A shortwave radio message from the last man on Earth

Communications are fragmenting, becoming more unreliable and untrustworthy. Social media has disintegrated. The epistemic crisis of default mistrust around news media is only just beginning. Smartphones - tracking and spy devices to facilitate over-consumption and social control via the trickery of surveillance capitalism - have almost nothing to do with "connecting people". When was the last time you took a call from an unknown number?

We're redefining communications as a network of semi-autonomous, unreliable or even hostile cybernetic systems in which humans are an undesirable component.

Olduvai theory may be correct, and we've passed some sort of local peak-technology. I guess I should be pleased that my lifetime centred on those golden years. On the other hand maybe that's a complete illusion and (if we ignore things like economics and measurable factors) Adams' Rules For Technology mean that everyone experiences technology this way.

I sent my first 'email' in 1983 or thereabouts, on a Model 43 Teletype hooked up to a 2400 baud modem and BBC micro. We had a cool computer science teacher Mr. Seal who wrote books using "desktop publishing" and had 'connections at Cheltenham', which meant my class got exposed to ideas many, many years before most people, including cryptography in our maths classes! Reflecting now, it probably wasn't even an RFC-822 based message system, nore likely part of some sort of "time-sharing" BBS system. Amusingly, the only people we could send messages to were other class members. You typed the message, hit return, then logged out. The next classmate logged-in and 5 seconds later the TTY burst into life and noisily printed the same message on the same paper just below the previous, but with the "to" and "from" fields now changed. Which kinda spoiled the magic. "What's the point in that sir?", asked one of the kids. I remember walking out of that lesson sensing amused disappointment in the air, and wondering if I was the only one who'd made the excited leap of imagination to how useful that could be if we'd had two of them in different places!

Phones in the 1980s were amazing. None of that shouting "Hello, hello, can you hear me…!!?" into the handset like today, or in the 1870s when phones had just been invented. The phone book (yes there was a book about it - but they never made the film) was amazing too. Imagine a list of all the people with telephones, and their addresses, delivered to your house for free each year. If you were a bored 8 year-old you and your mates could just call up random people with funny names to take the piss. "Hello, is that Mr. Issac Hiscock speaking?". If you knew someone's name, but they lived in some unpronounceable village in the Scottish Highlands, you could call the "operator" and a lady like Father Ted's Mrs Doyle would be gratingly over-helpful for a good half an hour. When the mains power went off, as it did frequently in the Winter of Discontent, we sat around by the light of oil-lamps and called everyone to ask if they still had power. That's right, the phones worked independently of the main power in case of some sort of civil emergency… like ehm… all the electricity going off.

For an astonishing insight into the culture of telephones during an earlier local technological high-point in the 1930s, read Ursula Franklin's Real World Of Technology ¹

So, what we see with the telephone is not a singular technology that linearly evolved upwards, rather a series of cultural shifts that have highs and lows as technologies change, not always toward better things. The same true of later communication technology.

Today E-mail, at least vis-a-vis US American Big Tech, is dying on its arse. In the first quarter of this century I've noticed that when technologies decline people are generally in denial. We get attached to technology. People go through all manner of angry mental gymnastics to avoid acknowledging the reality of their pet dying. It took a long time for people to admit that MySpace was fading and becoming Facebook, or that Google search was terminally sick.

Email has been faltering for a few years. Yet email is a kind of modern postal service. It has a semi-official, legal status, as assumed infrastructure. Whereas in Britain you could once rely on the Royal Mail as a "legally guaranteed" conveyance, we more or less reached a point where large firms would hire, fire, instruct and pay employees entirely by email - at least until the pandemic. Indeed, given Denmark's abandonment of physical postal services, one senses a kind of Atlas shrugging, nation states abdicating their commitment to common infrastructural technology.

We're regressing to a technologically multi-polar world. A century of communications technology has produced no single, simple, reliable, universal, interoperable message format. The closest thing is probably the plain ASCII text I am typing into this HTTP "web" system (with the obvious drawback that it is simplex (one directional - you cannot reply)). Should any of the 6 or 7 people who read this wish to, they could reply by email… but here's the problem;

First you'll have to find the address to send it to. Oh for the days when you could just publish an email address! Even the mildest obfuscation against "AI" spammer bots also thwarts the average human. All of the world's digital communications have a serious and growing discoverability problem. This is partly the social cooling Tijmen Schep named, but other factors are at play.

I've noticed a little of late that some people are trying to make themselves more contactable again. Mainly it's professionals, small businesses, podcasters and bloggers who run small independent websites and have realised WhatsApp, Twitter (or whatever the Nazi guy calls it now) is just tawdry. Serious professionals have email with their own domain.

But still, to be public, to be contactable brings up ambivalent need and repulsion; Greta Garbo's "Just being alone!" or Mark E. Smith's "Sex while not having it" (What You Need). Hiding in a walled garden won't help. Those beastly hooligans that made Percy Thrower cry will still come and pour motor-oil into the pond of your Blue Peter garden.

Institutions are not foxholes either. Academics traditionally had tilde (home) web directories and published their email address there. Universities started to prohibit that, to "protect" academics. From about 2010 to 2020 you pretty much had to guess an academic email according to some first.lastname@institute pattern. People even started redacting their addresses in published papers. Eventually it seems researchers got fed-up and frustrated at not being contactable - by other researchers, thus debasing the whole edifice of "science as community" - so the tide has turned again.

So let's say you can find the email address you want. The chances of your message getting there are slimmer every day. Email is a best effort protocol. Sometimes messages get through. Sometimes not. Maybe today but not tomorrow.

