Free The Tyranny of E-mail by John Freeman

peculiar solution known then as electronic mail— today we simply call it a fax. In 1961, in Washington, Chicago, and Battle Creek, Michigan, a service was tried out through which correspondents sent an electronic message; on the otherend it was printed out and delivered as a regular piece of mail. The service was dismantled in the early 1960s, then tried out again at the end of the decade between Washington and New York City. The experiment was again short-lived due to lack of patronage.
    The post office kept trying, though, as telex machines and the fax began to eat into its market share. A new era of communication was coming, and given that it was already being subsidized at a rate of up to $2 billion a year by the U.S. government, the post office couldn’t afford to be behind the curve: early estimates suggested that 17 billion pieces of mail could be electronically redirected by the mid-1980s. In the early 1980s, the post office spent close to a million dollars trying out the “electronic mail” solution between two American cities and several European countries. It was refined and labeled E-COM, “a special service for businesses with a sufficient volume of mail and enough computer capacity to take advantage of it,” as described in
The New York Times.
    To pull it off, the post office turned to an old player in the communications game: Western Union. Organizations that sent large volumes of mail would transmit computer-generated messages over Western Union lines to twenty-five important post offices. Upon arrival, the messages would be printed out and put into envelopes, with the rate at thirty cents for customers who sent fifty thousand letters in four weeks and fifty-five cents for customers who sent only five thousand messages in the same period. It was a bold step into the future—but it was ultimately not to be, as the post office kept running into one obstacle: the U.S. government.
    Time and again the post office’s electronic mail schemes ran into opposition from the Federal Communications Commission, which unanimously blocked its first official attempt to enter the electronic mail age, citing a lack of data from Western Union, which had applied for a license to carry mail over wires on thepost office’s behalf. The FCC also believed that since the mail had been sent electronically, it fell under its jurisdiction, not the post office’s. Later the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, and senators beholden to large industry fought against the scheme. The program was short-lived. Begun in 1982, it sent 16 million messages per year; it was folded in 1985. As a result of its failing, today we can send e-mail without a stamp.
The Ultimate Destruction of Space
    As the post office discovered, systems, especially those that deal with the shipment and transportation of tangible objects, have a terminal velocity. Conveyor belts can spin only so fast before the objects they’re transporting fly off. Trucks and buses have to obey speed limits; aside from the now-defunct Concorde, commercial airliners’ speeds have remained constant for decades. Mail that is electronic on one end and physical on the other—as E-COM was, its regulatory issues aside—solves only half the problem. The second a letter was printed out, it crashed into the bedrock of reality and slowed to a crawl.
    In order for terminal communicative velocity to be reached, however, time and space didn’t just have to be destroyed, they needed to be reinvented. Mail, by closing the gap between California and Connecticut, let alone Calcutta and the Cotswolds, began to bring about this change. The written word became an intimate tool that everyone could use, and as a result the sphere of intimacy expanded. But the lightning bolt that truly changed our sense of time was the telegram, which didn’t just speed up words but instituted a kind of new reality—one that found an echo in the burgeoning newspaper industry, on battlefields, and in that