I ordered stamps from the post office online, and sort of accidentally** turned on the USPS Informer, a daily email telling you what’s incoming today. It’s surprisingly detailed, with pictures and text descriptions of each envelope. Today it showed 4 pieces of spam from the Trump cult and one utility bill, pretty much the usual load, and similar to my usual email load.
This level of AI-assisted detail starts to blur the definition of Common Carrier. The concept was always imperfect for postal systems, since the clerks and carriers inevitably noticed what you were receiving, and could report something suspicious. But before this level of automation the images weren’t stored for future reference. Now it’s a lot more like a web platform.
Before full automation there was a distinction between small towns and big cities for both post and phone. The carrier in a big city was impersonal. The postman in a smaller town had time to think and talk with the clients.
Before dials, Mabel always knew who was calling who. In big cities she didn’t know any of the people and didn’t have time to think or listen. In small towns she knew everyone offline and tended to get into the conversations.
= = = = =
** TMI footnote: I’ve been sort of accidentally doing lots of things this summer. Hot weather and short sleep made me impulsive and snap-judging. Some of those impulses led to trouble of various sorts, which could have been avoided in my usual cautious slow-moving mode.
Polistra's Mill 