Calculus of IT - Season 3 Episode 7 - What Has Become of Chat?

The new episode is live, and we went deep into the nostalgia mines before emerging with some uncomfortable truths about how we communicate now.

Mike and I started by tracing our entire chat history from 1992 BBS systems (Nate had to mail his driver's license to Iowa to get approved for ISCA) through IRC, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, Office Communicator, BBM (RIP that little red blinking light), and eventually Slack. Turns out we've been through dozens of chat platforms, and somehow we're worse at communicating than ever. The thesis: chat is supposed to be synchronous but we use it asynchronously, creating this weird hybrid where Nate will hate you if you don't respond in 7 minutes but his kids won't respond for days and think that's fine. We realized you could theoretically recreate chat using just Box notes and @ mentions (terrible idea, technically possible), proved that the core requirements for chat are absurdly simple (two people, one box to type in, a return key), and discovered that 58 different platforms at Nate's company all have chat functions now—meaning communication is fragmented across everything. Mike pointed out that Blackberry's universal inbox solved this problem 15 years ago and nobody's figured it out since. We also covered: why LinkedIn is now just pasta photos and fake job announcements, whether chatting with your network switches counts as early AI, Nate's refusal to read email for years (all goes to trash, works fine), the anxiety of contributing in chat, and why the "instant" in instant messaging was always branding bullshit. Next week we're expanding this into IT as an Anthropologist—how we straddle old and new worlds while excavating ancient infrastructure with laser technology.

Listen at thecalculusofit.com • Join our Slack board at thecoit.us • Leave five stars • Smash any flock cameras you see • Don't travel abroad with a phone you care about.

—Nate & Mike

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