“[W]e had so many channels and direct messages and group chats. It multiplexed my brain and left me in a constant state of anxiety, feeling that I needed to always be on guard,” he wrote. “And I had to read everything. I felt that I had no choice as often decisions would be made in Slack that I needed to know. And in other ways it was simply an addiction that needed to be fed.” Then, when a colleague asked him if something was up—noting that Teare seemed “much more angry” lately, things came to a head.

This made me realize that our use of Slack was even more destructive than I had realized. The time pressures forced me to be curt and I avoided taking the time to be playful. Worse, since I was in a constant state of heighten[ed] anxiety, I often wouldn’t feel like being playful to begin with. I had always evaluated Slack from the point of view of “Does it make me more productive?” and “Does it help my team ship a better product?”. I had never considered the more important question “Does Slack make me look and feel like a dick?”

Slack, for its part, has tried to mitigate against the kind of anxiety Teare and others have described. People can decide how many separate groups to participate in, or how robust their notification settings are. Slack also created a do-not-disturb feature, so that after-hours messages can be sent—but won’t pop up on someone’s phone until they choose. Weirdly, this makes the experience of “checking Slack” more like email than anything else. Maybe that’s fitting: Many of the problems people attribute to Slack—that it naturally encourages round-the-clock attention to work, that it prompts people to be terse—are merely extensions of email culture. Which is another reason why the popularity of Slack and its peers is doomed, says Rebecca Greenfield, the Bloomberg reporter: “As it did with e-mail, though, our love of group chat will eventually morph into loathing.”

That may be true, culturally speaking, but individual relationships with technology are often more of a reflection of the anxieties and expectations a person brings to the technology—and not the other way around. The widespread obsession with reaching inbox zero, the late email pioneer Raymond Tomlinson once told me, is obviously a “human feature,” not a technological one. “Email does not produce guilt,” he said.

In my mind, Slack’s true cultural downfall won’t come from the way it’s bleeding into the love-hate-but-mostly-hate space that email occupies, but from the first major hacking incident. Most professionals, by now, understand that it isn’t prudent to put anything in an email that you’d be horrified to see splashed across the front page of The New York Times. (People may not always follow this rule, but that’s another story.)

But the culture of Slack in many workplaces is still relaxed, playful, and collegial—part-watercooler, part-business meeting. That’s likely to change in the event of a substantial leak of otherwise private Slack conversations. (Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s CEO, assured me his team is doing everything in its power to make sure Slack is never hacked. “We think about it all the time,” he told me when we last spoke, in November.) Part of the reason email stopped seeming fun is because the novelty wore off; and that’s because professional standards sucked the fun out of it. Slack may always have custom emoji, but if people stop using the platform for some degree of silliness and candor, it’s likely to lose much of its charm.

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