The sum total of all letters transcribed to tablet, parchment, papyrus or paper cannot be numbered on this side of eternity. Of those that survived, many more were doubtlessly lost: either destroyed intentionally or otherwise discarded under the presumption of their impermanence. And yet, those that did survive became the substance of documented history. Without them, the vision of the past would be left to more formalized monographs, what survives in oral tales, and archaeological remains. While relevant and offering their own insights, none of these offer the informality, intimacy and personality that letters do.

Such correspondence stood in the liminal region between communication and time. They were incidental, often concerning the needs of particular occasions, periodically dipping into more inspired thoughts of profound subjects between colleagues, but always exchanged in a medium just short of public announcement. Moreover, by virtue of the medium’s utility, within each civilized culture that came to adopt and subsequently be shaped by their written languages, the act of writing letters became a tradition reserved for the learned and therefore both a staple and an indicator of that civilization. It is indeed by this framework that we understand letters today, in retrospect.

And so arrives some definition of the letter. Foremost, it is a correspondence, but it is also secondarily a record. Thirdly, its existence marks its writer as learned to some minimal degree, even where the specific contents of a given letter may lack all consequence. Fourth, by way of this, the letter marks the existence of civilization, is a product of it, and marks its writer as in some sense civilized: a governed man whose action takes place within particular social and cultural milieu. His identity can be known (and is asserted here in the form of some particular letter) beyond the shape afforded him by social convention, as would be the case in a total society or a mental asylum.

It is with some surprise to note then that the tradition of the last couple millennia, the practice of writing letters, has seemingly come to a complete halt in the twenty-first century. The growth of digital computing has rendered the letter obsolete; e-mail and private messaging services, direct or instant messages, chat programs, as well as voice and video calls all satisfy the more immediate concerns of the letter’s primary end, and they do so with significantly greater expediency and efficiency than waiting the days or weeks for a postmarked envelope to arrive.

Within the context of the modern world’s tendencies, however, it is on the other hand that the letter’s disappearance is of no surprise at all.

Efficiency and Technique

In 1954, French philosopher Jacques Ellul sought to divorce the term ‘technique’ from its purely mechanical connotation and apply it to the manner in which then-contemporary society of France, and the globalizing West as a whole, operated. The Technological Society formed the foundation for a sociological framework by which the order of efficiency, the reduction of social enterprise to spreadsheets and men to numerical bits, could be better understood.

The society in question is not technological because of the existence of technology within it, but rather because it is ordered by the same means and methods which technology operates. Ellul comments within the opening paragraphs of the book that “technique has now become almost completely independent of the machine,” emphasizing that “the growth of its power today has no relation to the growing use of the machine.”¹ Seventy years ago, Ellul observed the trends that came with the industrialization of the West and the West’s subsequent embrace of, broadly defined, capitalism as an economic ethos, and in turn predicted much of the manner in which social life would be handled for the better part of the next century:

“The one best way”: so runs the formula to which our technique corresponds. When everything has been measured and calculated mathematically so that the method which has been decided upon is satisfactory from the rational point of view, and when, from the practical point of view, the method is manifestly the most efficient of all those hitherto employed or those in competition with it, then the technical movement becomes self-directing.²

Referring to this idea as ‘automation,’ it is clear here that the subject of Elluls’ thought is not specifically computers, industry, or machines but the means and method behind their operation and how that has been applied to nearly every aspect of life in the West. To some extent, it indeed comes as a bit harsh considering the time he was writing, when older traditions, if already disrupted by the process of modernization, could still be found in living communities and practices without much effort. Looking back, however, it’s difficult to call his position hysterical or out of proportion.

Correspondence seems always to have operated by such a principle. Letters were written and exchanged on some account of operational necessity, and surely their primary purpose was toward some logistic end: to relay incidental information. Even the more highfalutin letters of Europe’s greatest thinkers served the same purpose, though the degree to which their information was incidental varies. As mentioned above, their interest in such exchanges was quite a bit deeper than some updates on their circumstances to far removed family or requests for reimbursement of particular expenses; the deeper letters remained, however, at a level of written medium below that of more permanent works such as treatises, professional logs or studies. This is especially interesting to consider with regard to certain intellectuals, such as Gottfried Leibniz, whose sprawling system of thought is largely contained in the letters he exchanged rather than the small handful of publications he penned for public distribution.

It was not for lack of efficiency that letters persisted, but it was by this lack that they fell out of favor. Advances in technology coincided with the gradual decay of social competence—such as the reliability of delivery services weighed against the instantaneousness of virtual communication. Much as Ellul frames, however, it was the mindset, the social method, in other words, that preceded this change. The technology enabled behavior and beliefs that already existed to come about. Unfortunately, however, rather than affirm Ellul’s hesitant optimism about the possibility of technique’s use in vivifying the soul, these methods have led instead to modern man’s increasing alienation at a seemingly exponential rate. And one reason for this is that it has enabled the proliferation of junk and noise.

