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

Email Has a Mind of Its Own
The Rise of Email
Why did email become so popular? One clue can be found in an
unlikely place: hidden behind the walls of the Central Intelligence
Agency’s original headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. Here
you’ll find more than thirty miles of four-inch steel tubing, installed
in the early 1960s, as part of an elaborate, vacuum-powered intra-
office mail system. Messages, sealed in fiberglass containers,
rocketed at thirty feet a second among approximately 150 stations
spread over eight floors. Senders specified each capsule’s destination
by manipulating brass rings at its base; electromechanical widgets in
the tubes read those settings and routed the capsule. At its peak, the
system delivered 7,500 messages each day.
1
According to oral histories maintained by the CIA, employees
were saddened when, in the late 1980s, during an expansion of the
headquarters, this steampunk messaging system was shut down.
Some of them reminisced about the comforting thunk, thunk of the
capsules arriving at a station; others worried that internal office
communication would become unacceptably slow, or that runners
would wear themselves out delivering messages on foot. The agency’s
archives contain a photograph of a pin that reads “Save the Tubes.”
Why would the CIA invest the significant amount of resources
required to build and maintain such an unwieldy system? By the
mid-twentieth century, much more common and inexpensive
methods for office communication had already become standard.
When this headquarters was built, for example, internal telephone
exchanges had been around for decades. Isn’t it unnecessary to send

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you a note through a pneumatic tube network when I could just as
easily call you directly using the telephone on my desk?
But the telephone was no panacea. It represents an example of
what communication specialists call synchronous messaging, which
requires all parties in the interaction to participate at the same time.
If you’re not at your desk when I dial your extension, or if your line is
busy, then the attempted interaction is a bust. In a small
organization, tracking people down on the phone might be
manageable, but as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth,
single-room countinghouses and small managerial suites tucked in
the backs of factories gave way to huge edifices, like the CIA
headquarters, that could house thousands of white-collar employees
under the same roof. At this scale, the overhead of arranging
synchronous communication becomes onerous, leading to drawn-out
games of secretarial phone tag and piles of missed-call message slips.
An alternative form of interaction that avoids the overhead
problem is asynchronous messaging, which doesn’t require a
receiver to be present when a message is sent. The intra-office mail
cart is a classic example of this communication type. If I want to send
you a note, I can drop it in my outgoing mail tray when it’s
convenient for me, and once it’s delivered to your incoming mail
tray, you can pick it up and read it when convenient for you—all with
no coordination between us required. The problem with the mail
cart, of course, is that it’s slow. It might take the better part of a day
for my note to actually make it from my outbox to a sorting station,
then on to a cart on your floor, where eventually it will be pushed
past your desk and manually delivered. This might be fine for
conveying static information, but it’s clearly an impractical means to
efficiently coordinate or share time-sensitive news.
What the rise of the large office really needed—a productivity
silver bullet of sorts—was some way to combine the speed of
synchronous communication with the low overhead of asynchronous
communication. Which brings us back to the CIA. This is exactly
what they were trying to achieve with their pneumatic tube system.
Their electromechanically routed, vacuum-driven capsules were the
equivalent of a turbocharged mail cart: I can now asynchronously
deliver you a message within minutes instead of hours. It’s not
surprising, therefore, that the CIA employees were saddened to see
the tube system shut down when the headquarters was expanded in

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the 1980s. But this sadness didn’t last long, as this same period
marked the arrival of a newer, cheaper, even faster method for
practical asynchronous messaging: electronic mail.
2
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Most organizations lacked the resources to build a system similar to
the CIA’s tubes, so for them, the arrival of email was the first time
they could enjoy high-speed asynchrony. We’re so familiar with this
capability today that we take it for granted, but during the 1980s and
1990s, when it began to spread widely, its impact was profound.
We can find nice snapshots of email’s rapid ascendency in the
archives of The New York Times from this period. One of the paper’s
earliest mentions of this technology in a business context is in a 1987
article that places the word e-mail in quotation marks throughout.
3
“Although ‘e-mail,’ as it is called, has not spread as rapidly as its
proponents predicted,” it explains, “it has established itself as a niche
market, and it has a small but increasing following in the corporate
world.” As the article clarifies, professional email at this point still
required a special application that would dial into a server to
establish a connection, allowing you to send and receive messages
before disconnecting. If you needed to reference the information
from a message later, a laborious process was required to save it to a
disk. Given the complexity of this technology at this early stage, the
article’s caution about its importance is understandable. But this
soon changed.
Appearing just a few years later is another instructive article—
this time without quotation marks around e-mail.
4
 The article
describes the embrace of this technology within the entertainment
industry. In 1989, we learn, Mike Simpson, the cohead of the
powerful motion picture department at the William Morris Agency,
connected three hundred computers in their Beverly Hills and New
York offices with an early computer network technology offered by
Steve Jobs’s post-Apple start-up, NeXT, Inc. “A cornerstone of our
business is the quicker you get information, the quicker you can use
it,” Simpson says. “E-mail has already given us an edge.”
The article contains other examples of early admiration for
email’s potential. “It’s fast information, replaces telephone calls, is
environmentally correct and allows more people to know things at
the same time,” explains one agent. Another talks about his

