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Channeling that, a few years ago there was a hipster denim shop in Tokyo called ‘Not Found’, that hoped it would disappear from search engines and only be discoverable by word of mouth. Of course, like all these solutions it really only relocates the problem, because now you have to know about the shop instead of having to know about the book. I wrote earlier this year about Morioka Shoten, a bookshop in Tokyo that only sells one book, and you could see this as an extreme reaction to a problem of infinite choice. This is also part of the resurgence of vinyl, and even audio cassettes. I think a big part of the reason that people seem readier to pay for a blog post by email than a blog post on a web page is that somehow an email feels like a tangible, almost physical object - it might be part of that vast compost heap of unread emails, but at least it’s something that you have, and can come back to. You pull something into physical space, sever all its links and metadata, and own it yourself.Įmail newsletters look a little like this as well. Yes, you could search, but search where, and for what? Screenshots are the PDFs of the smartphone.

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Google Docs, Figma or frame.io turn the messages into structure, so at least they’re connected to the workflow Zawinski’s Law said that all software grows until it can do messaging, but now every document tries to absorb email, and turn threads into chat and version control.Ĭonversely, one of the early desire paths on the iPhone was the screenshot, and I think we take screenshots because otherwise whatever we’re looking at will be lost in the firehose and we’ll never find it again.

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Slack took emails from robots (support tickets, Salesforce updates) and moved them into channels, but now you have 50 channels full of unread messages instead of one inbox full of unread messages. You replace pressure with addiction.Īnother approach is to try to move the messages.

Tiktok takes this a step further - the feed is infinite, and there’s no pressure to get to the end, but also no signal to stop swiping. Snap proposed a different model - that if everything disappears after 24 hours then there’s less pressure to be great but also less pressure to read everything. This has always been a paradox of Facebook product - half the engineers work on adding stuff to your feed and the other half on taking stuff out. So your feed becomes a sample - an informed guess of the posts you might like most. Given that the average Facebook user is apparently eligible to see over a thousand items a day, it seems (or seemed) to make sense to try to show the video of your niece before the special offer from a restaurant you ate at five years ago. Gmail has its priority inbox, and social networks build recommendation engines and algorithmic feeds. The first generation of internet services tried to help with filters and settings, but most normal people ignore the settings and don’t want to write filters, and so we very quickly went to systems that tried to help automatically.

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I don’t, myself, have 351 thousand unread emails, but when anyone can publish and connecting and sharing is free and frictionless, then there is always far more than we can possibly read. I’ve been collecting pictures like this for a while now, partly because they’re hilarious, but mostly because I think they say something interesting about how we find room for digital in our lives. The internet is a firehose.

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