People screw up email. BCC is confusing. People can feel overwhelmed by email. Email isn’t as evolved and friendly as some more modern forms of digital communication.
I’m slightly surprised Terence Eden is opposed to email in general (for the reasons above, to name a few). I’ve read his blog a long time and seems to generally favor long-standing reliable tech. But hey, it’s not like I don’t see the warts.
Perhaps we’re on the cusp of obliterating email? Will the youth of today see sending an email as ridiculously old-fashioned as a paper telegram or a landline?
There are, I’ll admit, some advantages to email. The most prominent being that the receiver can permanently store a copy. Notwithstanding inept attempts to recall an email (which often highlights its sensitivity) an email delivered is an email stored. That is undoubtedly useful for the recipient.
But it is hard to escape the conclusion that email is an analogue process in a digital world.
It is time to ban email
Replace it with what? is my main pushback every time this comes up. How does my cable internet company get in touch with me? What do I tell someone I met at a conference how to get in touch with me? How can I provide a general generic way to communicate with me? What can be the root-level authentication method for other services for me?
I don’t want to give people my phone number, it’s too personal, too immediate, too abrupt. I don’t want to tell them to join a Discord group that I happen to also be in, that’s signing them up for a world of communication they may have no desire to have. I’m not giving them my address to send a letter, too dangerous, too slow. We need a very generic, very global, very interoperable communication system and we literally have it.
It’s not that hard and it’s not that bad. I think people can come to actually like it.
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