I'm on the "admin." email list for a volunteer group that organises monthly tech. talks. I'm not the volunteer who orders the pizza, so normally I don't fuss too much over how many registrations have landed. But I recruited this month's speaker, and wanted to give him a rough head-count (especially since it was a higher than usual, which is always good to report).
One downside to flipping through all those EventBrite notifications, however, was the huuuuuuge and depressing preponderance of "anonymous" email accounts used to register for the talk. Clearly, someone--well, pretty much everyone in our almost-big-enough-to-be-statistically-valid sample--has had their workaday email address trammeled by someone before. And (more to the point) that's not news or even remarkable. It's merely evolution in action, really. In the sense that arms races can be considered "evolutionary," anyway.
Until now, I'd failed to see the extra irony in that response. GMail and Hotmail (and the odd Yahoo) accounts are, of course, a prophylactic against having one's attention-stream repeatedly crashed by spammers and scammers. Not unlike how single women will wear fake wedding/engagement rings as a prophylactic against being creeped-on. (Needless to say, its deterrent effect is never 100%, but on balance it's worth the clunky el-cheapo jewelry. Pro tip, ladies: A layer of clear nail polish over the metal of a dime-store ring will extend its lifespan by months. Trust me on this.)
So, in an attempt to preserve the online equivalent of personal space, people choose to trade their privacy and a certain amount of attention-span. Because of course Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are monetising both. Behind the scenes, naturally. Which apparently makes all the difference. It's difference between the creeper at the pub who won't take "go away" for an answer and the stalker who rifles through your garbage and eavesdrops at your window. But the latter is at least discreet about it--incredibly polite, in fact--and (best of all) you're not its only target. So it's not even personal, which almost makes it not-creepy, hey?
Please understand that I'm actually not slagging Google or Microsoft or Yahoo here. Blocking all the spam and worse spawned in the underbelly of the internet is itself an arms-race. Just handling the sheer amount of illicit email traffic chews up resources that your average I/T department can't afford. Bayesian filters require constant "training" and updates to the code to keep up with the latest scams, viruses, and desperately incompetent marketing hacks. Only huge corporations have the resources to A.) Scale up to the challenges, and B.) Pay for it all with targeted advertising revenue. "Targeted," naturally, implies sniffing email for keywords and (more importantly) patterns and embedding compatible ads in the user experience.
Within the confines of the free market, we're left with an imperfect system. In essence, we're allowing the stalkers to protect us from (most of) the creepers. To imagine any other outcome is reading History backward without remembering that it is lived forward. And also to forget that people people--perhaps as much as the corporate people of which Mitt Romney famously spoke--have zero conscience when it comes to externalising costs for things you can't actually touch. Maybe even negative conscience, given some of the rationalisations I've heard. Internet security, naturally, ranks high on that list. Which is precisely what criminals and griefers are banking on. And, as if we could forget, Marketing's sins are both legion and legendary--regardless of medium.
If it weren't for those inconvenient truths, I'd feel less futile in wishing for a do-over on email at this late date. Namely, a do-over that doesn't require the ghetto-isation of personal email. Because a tool that's so critical to modern life (on the clock and off) doesn't fit well into any of those flows on or off the clock. To say that I'm fussy about my tools (in software development as well as elsewhere) is a massive understatement. You take care of your tools, and they'll take care of you. I believe that.
Predictions of email's demise are over a decade old. (Just like predictions of the demise of many things. Particularly when made by people too busy penning tech. articles to read any Geoffrey Moore.) But let's imagine that the street-corner nut-job with the doomsday sign is correct and that The End is, in fact, Near. That would be our last, best hope for owning up to how much #FAIL is baked into the current system and keeping it out of the Next Big Next Big Thing, yes? Effectively, means that it's time to (finally!) put a price-the on "free" email that reflects all its costs: The internalised costs of our own context-switching as well as externalised costs of subsidising crime, giving viruses a vector for spreading, etc.
When the internet first went mainstream, we were treated to starry-eyed predictions of democratisation and broadened horizons and geysers of previously untapped human potential. To some extent that's happened...along with other things less laudable or savoury. But there's no excuse for not learning the lessons of the past two decades, and far less excuse for perpetuating its sins. I'm at an age where I don't have soaring hopes
for the future--after that whole flying cars and Mars vacations thing
didn't pan out and all. But I'm all-in for "not-creepy internet" Can we get it right next time?
