My personal inbox, as it stands, is largely useless. Of the 100 emails I can see at a glance, two of them are things I asked for — changes to a profile, an order receipt – and the rest are adverts from companies that I have absolutely unsubscribed from.
One is for a perfume company that I once used to buy my mother a gift. Two or three are for crowdfunding campaigns. One is from a hotel I have never visited. Another is for a subscription box for dog toys I unsubscribed from in 2017. Why do I hear from Sears? I thought they went bankrupt! Either way, I’ve unsubscribed from their emails three times.
Every company I have ever interacted with decides to send me at least one email a week, several of them choosing to do so multiple times. I have tried every unsubscription product under the sun, and none seem capable of changing the fact that email, the single most popular product on the internet, has become unquestionably poisoned.
This is a direct result of the spam culture of modern commerce – every time you interact with any business online, even once, you are agreeing to be spammed. Book a flight with Southwest? Enjoy 3 or 4 emails a week about the flight you’re taking, even if it’s in a few months time, asking if you’d like to rent a car or book a hotel. Give a steak company your email? Expect to be emailed every single major holiday or news event that they see fit with some sort of discount or new product.
My email is irrevocably fucked to the point that I have to tell people to email me on my work email, because I will reliably not see it on my personal because a company I bought a suit from in 2017 has a new discount, or because Product Hunt has decided that I need both a weekly and a daily update that I have never clicked.
The concept of growth hacking has destroyed the basic communication channel of the internet, exchanging the inconvenience of physically going to a store with the annoyance of constantly being badgered by every single store you’ve ever shopped at. While one can unsubscribe from these emails, they invariably find a way back – either through future purchases or by simply ignoring the unsubscribe request, safe in the knowledge that no authority will reliably police the baseline harassment of using email.
Email has become the victim of the late-stage capitalist internet – a place where we are continually productized and monetized, where our actions are evaluated to better market us products, and where the actual experience of using said products too often exists to find more efficient ways to get our cash. And while these messages are annoying, the metrics that growth marketers see show that people complete purchases from them, and they’re never, ever going to stop.
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As I’ve related before, searching for things online has become less about providing answers and more about Google, the people that pay Google, and the people that game Google finding ways for us to decide that their answer is the right one. Content is created specifically to rank high on search engines — called Search Engine Optimization — to the point that businesses have to create entire strategies to con the robots that choose what comes up when you search.
The Verge published a vast piece on SEO last week, citing stories of stores using AI to find new and inventive ways to con Google search into ranking them above others. Google, a $1.5tn company, has always treated search as something to be manipulated rather than a mass-curation of “the best” of what’s online, allowing a cadre of SEO expert “hustlers” to grow into a $77bn industry where you pay someone to tell you how to change the things you want to say into what Google regards as “interesting”
