A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

particular setting, the determinists have something useful to teach
us.
To make this case, let’s first strip this philosophy of its spooky
undertones of self-aware tools. When examined closer, the
unintended consequences in technological determinism case studies
almost always have pragmatic causes. New tools open up some new
options for behavior while closing off others. When these changes
then interact with our inscrutable human brains and the complex
social systems in which we operate, the results can be both
significant and unpredictable. The technologies in question in these
studies are not literally deciding how humans should behave, but
their effects can be so surprising and sudden to those involved that a
story line of tools determining behavior seems as valid as any for
describing what’s going on. (The technology scholar Doug Hill uses
the term de facto autonomy to describe this effect.)
If you’re careful, you can often look backward after a new tool
has created profound change and decode some of the forces at play.
In the case of the horse stirrup, for example, scholars have done
exactly this work by excavating the specific context in which Charles
Martel encountered the stirrup—what was going on in his political
world, what experience he had previously with mounted warfare, and
so on. In retrospect, the idea that the stirrup would spark feudalism
makes sense. But no one planned or predicted it in advance.
This brings us back to email. The case study of Adrian Stone and
IBM is pure technological determinism: a tool introduced for a
simple purpose (to make existing communication practices more
efficient) had an unexpected result (a shift toward the hyperactive
hive mind style of collaboration). The speed of this transformation,
which required less than a week to get rolling, underscores how
powerful these forces can be once unleashed.

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Determinist dynamics similar to what Adrian Stone observed at
IBM went on to unfold in offices around the world as email spread
throughout the 1990s, ushering in a general embrace of the
hyperactive hive mind without anyone ever stopping to ask whether
this radical new way of working made any sense. We chose to use
email because it was a rational solution to the need for practical
asynchronous communication in large offices. The hyperactive hive
mind, in some sense, subsequently chose us once this tool had
spread, at which point we seemed to have all looked up from our
newly empowered inboxes, shrugged, and quipped: “I guess this is
how we work now.”