First they came for email. And we said yes.
I don’t think anybody logs into their personal email inbox these days. I look at my Gmail account once or twice a week, and I hit the close button after glancing through just a couple of emails.
While a majority of my work related communication happens over email, I fucking dread going to my own Gmail account.
The idea of switching to my regular Gmail account sometimes gives me jitters.
And it’s not just because my friends have abandoned email for WhatsApp, Messenger and the like.
It’s also because my inbox feels like a lot like TV. Just loads of endless crap.
I thought I’m the only one who feels this way. Every time I visit my parents, their inbox looks 10x worse, sort of like this:
Truth be told: over the years, we’ve given apps way too much permission to reach us directly. And marketers have gone on to abuse this permission for decades.
Turns out giving the keys to your inbox is called permission marketing. I call it inbox abuse. Fucking abuse.
Mindless marketing actually turned your entire inbox into a spam folder — and you couldn’t do anything about it because it all happened with your “permission”. Gmail was our ally in the war for our attention-three years ago. They launched the Promotions tab in a bid to reclaim your inbox but that didn’t help us in dealing with peak email fatigue either.
The damage was already done. We lost the sanctity of our email inboxes several years ago.
There’s no more attention for marketers to conquer in the world of email inboxes. But they’re smart, and they’ve already moved to where we’re headed. As we continue to invent new ways to communicate — stickers, stories and more — marketers are marching ahead to get more of our time and attention in all of these places.
And this time, the odds are against us.
Because unlike email, the apps we use today to communicate have a vested interest selling your attention. And marketers don’t even need your permission anymore — they can just trade a few dollars for your attention with the makers of these apps. You have nearly no control — because you didn’t even give the permission for specific content to reach you — the notion of permission doesn’t even exist!
If you haven’t noticed yet, Instagram and Snapchat already run ads in your streams or stories. MailChimp is venturing beyond email to help marketers reach out to you everywhere. And WhatsApp is soon going to join the game too: allowing businesses to communicate with a billion users directly.
Gradually, the tools we thought would always be clean and neat are now transforming into attention blackholes (WhatsApp launched their version of stories yesterday). You can imagine what more apps have in their plans.
Soon, even before you know it, we’re going to be surrounded by a stream of crap we’ve never really given permission for or wanted in the first place.
And then history will repeat itself, again. It’ll be interesting to watch where we go from messages on WhatsApp and Facebook and stories on Snapchat and Instagram to something else entirely new, something we haven’t thought of before when we feel the fatigue. Just like we made the leap from email to all sorts of ephemeral forms for keeping in touch.
