How I lost the paper war
Some years ago I worked on project for Wells Fargo Bank that was going to revolutionize how people pay their bills. I poured over architectural diagrams and specs for systems to let a customer pay their bills automatically from a checking account. We called it Electronic Bill Pay.
No more paper
No more stamps
Ditch your checks and become a champ! *
* Credit AI for every awful rhyme in this piece.
Never heard of EBP?! Possibly it failed under the burden of that supremely unsexy name and corresponding lack of marketing. It still bumps around in the dark, updated to the only slightly less unsexy Online Bill Pay. Don’t click that! It’s garbage.
Then PayPal hit. Soon after we got Venmo, then Cash App and yeah finally the big banks caught on and a few years ago we got Zelle. You’ve heard of at least a few of those right? If you’re a small business you best know about Square and Shopify. If you’re on Substack you know all about Stripe.
So, the technology was there to revolutionize payments, but turning it into something that society would pick up in place of scaled established procedures and habits - well that’s hard and unpredictable. It didn’t help that we hadn’t invented smart phones yet - the piece of tech that lit up the rest.
Stick a pin in this thought, we’re going to come back to it.
Motivated by my prior attempts, I’ve been on a crusade lo these past five years to rid my life of paper. Shit got serious when we moved. Mountains of paper were shredded, every single statement moved to email, every payment switched to ACH/Zelle or plastic or PayPal/Venmo. Everyday the mailman didn’t stop at my house was as a victory in the war.
No more mail
No more fees
Ditch paper statements, embrace digital ease! *
Then my parents up and died. The nerve. The subsequent attack of paper was unexpected, swift and unrelenting. Stacks and stacks of paper piled up across my previously pristine desk. Under the monitor, behind the monitor, boxes under the desk. Lawyers are paper generating machines. Same with doctors and coroners and pension plans and real estate agents. The mailman got busy. So much mail.
The other day I had to mail in a 10 page form (hand printed, no PDF!) complete with death certificates and notarized trust documents and then I had to get a notary to come out to notarize the already notarized stack for good measure. Thanks CalPERS, I hate you.
I’m almost caught up. The piles are shrinking. In my head as well as on my desk. But yeah, as much as we aspired to abolish paper some years ago - no, not quite.
I bet you wrangled through a good bit of paper this week to vote right? How about checks? I tried to get rid of our checkbook but no, somehow we still write and deposit plenty of checks. The dogwalker, the gardener, the IRS, sigh.
I put the word digital in my business because I make stuff online. Wirepine Digital, not Wirepine physical dammit! Websites are easy to change, simple to update, no paper needed, nothing to file. But my clients need paper; heck my business needs paper. Early on, I figured out I needed some business cards to hand out.
Since then I’ve made a lot more cards, banners, fliers, stickers, merch! I admit, it’s fun. Had a shot at some wine labels and I confess I ran screaming from that one - detailed printing is complicated and takes special skills and tools.
I can print anything my customers need now and and this week I did a new thing - car magnet. They say you can get 30,000 impressions a day for your business just driving around 👀
Now that’s a BIG printer!
So, I’ve welcomed paper back into my life. While I might prefer digital, paper and I have made up - not only are we on good terms but I have a newfound appreciation. There is a sweet sensation in paper products. Books have a warmth not found in Kindles. I love leafing through a comic book, writing or drawing in bound journals and putting prints up on my walls.
Just please, please no more stacks of paper on my desk.
Stacks of paper lie.
Dreams forgotten, they sigh.
Silent beneath the sky. *
Circling back to the tech outcomes train of thought we put a pin in before. AI is not going to put any poets out of business, but it is going to change up a lot of things. Like my fruitless war on paper, it’s going to play out in ways we haven’t imagined.
best, Andrew
My own life has a pretty funny relationship with paper. I grew up loving drawing, and of course that meant loving paper to a degree. Paper was, by far, the quickest and most comprehensive way we had to create something cool.
Today, the digital realm is vastly quicker and also vastly more comprehensive, so I think that's why I have gravitated toward the digital and away from the paper over the years. Recently, however, I've rekindled my patience with paper (I won't say my love; that's a bridge too far) since I have come to realize that everything hand written or drawn is suddenly precious and finite.