"Send" Message ...or not!

Have we reached Peak Stupid?

June 28, 2025 ~ Vol. 30

“Wait twenty four hours.” It was my father’s sage advice regarding sending a message, or more accurately, in his day—a letter— written in anger. Those types of letters needed to season in a drawer overnight, before sending them on to the intended recipient. After reflecting on the content overnight, you could send it, or not, but you should take some time to think about it. After a few years you should have a drawer full of unsent letters, suitable for starting fires—in the fireplace.

I am old enough to remember letters—actually letters, handwritten or typed on actual paper, folded in thirds, put in an envelope with a stamp, and mailed. It took a day or two or three to get to the intended recipient, who had a day or two or three to respond to your original correspondence. The letter could have been a request for information, or advice, or be attached to a report that someone wanted you to read, or a newspaper column torn from an actual newspaper, more than likely sent by your mother, who wanted you to know that your cousin had been mentioned in the local paper and she thought that you would enjoy reading about her too.

If it was a business letter it would arrive with an implied expectation of a timely reply, after you had taken your own day or two or three to consider the request and formulate your response. You had time to research the relevant data if required, to read what other people were saying about the topic and perhaps talk to more knowledgeable colleagues about it, to weigh the pros and cons of the options at hand and to put your thoughts to paper in a fashion appropriate for the situation and the intended recipient. You had time to think about your response. You had time to weigh the pros and cons, to examine the upside and potential downside—to calculate the risks and rewards. The resulting correspondence and conversation was measured and considered and thoughtful, because you had time, and the correspondent valued your opinion.

The first crack in the messaging timeline dam appeared in the early 1970’s with the formation of a new company called Federal Express, which had a new business model—overnight delivery. The company focused on small packages originally, and pricing was computed based upon weight and distance, but for around $10 these packages and contracts and proposals and any documents requiring immediate attention could now be delivered overnight. When FedEx delivered their first $10 overnight package in 1973, the cost of a first-class postage stamp was eight cents.

When someone shipped you a document overnight, they also expected you to return the document overnight, which meant that the time to consider the contents of the package – the contract, the research report, the real estate closing documents – was now reduced to something less than eight hours – the time that FedEx delivered your document in the morning, until their last pick up—with your response, or proposal, or counterproposal—at around 4 PM. The introduction of overnight delivery changed the way that business was done, as evidenced by the fact that FedEx now delivers over three billion packages each year.

As speed of communications increased, technology champions celebrated the increase in productivity in offices across the country. Transactions were consummated—signed, sealed, delivered—in days instead of weeks. Left unsaid was the inverse correlation of the newfound speed with the thoughtfulness, diligence, and accuracy, or lack thereof, of the responses. Stress levels started to rise, but in the 70’s no one was talking about stress. We still had martinis at lunch.

The 1980’s brought the next entry in rapid response office communications, the fax machine. Why wait until tomorrow if you can have a response today? In fact, you can have it in ten minutes. If an original “wet” signature was not required, a facsimile copy of a document could arrive from across the country in seconds. Proposals and reports (and lunch specials from the local restaurants) started piling on the fax machine as soon as the office opened and kept appearing as long as there was paper loaded in the machine.

The days of a thoughtful, considered response were officially over. A day or two to respond to an inquiry or a request for comment, or a decision on a proposal was no longer acceptable. You could no longer buy time to respond to the letter that you received yesterday with “I didn’t receive it yet”, because the sender now knew that you did receive it, thirty minutes ago and needed a response—now! Actual “wet” signatures have now been replaced by digital DocuSign signatures, allowing respondents to legally acknowledge and accept the content of the referenced documents (which, in most cases, they have not even read).

For every advance and increase in communications technology, there was a commensurate increase in stress, in unresearched and ill-considered responses. At least when your pager went off you had time to think about things while you looked for a pay phone to call back the office. In just the decade between the advent of overnight delivery services and the rise (and fall) of the fax machines, the increase in speed and the accompanying decrease in response time brought about an exponential increase in two other very important items: stress, and stupid responses.

And then it got really bad. We have now entered the next chapter in rapid response communications technology, where the digitization of messaging, even digital wet signatures on contracts and agreements, leave zero time to actually think about what is in a document. And think we should. I will suggest that we are now approaching peak digitalization and peak stupid, and submit as evidence 1,000+ page Congressional “big, beautiful” legislation that appeared in your Representative’s inbox the night before a vote on said legislation, where no one has the time to read it or think about it and then have to admit that they voted to approve life changing measures that they were not even aware were in the bill.

But we are every bit as bad as Congress. How many people would you think actually take the time to read online contracts or agreements like “User Agreements”, “Privacy Agreements”, “Terms & Conditions” that you must attest to reading before you are allowed to order a pizza online. If you said “absolutely no one” you would be wrong, but not by much. According to Pew Research, twenty five percent of Americans say that they are asked to consent to an online privacy agreement on a daily basis. Numerous surveys suggest that approximately ten percent of us actually read them before signing off by checking the box. I was surprised to read the ten percent number; I assumed it would be closer to “absolutely no one”.

Security.org, who follows these types of data, conducted a survey including the question—Do you always read user and privacy agreements? Of those respondents who answered “yes”—that they always read these documents in their entirety—they then asked them to sign off on an attached user agreement, which included forfeiting the naming rights to their first-born child. 100% of the respondents approved that user agreement.

It is fascinating to speculate which stories that we read now online are written by AI, or Russian disinformation bots, or just someone posing as someone else. There really is no way to know, and many platforms, like Facebook, just state up front that they are no longer checking anything for truthfulness or accuracy. I do not trust anything that I read online anymore. Period, full stop. This proliferation of digital misinformation is exacerbated, by orders of magnitude, by the digital messaging media that is now in common usage. Most of us have multiple messaging apps—Message, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal—on our phones and tablets and most of them offer up bogus or overtly nefarious content on a regular basis.

Who among us has not received a request “from the US Post Office” informing us that a package is being held up for lack of postage, so please click here to pay the $.64 with your credit card to release the package, or the package will be returned! Immediately! I get the same message on a regular basis, at least once a month, looking for my credit card number. I have no idea how one comes to be targeted, or how any of this happens. I also have no idea why each time that I travel out of the country lately I end up with a second Amazon account—in Denmark.

As much as I appreciate the convenience of shooting off a text to someone on the other side of the planet, there are significant advantages to taking the time to organize your thoughts and to consider all of the consequences of saying what you are about to say. In today’s world of digital messaging, everything is instantaneous, in real time, and once you hit send—part of history. For a classic example of real time bloopers in messaging, see: Messaging / Signal / Hegseth / Goldberg. Oops. Those chat group participants are longing for the days of messaging on papyrus scrolls, where the content was then hidden away for millennia in Dead Sea caves.

As much as I enjoy the convenience of modern communications technology, I really do miss the security, and the pace, of the old-fashioned way of doing things.

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