Proliferation of Noise

The death of the letter took longer to come about than the recent developments in large language models over the past four years, but their effects are most obvious. As has been written at length both here and by others, as well as verified by any average experience on a large enough social media website, AI slop has invaded feeds with some of the most insultingly low-effort content imaginable. Elon Musk, for instance, has turned most of his official timeline into extended marketing for Grok’s use as a content generator, adding to the discourse with his own middling executions.

Little space needs be devoted to this aspect of the internet’s slopification. This trend in content overproduction has been around for much longer than these particular machines have been functional—so long, in fact, that it was one of the pivotal subjects of the popular 2001 narrative stealth-action game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

A generation ago, advertising would have been the easiest target of these such accusations, but most of the field of journalism and round-the-clock news reporting would fit the bill as well. The expansion of television from three or four channels into the hundreds accessible thanks to satellite and broadband in the Aughts similarly fed into the cycle of mass marketed and disposable entertainment: content made with the explicit intent to be consumed once and then, likely, forgotten. More importantly, such entertainment carried with it the implication that it served not even to entertain, but to soak up a viewer’s time and to act instead as a vehicle for advertising.

In this respect, all that’s changed is the sheer volume of content. The structure of that content, as well as its accessibility, however, have changed a great deal; in about a decade, media consumption moved from the scheduled panels of television screens to instant gratification at the far end of an internet search bar or the next video in a playlist. The normalization of user-made material opened an eventual set of floodgates to the proliferation of junk content, be it video, image or text. This background should make it apparent how AI tools didn’t invent the culture of noise but merely stepped into a large space provided for it by decades of consumer media.

Consumer media has been defined before; its use here refers specifically to media content made according to conventions, as if built to the specifications of particular categories or genres as opposed to planned, produced and made in an artistic mode. More deserves to be defined on this point, but for now, the focus remains on consumer media and said conventions.

Such conventions are not strictly limited to narrative elements, either, such as the presence of wizards and dragons indicating a particular story’s belonging to a fantasy genre. In the case of literature, the style and deployment of particular words in particular ways often owe themselves to similar such conventions. Likewise with regard to the typesetting, the fonts, the formatting, and extrapolated outwards, the subject and layout of the book cover itself.

Conventions apply to visual media, print media, advertising, branding; they are priming devices that are used to orient the consumer into proper interpretive modes, sometimes even subliminally. Certain conventions in advertising, for instance, are designed to bypass typical cognitive means of engagement through repetition, use of color and various applications of montage theory. While most conventions in consumer media operate at the fringes of consciousness, they don’t tend to be outright subliminal in their design or approach, however.

Consumer media would not exist without these conventions, as the media is designed to fulfill them in order to establish some form of revenue stream for its creator. Usually this revenue stream is related to advertising, as mentioned above, but in the case of purely creative content, such as genre fantasy novels, webcomics, or infotainment internet videos, the content itself tends to be the point. When considering conventions as a set of definitions of a genre or category, then it’s simple to treat them also as instructions to carry out in order to create another work within that category. These categories thus become simultaneously descriptive tools to orient an audience’s expectation, as well as prescriptive devices to predetermine a creator’s product. In this sense does consumer media vividly distinguish itself from works of art.

But this media is not limited to things bought and sold or riddled full of advertisements. The shift in media thanks to technique, the internet, and the digital has resulted in this method being applied to basic communication, to correspondence: it has affected common writing.

Internet Diction and Irony

Internet blogs and early Web 2.0 styled forums both stood one step closer to permanence than emails did, but nonetheless were treated by both their users and posters as incidental, informal mediums. Text and information was not ‘published’ per se, although going solely according to definitions, they were; it was ‘posted’ instead. Articles on a blog were posts, responses to forum queries were posts, comments were forms of posts, as well. Likewise, readers were ‘users,’ users were ‘posters,’ information became ‘content,’ and as the Aughts moved into the Tens and now the Twenties, publishers are now ‘content creators,’ and everything is some form of ‘media.’ The reason for pointing this out is not to imply that definitions have changed, as they haven’t, but rather to recognize a sort of semantic drift in the vulgate.

Digital media was recognized to be transient, impermanent, and while useful, of less importance than physical books or published papers—a term that, despite the process being entirely digital now, still calls to most minds the image of a stack of copy paper covered in text. What was published online, then, bore the implication that it was of less consequence than what was published such that it was handled by human hands, flipped through, edited, scribbled on, and critiqued in person.

