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

What Does Technology Want?
Adrian Stone’s first job after graduating from college in the early
1980s was at the IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York. At the
time, internal communication at IBM relied heavily on scribbling
notes. As Stone recalls in a 2014 essay he wrote about this period, if
you wanted to talk to someone, you might try calling, but because
this often failed, the default approach was to walk to their cubicle
and leave a note for them to read later. “Once they read their little
note, they got a chance to be ‘it’ and play the game in reverse,” Stone
wrote. “This could go on for days.”
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This is an important reminder that the world before email was
no prelapsarian paradise. Communicating in big organizations
during this period was a real pain, and email, when it came on the
scene, offered a simple solution. So it’s no surprise that as IBM began
to network its operations in the 1980s, it was quick to deploy an
internal email service. One of Stone’s first tasks at the company was
to help these efforts by investigating how much IBM employees at
the Armonk headquarters were currently communicating through
voicemail, memos, scribbled notes, and so on. They assumed most of
this communication would shift to email, and they wanted to
provision a sufficiently large mainframe to handle the load. (As Stone
explained to me, these machines were expensive at the time—“We’re
talking prices in the millions”—so it was important to identify exactly
how much processing power you really needed.)
Stone soon put together an estimate for a server that could easily
handle all the analog communication already occurring in the office.
The system was configured and deployed, and once activated, it was
a hit among employees; too much of a hit, as it turned out. Within a
few days, they “blew” the server due to overload. As Stone told me,
they experienced five to six times more traffic than he had estimated,
meaning that almost immediately after email was introduced at IBM,
the volume of internal communication exploded.
A closer examination revealed that not only did people send
many more messages than they did in the pre-email era; they also

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began cc’ing these messages to many more people. “Pre-email,
simple communication was largely person-to-person,” Stone told me.
After email, these same conversations now unfolded over long back-
and-forth threads including many different people. “Thus—in a mere
week or so—was gained and blown the potential productivity gain of
email,” he joked.
This story is important because it highlights a dynamic between
people and technology that’s often overlooked. We like to believe that
we deploy tools rationally to solve specific problems. But cases like
IBM’s server meltdown complicate this story line. No group of
managers at IBM decided that massively increasing internal
communication would improve productivity, and the individuals
suddenly trapped in this deluge of messages weren’t happy about it.
As Adrian Stone recalls, the intention of the system was simply to
move the communication that already existed in the office to a more
efficient medium—to take what people were already doing and make
it easier. So who ultimately decided that everyone should instead
start interacting five to six times more than normal? To some who
study this question closely, the answer is radical: it was the
technology itself.
—
If you talk with a scholar of the history of technology, you’ll likely
discover a fascination with a seemingly unlikely topic: the rise of
medieval feudalism in the early Carolingian Empire. Historians trace
the origins of this style of government to the reign of Charles Martel,
grandfather to Charlemagne. In the eighth century CE, Martel kick-
started feudalism by confiscating Church lands and redistributing
them to his vassals.
Why did Martel begin grabbing Church lands? This question was
answered in a magisterial tract published in 1887 by the German
historian Heinrich Brunner, who argued that granting land to loyal
subjects was necessary for Martel to maintain horse-mounted
warriors for his army.
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In later periods of history, rulers might
simply tax their subjects and use the revenue to fund their military,
but in the early medieval period, land was the primary source of
capital. If you wanted someone to maintain a mounted warrior for
your army, they needed land to do so. Brunner marshaled historic
documents to demonstrate persuasively that this maintenance of

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knights in shining armor was one of the main motivations for
Martel’s setting up fiefdoms throughout his kingdom.
As is often the case with history, this answer leads to another
question: Why did Martel feel the sudden need to raise a massive
cavalry force? Brunner proposed a simple answer. When the Franks
under Martel faced a Muslim army from Spain, near Poitiers in 732,
Martel’s forces were largely fighting on foot, while the Muslim
soldiers were largely mounted. According to Brunner’s theory,
Martel quickly realized his disadvantage. Almost immediately after
this conflict—indeed, later that same year—he began his sudden
confiscation of Church lands. As historian Lynn White Jr.
summarizes: “Thus, Brunner concluded, the crisis which generated
feudalism, the event which explains its almost explosive
development toward the middle of the eighth century, was the Arab
incursion.” This theory proved resilient in the decades after it was
proposed, standing up, according to White, “remarkably well against
assaults from all directions.”
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But then in the mid-twentieth century, Brunner’s theory took a
blow. New scholarship revealed that Brunner’s date for the pivotal
Battle of Poitiers was wrong; it actually took place a year after Martel
began grabbing Church lands. “We are faced, in the reigns of Martel
[and his successors], with an extraordinary drama which lacks
motivation,” writes White.
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The idea that feudalism was instigated
by the need to support mounted warriors remained an accepted
hypothesis, but the reason for this shift toward cavalry was suddenly
once again shrouded in mystery. That is, until White, at the time a
middle-aged history professor at UCLA, came across a “rambling”
footnote, written by a scholar of German antiquities in 1923, that
concludes with the following offhanded claim: “The new age is
heralded in the eighth century by excavations of stirrups.”
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The footnote implied that the force that drove Charles Martel to
develop feudalism was the arrival in western Europe of a basic
technology: the horse stirrup. In his now classic 1962 book that fills
out this hypothesis, Medieval Technology and Social Change, White
meticulously draws from both archaeology and linguistics to show
that the introduction of the stirrup does indeed explain well Martel’s
sudden shift toward mounted troops.
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Before the stirrup, a warrior on a horse had to wield his spear or
sword with “the strength of shoulder and biceps.”
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 The stirrup

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enabled a “vastly more effective mode of attack.” By bracing a lance
between his upper arm and body, a rider leaning forward in metal
stirrups could deliver a blow with the combined force of his weight
and the weight of his stallion. The difference between these two
attacks was monumental. In the eighth century, the warrior with a
lance and stirrups on a horse was a form of “shock warfare”
devastating to opponents. In a medieval version of the nuclear arms
race that would follow more than a millennium later, Charles Martel
realized that the advantage provided by the stirrup was so
“immense” that he had to do whatever it took to get it before his
enemies did—even if that meant upending centuries of tradition and
creating a brand-new form of government.
In Lynn White Jr.’s study of the stirrup we find a classic example
of a technology introduced for a simple reason (to make riding
horses easier) leading to vast and complicated consequences never
imagined by its inventors (the rise of medieval feudalism). In the
second half of the twentieth century, many scholars in the field of the
philosophy of technology began to research similar case studies of
unintended consequences. Over time, this idea that tools can
sometimes drive human behavior became known as technological