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experience shifting to the rival Creative Artists Agency, where, to his
“horror,” he discovered that they were still delivering paper notes
with runners. He insisted his new colleagues adopt email. We also
learn that at Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg set up a private email
network connecting twenty high-level executives. “We had to love e-
mail because Jeffrey loves it,” explains the vice president of feature
publicity at Disney, before helpfully clarifying: “You communicate by
computer instead of by phone.”
Email was still new enough in 1992 that not everyone understood
its potential. “E-mail is fun, but it’s a toy,” says a story analyst at
Columbia Pictures, providing a quote he probably now wishes he
could take back. He then adds: “E-mail encourages people to chatter
and say things that don’t need to be said.” The article also notes that
at this point, most motion picture studios still depended on a
primitive communication device called the Amtel, a combination of
screen and keyboard that was used to send short text messages. (A
common use of the Amtel in Hollywood was to allow assistants to
inform executives, without interrupting their closed-door meetings,
about who was holding on various phone lines.)
In a 1989 article, the venerable technology writer John Markoff
provides more insight into the dynamics that helped accelerate
email’s growth.
5
 “Electronic mail, which has taken a secondary
position to the facsimile machine through the personal computer
boom of the 1980’s,” he writes, “is finally coming into its own.” As
Markoff’s piece clarifies, in the late 1980s, email was largely used to
connect employees within the same company. In 1989, under
pressure from the Aerospace Industries Association (a group of fifty
aerospace companies with over six hundred thousand total
employees), the main email network providers “grudgingly” agreed
to interconnect their networks using an early email protocol called
X.400, allowing users from one network, for the first time, to
communicate with users from another.
Markoff presciently argues that once email becomes global, it
will largely eliminate the need for fax machines and therefore spread
rapidly. He wasn’t the only one to see this potential. In the article,
Markoff quotes Steve Jobs—identified as “Steven P. Jobs”—providing
what turned out to be an accurate prediction: “In the 1990’s,
personal computing will transform personal communication roughly

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by the same magnitude that, in the 1980’s, spreadsheets transformed
business analysis and desktop publishing.”
The case studies in Markoff’s long piece paint a picture of a
technology on the rise. “We found that electronic mail dramatically
improved the way in which we communicated,” explains a hospital
executive. “It took off and permeated our organization.” Markoff
later elaborates: “In large and small offices throughout the country,
[email] is being seized on as a means of communication more
efficient than the telephone.”
By 1992, the Times reported that email had become a $130-
million-a-year business, projected to be a $500 million business by
mid-decade as many big software companies, including IBM and
Microsoft, began preparing to enter the market.
6
A couple of years
later, email’s dominance was unquestioned. “Ever since the Lotus 1-
2-3 spreadsheet was anointed a decade ago as the first killer app . . .
people have been asking, ‘What’s the next killer app?’” writes Peter
Lewis in a 1994 article. “In my mind, there is no doubt: electronic
mail is the killer app for the 1990s.”
7
As portrayed by these articles, the speed with which email spread
through the business sector is astounding. In 1987, it’s a clunky tool
useful to only a “niche market.” By 1994, it’s the “killer app” of the
decade and the foundation of a half-billion-dollar software industry.
That’s about as close to an overnight transformation as you’re likely
to find in the history of commercial technology adoption.
We shouldn’t be surprised that this tool spread so fast. As I
established, it solved a real problem—the need for high-speed
asynchronous communication—and did so in a manner that was
relatively inexpensive and easy to master.
8
 But it’s important to
remember that there’s nothing fundamental about email as a tool
that demands that we use it constantly. One could imagine an
alternative history in which email simplified existing communication
that used to occur over voicemail and memos, but office work
otherwise remained the same as it had been in the mid-1980s. You
can enjoy the practical benefits of email, in other words, without
having to also embrace the hyperactive hive mind workflow. So why
did this frenetic behavior become universal in the aftermath of
email’s arrival, even though, as argued in the preceding chapters, it
makes us less productive and more miserable? When you look closer
at this question, a nuanced and fascinating collection of answers

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emerges, all of which point to a surprising conclusion: maybe the
way we work today is much more arbitrary than we realize.