E-mail correspondence and direct messaging services both exemplified this difference in attitude. Fairly quickly after internet access became more publicly available, the language employed in a typical e-mail could feature dropped punctuation, missed capitals, too many or too few line breaks. This sort of style guide should sound quite familiar to the average internet user now, particularly now that social platforms like Discord have become one of the most popular means by which internet users connect with each other.

New incidental and purely text-based creoles of written languages begin appearing thanks to these new digital media. The beginning of sentences cease being capitalized, periods get dropped in exchange for line breaks, words get condensed into phonetic abbreviations like ‘u’ or ‘ic’, emojis come into popularity, asterisks around phrases and runs of capital letters turn to indicate emphasis. All of these arose to popularity thanks to e-mail, internet forums and messaging technology.

Messages written in such a form also indicate a total utilitarian impermanence because of the direct association with the media in which the language is expected. One might as well use proper grammar and punctuation in informal discourse on digital platforms—and indeed, many do—but the digital’s ephemerality owes itself to a half-recognized irony in the act of communication. When one uses a chat program to communicate with someone halfway around the globe, one engages also some unspoken of, or even unconscious, act of irony that leaks through into the form of the message. One’s intentions may very well be sincere, but a user operating a computer remains a user, a utilitarian, a technician (to use Ellul’s definition), even a consumer; one maintains an understanding that what is digital is not real in the same way that physical objects are, even if this understanding isn’t consciously engaged with or even recognized. As a result, our interactions online lack more than just physicality: in gaining this ironic sense, they in turn lack an element of reality. They are alienated.

This is the impermanence spoken of above. In centuries past, letters were considered impermanent because of their form and content, but this impermanence was incidental, a matter of course rather than something baked into their intention. Digital communication, however, turns toward the opposite; chatlogs, although permanently and remotely stored (in the case of Discord), aren’t treated as permanent records that can be cross-indexed by their senders and readers, or cataloged and placed into reference collections for future generations. The same can be said for e-mails. Forums, to some degree, come closer to this notion of permanence, but the limits of technological hardware and bandwidth present challenges to the longevity of such digital correspondence. This same limitation can also be leveled at any other digital archival attempt.

Yet the abundance of this media and correspondence continues to grow at astounding rates. There is an unending supply of it brought into existence and seemingly no end to it. Users are warned about what to say online due to surveillance laws or data harvesting, both of which indicate some element of permanence to their correspondence, and yet this permanence has no intuitive meaning to them because most of the time, they engage in these forms of digital correspondence with nothing particularly meaningful being said. In past days, however, the physical evidence of that correspondence rebutted the ephemera of its content; now, one closes a chat window or navigates away from an inbox and it’s as if the correspondence hadn’t even happened.

The data accumulates somewhere, in theory, but such record-keepers today are in no way similar to the gatherers of history in days past.

Xeroxing History into an Eternal Now

When the same document is photocopied, and then that is photocopied, and then that is, and so on, the errors in the resulting photocopies compound until the text becomes unreadable. A similar phenomenon can be observed with consumer media, or any other form of entertainment made with the underlying assumption that it is to be used and then disposed of. One is tempted here to draw comparisons or reference to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, to the simulacrum of reality, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.”³

Hyperreality entails the imagery of reality overwritten by so many referents to itself that the individual finds himself alienated from any sense of authenticity or meaning. Symbols cease to refer to real concepts but rather to the tangled web of other symbols. As a result, action ceases to serve its obvious purposes and is instead motivated by the fulfillment of confused third-order causes; consider actions undertaken purely for the purpose of gaining fame, but without any other purpose beyond that, such as to promote a cause or product, or even to satisfy some personal narcissism: fame purely for the sake of fame.

But xeroxing an image over and over again does not just degrade the image’s quality over time. It produces reams of copies in the process, boxes of copies, copies upon copies, a proliferation heaped upon itself. This is the proliferation of junk information. In this modern digital age, if the hyperreal is to be considered a valid idea at all, its components are these massive piles of derivative junk objects, junk media, junk widgets. Rather than a map that has overlaid all of reality, as Baudrillard analogized, it is more fitting today to consider hundreds—billions—of small, poor imitations of local maps piled so high and copied so much that they form indiscernible mountains of paper.

To return to the point, the shift in written correspondence from physical letters to digital media creates such a social and psychological landscape. The use of paper in the analogy might come across as ironic or self-defeating, but the notion of things copied into irrelevance is the important part, here. It’s not even information that is copied either, necessarily, but forms of it, aspects of it, habits of its generation. The incidental nature of letters collapsed when the last semblance of their permanence was flattened even further into digital bits; now that correspondence is even easier, even more incidental, even more haphazard, the act of correspondence itself threatens more than ever to be self-effacing, self-indulgent, an act motivated less by some form of interest in contacting another person and more done as an attempt by an alienated soul to assert itself independently of whomever or whatever he seeks correspondence with. Lost and adrift in a sea of totally impermanent data, he stumbles around the stacks of junk unable to sift through any of it to find anything real.

