The original inbox was a wooden tray on a real desk.
Papers arrived there because a person walked them over. The obligation was physics: it took up space, it had mass, someone had expended effort. You could see when it was empty.
The telephone demanded presence but not memory. It rang, you answered or you didn’t. No accumulation. No count. When it stopped ringing, the obligation evaporated. The phone never remembered what you missed.
Tag: software design
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The guilt of the inbox