In praise of email

Where important ideas free of a performative world arrive

“One great idea can revolutionize your life; a thousand small ones might only clutter it.”

—Anonymous

The modern internet is vast yet fragmented, an infinite sea of ideas where everything is available but almost none of it is seen by you, percentage-wise. This is not hyperbole: ~720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube per day, as just one ex (you only have 24, and aren’t even awake the entire time). I actually think the YouTube algo is pretty good, but how much of what you’ve truly cared about in the last year (ideas that challenged you, moved you, shaped you) came from scrolling apps like Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook? If you’re like me, very little that mattered (and so with that social media information FOMO is unnecessary).

Email on the other hand is high signal and the most lindy part of the internet: resilient, underestimated, deeply essential. Your inbox is where important things arrive. It’s a place sheltered from the disease of excess making us sick and manifesting everywhere, including our information diets. You’ll note every single large social media company invests heavily in sending emails if you don’t opt out, the point of this of course is to lure users back to their walled gardens (where outbound links are suppressed). But why, amid infinite scrolling apps and the dopamine drip of social feeds, does this decades-old technology hold up? It’s because it’s not infinite, and free of algos that dictate what we see and what fades into oblivion. Email is likely keeping you sane, and smart.

To understand email’s importance, let’s talk more about what the internet has become. Platforms promised us connection and reach, but instead delivered curation not by human hands but inscrutable machine learning models. These algorithms don’t merely organize information, they determine which voices rise and which are buried. And they do so with instructions that are not your priorities: engagement metrics, ad dollars, retention strategies. The result? A narrowing of vision, a feed that reflects not the best of the internet but the most clickable. Instagram and LinkedIn are even going so far as to totally remove humans, replacing them with AI. It couldn’t be bleaker, and my friend Ed suggests we should never forgive them for this ‘enshittification’.

Email by contrast is profoundly democratic. It’s chronological. Egalitarian. Everything you’ve subscribed to arrives in your inbox, not filtered through opaque mechanisms that decide what’s worthy of your attention. Contrasted with social’s algorithmic opacity, your inbox is a rare place of clarity. There’s no AI gatekeeper deciding whether the blog you signed up for two months ago aligns with your current ‘interests’ as interpreted by recent scrolling habits. It’s just there in its unmediated, raw state.

This is why the people who matter most to me professionally and intellectually reach me via email. Their posts on LinkedIn or Twitter/X might be brilliant, but sadly I won’t see the majority of them because the platforms deem other things more engaging. But their emails? I see every single one (I keep a ruthlessly clean inbox, so should you). It’s not merely a matter of reliability, it’s a matter of respect for the relationship between creator and audience. When someone sends an email, they’re not asking for permission to enter an algorithmic popularity contest. They’re placing their ideas directly in your hands, trusting you to engage (or not) on your own terms.

Erik Hoel talks about this recently, that blogs will be the last bastion of the ‘good internet,’ and remember blogs are mostly delivered by email now:

A rising tide lifts all boats, and the rising tide that drives people to blogs is that they're one of the last bastions of the “Good Internet.” Social media has become a chore. You get to choose between the banality of censorship or The Elon Show, and there’s nothing in between. There are still nuggets of gold on your feed but the work of panning for them gets ever more tedious.

…we can be happy, at least, that what gets to survive is one of the more aesthetically promising mediums.

This directness also makes email intimate in a way that platforms can never replicate. An email arrives addressed to you. It enters a digital space that feels and is private. It’s not performing for an audience of thousands or millions, it’s speaking to you alone. And in an age where so much online communication is performance, this intimacy is something different, something more important.

Perhaps email’s greatest virtue is that it’s boring. It lacks the addictive qualities of other modern platforms. It doesn’t seek to hijack your attention but to deliver value. You can get through everything sent each day with ease. And in an internet increasingly designed to keep you distracted, that’s nothing short of revolutionary.