This phenomenon attacks the man at the moment, but this piece opened with considerations of the man of the future looking back for some evidence to archaeologize. An alienated people offer little in the way of anything concrete by which they can be remembered; only their trash and junk will remain as the permanent markers of their existences. The condition of postmodernity urgently defies this due to the neuroses it spawns in the minds of its adherents. It seems only appropriate, natural even, that the digital revolution would occur in a period with exactly such social conditions.

Conclusion

Technology, brought about by an embrace of technique, society’s pursuit of ever increasing efficiency, in turn brought about mass production and the mass market. Not coincidentally, this shift in approach brought about changes in interpersonal relations and communication, which of particular note here regarded correspondence. It would not be until the digital age, however, that these changes would be evident enough to be seen with a mere glance.

This is about more than the mass proliferation of slop. This has been an attempt to define and illustrate what such a mass proliferation of easily-accessible, easily-transferable information does to the mind and soul; with regard to correspondence, the written language degrades and correspondence itself becomes another mirror for the modern mind, painting over the attempt to establish communication with lenses of unintended self-reflexive irony and self-awareness. The nature of digital media prohibits this correspondence from being rooted in something tangible and thus more identifiable.

The dissolution of this permanence detached man from history; without a memory bound to a physical object, such as a tangible letter, he is less inclined to position himself with relation to the past and, necessarily, the future. Instead, aided today by the digital media of social platforms and high volume/low content information spectacles, his experience is reduced to an eternal and unending but equally unstable Now: a present from which there seems hardly any escape. Trapped in that eternal Now, one cannot look forward to a future, which is just the same Now prolonged in time and forced to wait for, nor into the past, which has no objects to evoke its memory and which, by means of the memory, comes across as the same Now recalled only as a phantom on the intellect.

It is much easier to recognize this distinction today, where the internet makes possible nearly-instantaneous communication across billions of devices worldwide. As access to and generation of information eases, more people in turn use these technologies, and at increasing rates, from other countries where knowledge of English is even lower than it is for native speakers. This, coupled with the inundation of LLM bots and artificially generated ‘discourse’ (comments, microblogs, even messages), has degraded the colloquial written word even further.

On one hand, it is tempting to fall back into a habit of browbeating those who either lack the ability to discern the slop from the good, or those simply too lazy and unwilling to do so. The tactical purpose of the browbeating, one presumes, is to serve as a form of social ribbing: guardrails that, in the interest of staying convenient and out of the way—‘in one’s lane’ or some such other phrase—these types would at least adopt some semblance of taste if only out of social obligation. This tactic only works when a relative majority of the culture actually affirms the desired taste, and it serves only to maintain this status quo rather than to overturn it.

As this applies to correspondence, it seems ill-fitting to simply insist that one ceases using digital correspondence altogether, and one would be shouting at a wall if he demanded of the average internet denizen the self-restraint to write coherently and dispense with internet lingo. On the other hand, some awareness of what internet correspondence actually is seems a fitting middle ground.

Despite how it may have come across, Jacques Ellul was quite optimistic about the society of technique back in 1954. The Technological Society highlighted the problems and errors of technique as it had been implemented at the time, and to some extent, it projected and predicted accurately how it would continue to be implemented in its coming decades. Ellul, however, perhaps owing to his Christian anarchism, considered technique to be a means by which man might free himself from the alienation it apparently causes.

At the risk of redundancy, Ellul’s hope seemed wildly misplaced and the seventy years that have passed since his initial work on the subject came out has seemed to prove this. The advent and subsequent domination of a World Wide Web only exacerbated the encroachment of technique upon the rest of society, gluing mass communication to an ethos of optimization, usually at the expense of anything else.

This trend is not reversing, nor, given the nature of digital media, is it likely to ever do so. It is possible that the proliferation of AI slop and the hollowing out of the megalithic social media platforms may cause some schism in users that could lead some to similar conclusions, however. AI and LLM technology are making plainly apparent the flaws in the digital society of content creation and the means by which digital correspondence were engaged with over the past twenty years. Those that recognize these flaws should be encouraged to adjust, even if only subtly, how they perform with their content or how they engage with it. It’s unlikely to be a majority of such users, in part because of how chained to the algorithm many of them are, even if unknowingly. But it’s certain to be at least some.

1Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 4.

2Ellul, 79-80.

3Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.

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