, it just textures things in a different way. And it's also a burnout at antidote. And this, you know, all of my work on burnout, I always know that I'm burning out when I can't even come close to entering into that space. Can't even immerse myself in fiction or a movie. But the hard thing is that when you are deep in those spaces, you can't get your way out, right? Like, you know, the things that will get you out of it, but they're the very things that are very difficult to access in that headspace. The point of all this is that there's not an easy solution.

We can't just be like, so turn off your iPads for the weekend, ladies or whatever, because it's like, well, maybe you probably can't. Maybe you work for Uber, you know, what do I know? But our attention, which is one of the things that we used to have, even if we had very little else, we could at least kind of control that is now it's been taken, basically. And it's very hard to get it back. And like, you have some control over it. You probably have some control, but you probably don't have as much control as you would in a non-dystopia, I bet. No, especially since everything seems to be so located on our phone, like the vast majority of people listening to this episode are listening on their phones, which means they're also listening on their email device. Right. Could you even be listening to this on something that you don't also get email on?

And are you getting a push notification right now? And is it from West Elm? The fact that you can't separate that makes it really hard to exercise any sort of discipline. There's so many industries that have tried to figure out how to give us our attention back or give us back that feeling of attention. Like Headspace, which is on the thing I get my email on. Yeah. Band-Aids on bullet holes, like they are not a greater solution to this larger problem, this expectation of constant accessibility. I feel like there was a time when it felt like the technology was giving you the power to do something with it. And now it feels like there's a hole in your wall and every day a giant torrent of garbage water comes through and you wake up and you're like, well, time to deal with this.

Gotta get the sump pump out. Yeah, I think it's the difference between feeling empowered by a technology and disempowered by a technology. Yeah. I want to be as gentle with others about expectations for communications as I would hope they would be with me. Yeah, I do feel like if we're able to find ways to relate to technology where we're focused on like, wow, I get to connect with a human being in a genuine way as opposed to like, I'm drowning and I'll be drowning forever. And I'm not even really appreciating who I'm talking to or what we're talking about because I'm just like trying, I just need to get through this horrid of zombies today. Yeah, like recreate the magic of early internet. I think that means that you need to send more e-cards. That's true. Oh my God. And like, when was the last time I received an e-card? I only get e-cards from my dentist.

That's because they all go into spam now. Well, of course. File's done. Goodbye. And that was the story of email. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with us through the motherboard and into the future. You will. Thank you again to Anne Helen Peterson. Check out her work on the Culture Study newsletter. Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick, our wonderful producer. While we're reminiscing about a time when email was fun, it's impossible to not think about my original AOL screen name, which was obviously a Moray Dragon 88. And I would love to know yours. Over on our Patreon, we have a new bonus episode featuring Josie Duffy-Rice from our CSI episode recently.

And in this one, we are talking about how to be a psychic detective in really just a few easy steps. If this is a career you've ever been curious about, it seems to be not that hard to crack into. Please don't do it. But if you want to hear about somebody else doing it, you can do it on patreon.com slash you're wrong about. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you in two weeks. Now that I've gotten on the internet, I'd rather be on my computer than doing just about anything. It's really cool. The internet gave us a whole world of exciting new possibilities. So I guess this is a story of how it changed our lives. Maybe it will yours too, with the Kids Guide to the Internet.

We're riding on the internet, cyberspace set free, hello virtual reality. Interactive Appetite, searching for a website, a window to the world, got to get online. Take a spin now, you're in with the techno set, you're going surfing on the internet.