Inbox 100,000

Many cubicle workers, no matter their particular job or industry, have at least one common task: keep up with email. Nothing ruins a day at the office like email messages piling up faster than you can deal with them.

To deal with this modern malaise, a dude named Merlin Mann came up with “Inbox Zero,” a series of videos and articles intended to help computer-bound professionals organize and accomplish all the tasks that attack us via email. Predictably, the term was interpreted literally by many cube denizens and achieving a totally empty inbox by any means necessary became an end in itself.

It’s one trend I haven’t followed.

Inbox 100,000

No, that’s not my work inbox. It’s the Yahoo! account I established some time prior to August 27, 2002, the date of the first email I still have saved. If you just look within the window, it appears I have “999+” unread messages, because apparently anything more than three digits is too much for Yahoo! to handle. Not really, though, because the title bar of the window gives the much more useful figure of 99,813. That’s not total messages; that’s just unread messages.

The figure is accurate as of May 22, 2013 at 8:38 am. Since that screenshot was taken, the number has topped 99,900. It’s quite possible my inbox will exceed 100,000 unread messages by the end of Memorial Day weekend.

My Yahoo! Mail account is probably the oldest online account I still use regularly. It’s the address I give out whenever there’s the slightest possibility it will be used for spam. Every few months I go through and unsubscribe from most mailing lists, but the marketing onslaught continues. Nevertheless, I still need to check the account for legitimate emails, mostly from online shopping transactions.

I could set up spam filters, but the junk email is occasionally interesting – sales flyers for businesses I frequent, that sort of thing. I’m certainly not going to take the time to delete messages I don’t want; whom are they hurting? Soon enough they’ll scroll off my screen, pushed ever downward by newer useless missives. Inbox zero is a myth anyway. There’s plenty of inner peace to be had just ignoring unwanted emails.

Google Glass Confuses And Frightens Me

The first Google Glass kits have arrived in customer hands. Like the Bluetooth headset did for the sonic part of interacting with our phones, Google Glass does for the visual, placing a tiny screen in front of the eye for always-ready, hands-free use.

I work in the high tech industry – the mobile high tech industry, in fact. Not as a programmer, or an engineer, just as a marketing writer with an interest in technology and gadgets. I write about smartphones and apps every day. New hardware always gets me itching to upgrade.

But I’m not looking forward to Google Glass.

Mobile technology has always lent itself to a kind of consumer arms race. Flip phones were cooler than bulkier brick phones; BlackBerries were cooler still, for a while. Then came the iPhone, which at first couldn’t run apps but was way better at surfing the Web than previous smartphones; and newer iPhones or Android phones were of course cooler than the early models.

Google Glass represents a giant escalation in this arms race. Rather than an incremental improvement to previous phone technology, Glass is a whole new interface that frees the hands completely. One can literally be connected non-stop.

“That’s great!” you might think. “I can do two things at once and have more free time!” Really? I’ve written about this before:

Every advance in technology that promises more productivity and more convenience can only do so for a short time. After that, it blends into the normal, everyday fabric of life and becomes expected rather than novel.

Worker productivity, aided by technology, grew 80 percent between 1973 and 2011. Worker pay, meanwhile, grew just ten percent, adjusted for inflation, in that same period.

Whether or not Glass becomes cool enough to be accepted in social situations, it will undoubtedly find at least niche utilization. Many employers already expect their workers to be available by cell phone outside work hours. Smartphones enable those workers to log into company systems and get work done, even while not on the clock. Google Glass further enables users to divide their attention, giving both real life and in-Glass life short shrift.

At the very least, Glass and its descendants will enable a new type of asshole. The current generation of Glass is rather conspicuous, but future revisions will undoubtedly be miniaturized and more stealthily designed. Researching information on the spot is possible now, but doing it without the knowledge of one’s conversational partners can mislead them. Playing games or otherwise distracting oneself is likewise disrespectful.

TechCrunch, self-appointed arbiter of every Next Big Thing, seems to think Google Glass will be neither a culture-rewriting bang nor a shunned and rejected whimper, and I tend to agree. But don’t expect a bold new world of joyful connectivity without consequences. That’s not how technology works.