Modern communication is built for the scroll. Think: Slack and Discord chats, disappearing messages, DMs, and social feeds. But when it’s the only system of record, ephemeral channels quickly erase institutional memory.
A Theory of Messaging Styles & Ghosting.
Online communication tools serve many purposes. So does silence.
Building Communities That Think
Social media and instant messaging fundamentally changed how we talk to each other. The paragraph has ceded power to fast moving and ephemeral chat that inevitably leans toward the shallow and reactive.
A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
A New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellerFrom New York Times bestselling author Cal Newport comes a bold vision for liberating workers from the tyranny of the inbox--and unleashing a new era of productivity.Modern knowledge workers communicate constantly. Their days are defined by a relentless barrage of incoming messages and back-and-forth digital conversations--a state of constant, anxious chatter in which nobody can disconnect, and so nobody has the cognitive bandwidth to perform substantive work. There was a time when tools like email felt cutting edge, but a thorough review of current evidence reveals that the "hyperactive hive mind" workflow they helped create has become a productivity disaster, reducing profitability and perhaps even slowing overall economic growth. Equally worrisome, it makes us miserable. Humans are simply not wired for constant digital communication.We have become so used to an inbox-driven workday that it's hard to imagine alternatives. But they do exist. Drawing on years of investigative reporting, author and computer science professor Cal Newport makes the case that our current approach to work is broken, then lays out a series of principles and concrete instructions for fixing it. In A World without Email, he argues for a workplace in which clear processes--not haphazard messaging--define how tasks are identified, assigned and reviewed. Each person works on fewer things (but does them better), and aggressive investment in support reduces the ever-increasing burden of administrative tasks. Above all else, important communication is streamlined, and inboxes and chat channels are no longer central to how work unfolds.The knowledge sector's evolution beyond the hyperactive hive mind is inevitable. The question is not whether a world without email is coming (it is), but whether you'll be ahead of this trend. If you're a CEO seeking a competitive edge, an entrepreneur convinced your productivity could be higher, or an employee exhausted by your inbox, A World Without Email will convince you that the time has come for bold changes, and will walk you through exactly how to make them happen.
The 37signals Guide to Internal Communication
The how, where, why, and when we communicate. Long form asynchronous? Real-time chat? In-person? Video? Verbal? Written? Via email? In Basecamp? How do we keep everyone in the loop without everyone getting tangled in everyone else’s business? It’s all in here.
Mossberg: The tyranny of messaging and notifications
Can we endure even one more communications service?
My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet
Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.
Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work | I Done This
Whether you fear its impersonal nature or thinks its the best thing since streaming television, asynchronous communication is here to stay Remote work is rising and online education is becoming more accepted and commonplace, both due to changing attitudes and the pandemic. These factors are only going to increase the…
Shlok Khemani on Twitter / X
Super interesting that eve doesn't ship with any long-term or cross-session memory (yet). The main context-management lever out of the box is conversation compaction. This is unlike OpenClaw and Hermes, each of which comes with a default opinionated memory implementation. https://t.co/DDIyc4rFtW— Shlok Khemani (@shloked) June 17, 2026
The Forgetting Problem: Persistence Architectures and What They Cost - Astral's Blog
Remote work requires communicating more, less frequently | Ben Balter
Async communication is like gzip compression for humans—more upfront processing, but greater throughput with fewer packets.
The Memory Walled Garden
The gap between first and third party memory systems
ChatGPT Memory, Boundaries and AI Companions, Auren
ChatGPT’s memory feature is pretty basic, but it’s the sort of product feature that can build a moat, particularly if it’s extended to other use cases.
The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?
Researchers at Caltech quantify human behavioral information throughput at approximately 10 bits/s across various tasks, highlighting a vast discrepancy with the brain's sensory input capacity,...
Slack is the opposite of organizational memory
The internet is not a dumptruck and neither am I
Signal Developer Explains Why Early Encrypted Messaging Tools Flopped
'The intuition was to take the complexity and push it onto the user,' Moxie Marlinspike says at Black Hat. 'We were just wrong.'
You have to mainline info all the time because our information tools make you do so. Infinite scroll timelines, group chats with no beginning or end, recommender algorithms with no sense of place — all of them require constant vigilance to make sense of. We can do better.
Charlie Warzel
had a death in the family and was almost completely off the internet for a few days & my observation is that there is too much happening too fast such that basic facts abt the world are difficult to ascertain unless you are mainlining info all the time & doing that seems to drive people insane
