When the Senders Are Machines

An agent emailed me recently. The message was ordinary enough; I hesitated because I did not know what social convention applied. Was a person using software to contact me, or had software decided to make the approach on their behalf?

With one message, I could take time to work that out. With ten thousand, that uncertainty becomes part of the design problem. Someone has to decide which requests reach me, and on what terms.

My capacity to evaluate requests is finite. Artificial senders can produce messages, follow-ups, and new identities much faster than I can read them. An inbox under that pressure becomes a system for allocating attention.

Herbert Simon had a name for the scarcity long before machine senders arrived:

“a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”

— Herbert A. Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971), pp. 40–41

The inbox makes his point personal. Every additional message asks for a little of the same morning.

The first proposed simulation would give a recipient a budget of fifty messages per day. Begin with one hundred senders, then increase the population to one thousand and ten thousand while keeping the reading budget fixed. Give the senders a mixture of useful, irrelevant, and opportunistic requests. Let them adapt their messages in response to what gets opened or answered.

I would track the share of useful requests that reach the recipient, the time spent evaluating them, and the effort senders devote to gaining access. Those measures would distinguish simple overload from a channel that rewards persistence or manipulation over usefulness.

A further run could let the recipient use an intermediary to screen messages. That might reduce the reading burden, but it would also give the intermediary influence over who gets heard. The inbox offers a familiar setting in which to study how a communication problem becomes an institutional one.