The Singularity is Post-Privacy - by Hollis Robbins

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The Singularity is Post-Privacy<br>The medium eats the message

Hollis Robbins<br>Aug 22, 2026

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You owe your belief that your mail is private, that no one should read it without your permission, to a British schoolteacher named Rowland Hill, whose 1837 pamphlet, Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, changed mail forever. Even your vague trust that your electronic mail (texts, Signal chats, email) is private, you owe to Hill, because even your Signal chats bear the traces of his policy of prepaid anonymity.1<br>Hill saw postal delivery as wasteful and expensive. The price varied, depending on distance and number of sheets, and it was paid by the recipient, who could just refuse to accept. Hill began collecting sad stories of failure: urgent letters sitting for weeks at the postmaster’s, parents pawning clothes to pay for a letter from a child.2 Instead, Hill proposed, why not have the sender pay in advance, a flat rate, with a stamp (one penny). Parliament liked the idea and this is how the mail has worked since January 10, 1840 (though the price of stamps has naturally gone up).<br>As Hill predicted, everyone started sending letters, now that it was affordable. Mail volume doubled in the first year, from about 76 million to about 169 million. Volume passed 300 million by 1850 and kept climbing for a century and a half, peaking in 2004–05 at about twenty billion a year. It is about seven billion now. The US adopted pre-paid stamped mail in 1847.<br>More importantly your mail was now private. Under the old system, clerks counted sheets to figure the price, which meant handling and close inspection. An envelope counted as a sheet of paper, so most people folded their letters and sealed them with wax. In 1845 Hill’s brother Edwin, with a stationer named Warren De La Rue, patented an envelope-folding machine. By the end of the decade in the US and the UK everyone was using envelopes (which are officially called “covers”).<br>The envelope, or cover, gave you the presumption of privacy, legally. In the US, the Post Office Act of 1792 had already forbidden postal officials to open letters except when they couldn’t be delivered. In 1878 the Supreme Court included the sealed letter under the Fourth Amendment. Ex parte Jackson held that letters and sealed packages could only be opened with a warrant.<br>An honor code that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” as Secretary of State Henry Stimson put it, followed. (His 1948 book is not bad; maybe Stripe Press should take a look.) Everybody bought into the privacy idea, especially postal carriers who took pride in being indifferent to what they carried.<br>Along with privacy came a kind of individuation, as the philosopher Kenneth Burke noted. An address (a name, a street and number, a city, a state) differentiated every individual by design. If a correctly addressed letter went astray, the postal machinery was at fault.<br>In 1948 Claude Shannon described a communication system mathematically as a source, a channel, and a destination. The channel’s only duty is to reproduce at the destination the symbols handed to it at the source. Formally, the channel ignores the meaning of the message on it, despite what Marshall McLuhan says.<br>Enter email, designed with the same structure. RFC 821, Jon Postel’s 1982 specification for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, separates the routing from the content: MAIL FROM and RCPT TO carry the addresses, servers route on those alone, and DATA (the headers and body, the letter inside) passes through without anyone or anything reading it. Postel’s document doesn’t use the term envelope but David Crocker’s companion standard, RFC 822, does in its format specification dividing every message into an envelope and contents. The envelope is used by the transport agents; the addressee gets the contents (DATA). All the interface terms are familiar: mailbox, inbox, forward, carbon copy, an icon of a sealed letter, a chime announcing mail.<br>Everyone sent email like they sent mail: candidly, embarrassingly, filled with gossip, complaints, things a spouse isn’t supposed to know about, dirty jokes. The privacy of email seems to be just as sacred. Congress had extended wiretap protection to electronic mail early, in 1986, on the theory that a message in transit was like a letter in transit.3 A system administrator could read your mail but was not supposed to. Such invasions of privacy became firing and disciplinary offenses.<br>Email feels personal and private to people. It works 99% of the time, unless someone’s bulk email list is wrong. You don’t get email that isn’t yours. Your address is a string: local part, @, domain. Some people have had the same address now for decades.<br>But very early on came the junk mail problem. In August 2002 Paul Graham published “A Plan for Spam,” and within two years the presumption of email privacy ended. Most people have no idea about...