If you enjoy the full time hobby of running your own mail server, you get to see the codes, the headers, the bounces, the timeouts, and spend days and nights tweaking SPF, DMARC, IP and DNS settings. But it remains voodoo. It depends on what the algorithms at Google or Microsoft are doing that day and it's clear that whatever your efforts toward reputable mail operation delivery is no longer "neutral", but depends on:

• message content
• timing
• number of recipients
• who you are sending to
• geopolitical events

Is it still a secret or disputed that Big Tech read and censor email for commercial or political influence reasons?

Further, fundamentally, senders never know whether messages get through or not. This is arguably a good thing. If you've any sense of privacy and security you turn off HTML, image links and other 'delivery tracking' methods that are invariably abused. But add highly unreliable transport into the mix and that becomes a huge problem.

Unused email accounts are not deleted by Big Tech providers. They are a rich source of intelligence to harvest over many decades. In the 1990s people set up dozens of email accounts which they abandoned. I've no idea how many old friends might have tried to contact me on dead email accounts over the years. How many of them assumed I was being rude or didn't want to reply? For everyone, how many missed opportunities and misunderstandings have precarious, half-baked email systems caused in the world?

Something we no longer teach children at school, but absolutely should, is that with all digital communications it must be your default assumption messages were not delivered and read, unless there's clear evidence otherwise.

Delivery often depends on "reputation". But sender reputation has become a tangled tar-pit of spam countermeasures, none of which work. Most of the spam I get comes from the USA, specifically from Gmail or MS/Hotmail accounts with high IP reputations, SPF and DMARC credentials all in order. It's time to abandon the whole, ineffective clown-assery of reputation policing that Big Tech has evidently failed at. If Google and Microsoft can't make it work, because commercial bot farmers just buy the reputation they need, the whole idea is dead.

Even funnier is now you can't rely on supposedly reputable Big Tech providers to talk to each other. They're all breaking the basic standards that made email a universal tool. Whether fastmail talks to gmail, or gmx talks to proton, or hotmail talks to tuta, is anyone's bloody guess! I'm regularly in a situation needing two or more email accounts to correspond with a person, asking them to send using one system but reply using the other address.

That's actually not entirely silly craft if you want privacy, by the way. If an adversary can only read one side of your conversation they're less dangerous. Which is a good reason not to lazily top-post the entire message history. Send something via Signal on the phone, get a reply by WhatsApp on the tablet, respond by email on your desktop and get the next response by SMS - it's very unlikely any adversary has compromised all the channels and endpoint devices.

Splitting messages, for example sending parts of a password via two or more channels is effective security. We call this "multi-factor" and use it in some authentication schemas. Using multiple channels will become more commonplace as deep-fake technology grows. "Are you really calling me right now?" may become a common SMS or IM message to verify voice calls.

Different channels are needed not just for different media types - video, audio, text - but also for different bandwidths and tariffs. Tech savvy people know not to use their 4/5G mobile data to send photos, video and music, but to use WiFi and a separate messenger application. Sites like Dropbox and WeSendIt became popular because of limits on email attachments. A very good investment is to simply buy your own web space with a few gigabytes of WebDav so you can transfer files by sending a link. But companies like Facebook block links "for your security" (actually to keep you in the walled garden), so how you send things also matters. Sometimes people send important links that just disappear from social media. Don't assume all parts of your message got through.

Indeed message integrity is going to become a serious issue going forward - because of the normalisation of "AI" manipulation. Without true end-to-end encryption (the sort that bad governments and big business really doesn't want you to have), anyone who routes your message is free to alter it. It's why we added TLS to the web; to stop Eve from changing the bank account number that Alice sees when shopping on Bob's e-commerce site.

In future, expect to have the semantics of your "summarised" and "filtered" messages changed. What starts with removing f**king bad language - to "protect the children" - ends with the names of political parties and public figures transforming, love turning to hate, and liberal Europe turning to Communist China.

As this communications salad is getting more commonplace, dealing with the complexity of it is draining. Dealing with any coms that go through US BigTech now means a great deal of uncertainty and sometimes needing two or three messages sent in parallel, hoping that one of them gets through.

How often have you had a message saying "check your email/less-used-coms, I sent you something"?

There is plenty of hope for the future.

Fragmentation of function mustn't be confused with fragmentation of operation.

Communications are fragmented and broken now because they're run centrally by a few too-powerful monopolists whose ambitions are at odds with the people.

Returning to a highly distributed, individually governed but inter-operating global set of nodes is exactly how the Internet was designed. In the 1970s DARPA built a Fascist-proof network and because of that it's now more valuable to real Americans than ever in 2026!

The enduring problem is that the average person doesn't know how to run an Internet host. ISPs broke that with asymmetrical DSL links, cheaping out on IPv4 addresses, and blocking stuff that's none of their damned business. Hosting providers, while competitive and cheap never really mastered the all-in-one self-hosted package, though One And One had a fair stab at it back when they were good.

That is going to change for political reasons.

I'm stopping sending email to MS and Gmail users and gradually telling people in my network to find alternatives if they want to keep in touch. I'm not alone, and that's why the courage to take the plunge is finally there.

The baton for leadership of a liberal Internet is passing to Europe, along with an opportunity to revert back toward the original DARPA vision of Internet before it became a projection of US hegemony after the 1980s. To move away from centralised implementation and control, and seed massive grass-roots tech innovation in the UK and Europe, will become an emergency imperative as US-Europe relations disintegrate. We call this digital sovereignty.

Sir Tim is a strong proponent of the self-ownership model that other computer scientists, myself included, have advocated for decades. It's not clear yet how we can replace email and social media entirely with modern sovereign versions. But the seeds are sown and growing strong. The political schism between the old US Big Tech and European projects for private, sovereign technology only helps us to progress.

My generation's Internet is going to die. But that's okay. The long night of Big Tech is turning to the dawn of a Post-American internet.