New Orleans In the wake of massive and disruptive hacking of emails in the corporate and political world, there was a piece in the paper the other day essentially announcing the end of email. The author was making a case that it was time to return to direct and telephonic communication on any matters pretty much more important than a grocery list. We might wonder about all of that even if it is abundantly clear that soon email systems should come with a caution or a cigarette pack warning that pops up before you hit the “send” button. In fact, is there already an app for that? If so, we should all get it!
We think of email as ubiquitous now with a gazillion messages sent daily, but is it? There’s every indication that texting, Facebook messaging, Snapchat, and even Instagram are more common communications tools for many of the under-30’s in the developed world than email. No small part of that may be the ability to utilize a more informal language and briefer protocols than even common in emails. On the other side of the divide, there are the old dogs, and there are some of them still barking in union halls, corporate corridors, and even political offices who have their assistants print out their emails and often handle their replies.
Some of these dogs know how to bury their bones or at least keep others from uncovering them. Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina was quoted during the first of the Democratic National Committee released by WikiLeaks that he had never used email yet, and had no plans to ever use email in the future. I’ve often told the story of Mayor Marc Morial of New Orleans, now the longtime head of the National Urban League, based in New York City, telling me he looked forward to leaving office so he could see what a Blackberry was like and use email. Politics is almost the ultimate transactional business, so at the best some were huge fans of the Animals and were always humming, “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and at the worst, well, as Hillary Clinton’s email program has demonstrated, let’s just not go there. On the other hand we had John Podesta a former White House Chief of Staff and ultimate political professional using a Gmail address, when he must have known even if never hacked, Google never destroys emails leaving a permanent record just out there waiting.
Can we keep email and use encryption? I’d like to think so, but then there’s the federal lawsuit trying to break Moxie Marlinspike’s best-in-class system. Can messaging encryption like WhatsApp be better? Maybe, but then I read a long article in The New Yorker about the coup in Turkey and how the Gulenists were in deep trouble once the Turkish intelligence got into their homemade app called ByLock that had 200,000 users forcing them to “go underground” with something else called Eagle. We’ve all read about the FBI having to pay big bucks to “unlock” an IPhone. You have to wonder whether or not there’s anything that cannot be hacked?
Should we worry about this at all? Most of us not only have nothing to hide, but pretty low key, boring correspondence and lives for that matter in the eyes of the outside world, even if vital to ourselves, our work, and families. Nonetheless, we’re somebody, too! Do we just sigh and accept the tradeoff between privacy and convenience? Do we exchange paranoia for openness?
Where is this all going? My companera and I watched an episode of a widely touted, and supposedly “most relevant” show on television the other night on Netflix. The episode featured an implant behind the ear and a small thumb drive size device everyone carried around constantly that filmed and recorded every part of everyone’s lives, allowing someone to search back in old experiences from their past, unless they had deleted it. Is that where we’re going? If so, I guess we should enjoy email while we have it, and start calling these days, the good old days!