AMP for Email

Google recently unveiled a set of proposed upgrades to email. For New York Magazine’s tech section, I wrote about where it went wrong – most notably, that it should not be possible to “unveil” upgrades to a standardized communication platform in the first place.

The biggest flaw is simply that it can’t reasonably be called version two of email. That isn’t Google’s fault — version two of email doesn’t exist anywhere else either. We aren’t even trying. That is such a profound moral failure that maybe technical failure was also inevitable. And so a lukewarm quasi-open standard pushed by a monopoly interest punts our indefensible collective apathy right into the next generation, deeply broken and silly and misguided but also, embarrassingly enough, still the best we say we can do.

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This is in many ways the spiritual successor to a previous article I wrote about the continued stagnancy of email.