8 ms·
Anyone who thinks the world hasn't gone paperless, really needs to recall how it used to be in the 80s and 90s. - We don't send physical letters in envelopes a
by whack 9y ago
Anyone who thinks the world hasn't gone paperless, really needs to recall how it used to be in the 80s and 90s.
- We don't send physical letters in envelopes anymore, we send emails.
- We don't send documents via fax or courier, we send them digitally.
- We don't apply for jobs by mailing in resumes, we apply online.
- We don't file taxes or other applications using snail mail, we send them online.
- We don't receive statements and invoices in our mailbox, we get them in our inbox.
- We don't send photocopies, we send pictures.
- We don't use checks or even currency notes, we use credit cards.
- We don't read physical newspapers, we read articles online via HN.
- We don't read physical books, we read e-books.
Yes yes, I know people still do some of the above things. But the quantity of paper-use for the above has fallen precipitously, and it's falling even further everyday.
I still use pen-and-paper occasionally to sketch out my thoughts in an unstructured way, and I do like sending letters as a gesture of my extended effort. But for any kind of business dealing or inter-person interaction, paper is on life-support, and is going to be DOA in another decade or two. And everytime I think of paper statements and requests for photocopies to be mailed in, all I can say is good riddance.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lucideer 9y ago> paper is on life-support, and is going to be DOA in another decade or two. I'm not sure what the indicators of this would be, for or against, but extrapolating the current trend to zero seems premature. I can see paper use continuing it's rapid decline, but I genuinely believe it will plateau at a relatively high level. I think paper will always have it's place, in some fashion.
- lgas 9y agoWhy do you believe this? I can't imagine paper being used for things like documents or communication 100 years from now at all. I could imagine it still being used for arts but if there aren't other widespread uses for it then it will probably be rare enough to be pretty expensive for artistic usage. I'm also not convinced all that many people will even want to use it for artistic purposes when, by then, you'll have things Google's Tilt Brush but with 100 years of advances on top of it.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoBecause not everybody will be plugged into a 100% electronic society and will need paper for documentation and exchange of goods. At the very least we're still going to need toilet paper and cardboard boxes.
- jacobolus 9y agoPaper is an incredibly versatile tool: 1. You can cut, tear, fold, roll, crumple, burn, sew, staple, glue, laminate, etc. it, including sticking found objects to it, wrapping things with it, making it into 3-dimensional structures, ... 2. It comes in a wide variety of colors, textures, thicknesses, and sizes – if you want you can cover your whole wall with one piece of paper. Some paper is translucent and can be used for tracing. 3. You can draw/write/paint over it with a wide variety of substances with a wide variety of appearances. You can fit visible information more densely on paper than pretty much any other available medium. 4. There are many nice tools for interacting with paper, such as rulers, compasses, french curves, pantographs, planimeters, ... You never run into a case where two drawing tools can’t be used together because they run different operating systems. 5. You can easily make physical copies of electronic documents and images onto paper, easily manipulate paper documents, easily copy paper documents from one piece of paper to another, and easily put paper documents back into digital form. 6. It’s incredibly cheap. 7. The right kinds of paper stored properly last a really really long time (centuries if not millennia). 8. It is light and portable, can be stuck up pretty much anywhere. 9. It requires no batteries, no legacy systems, no software updates, no expensive equipment, no special training, .... 10. It is its own concrete physical record, which can be effectively checked for tampering and made difficult to forge at scale. (Hence use for money, ballots, contracts, titles, ...)
- DonHopkins 9y agoThen at least paper-less, if not paperless.
- dabbledash 9y agoYet I still receive piles of garbage in the mail
- TnuoccApmet 9y agoThe reason why papyer is here and here to stay - is the frailty that software has shown again and again. Paper survies the absence of humans, software and devices dont. Operating systems decay, reading software and devices wither away, the revenue stream drys up and soon a whole eco-system decays from a oasis of data back to the dust it came. We know how frail and vurnerable the whole affair is, deep down. That is why we use ink to sign important contracts, that is why we store copys at seperat places. We would burn them in clay so they outloast us, if we still had a comfortable way to do so. There is a market for durable softare there, for durable hardware, for the guarantee to withstand times tests. But in the end, it would be a lot- like paper made from sand.
- m_mueller 9y agoAlternatively you could step into a time machine, i.e. a flight to Japan (where pretty much your whole list is still standard, just replace paper mail with fax in some cases).
- irrational 9y agoWe don't play board games anymore, we play video games. Except... this isn't true. Right now is considered the golden age of board games. Just this past year somewhere between 3000 and 4000 new board games were released. Every one of these use paper in abundance.
- ashark 9y agoAnecdata, but my circle of friends spend about 20x as much time playing board and card (we're just getting into Bridge and... we may not need any other card games now?) games together as we do board games. Probably more like 40-50x if you count pen & paper RPGs. Our digital gaming is all solo stuff. If we play video games together it's almost always local coop, and probably "classic"—something on Gamecube (I assume Double Dash is considered "classic" by now), the Perfect Dark HD update on the XBox360, that kind of thing. We're technically Millennials (though early ones). I went to my first convention this year (with one other person from same circle of friends) and it was for board games. It was social, it was fun, every single person I met there was awesome. I'll probably go to the same one next year. I'd never go to a video game con, however much I like video games.
- mindslight 9y agoTry settling an estate - 7 out of 9 on your list.
- pishpash 9y agoIf one's life is at all realistic, the statement that paper will be gone is laughable. - Sent mail for something requiring physical proof and evidence of delivery like court related correspondence. - Sent fax to financial institution demanding medallion signature; they have an app but didn't work. - Not for a job but for applying for credit, had to send in identifying information via mail. - Any tax situation that is slightly complicated involves forms not available for eFile, guess what, paper forms. - Still get tax forms in mail, it's a paper trail that won't disappear in 1, 2, 7, or 10 years and then have to pay $25 to retrieve; plus long-term safe, secure storage of readable data is difficult. - Not sure what the difference is here; photocopiers are scanners. - Still use checks for rent because landlords don't care to be raped by processor fees. - Hotel sends paper WSJ and USA Today every day. - Physical books, especially textbooks, are everywhere since eReaders can't render math worth sh*t; nobody reads anything serious, e.g. academic literature on eReaders, so it's print and mark up. Paper is far from dead since there is no replacement for some of these things or the replacement is worse or expensive.
- PurpleRamen 9y agoFor complex ebooks tablets are good to use. Similar for comics, which might be the main reason many students have them in the first place.
- khedoros1 9y agoEbooks are great on tablets (especially the 7" ones). I've never enjoyed reading comics on even a larger tablet. I've got a bunch of electronic graphic novels that I've been putting off reading, because I'm not looking forward to dealing with the tablet.
- uiri 9y agoI'm probably younger than you are - I don't really remember the 80s nor much of anything in the 90s - and I have probably done half of the things on your list on paper within the last year. Some of those are by choice and some are by necessity. This doesn't invalidate your point but I think that you will be surprised in a decade or two just how much stuff is actually still done on paper. Electronic statements are particularly nasty because the bank might make records older than 24 or 36 months inaccessible and then charge you to retrieve them unless you thought ahead to download your statement PDF each month. Not that that has stopped me from going paperless for day-to-day things but I am rather fond of collecting and filing tax forms on paper.
- ttflee 9y agoWe email them resumes and they got the attachment printed so that their managers could draw circles and lines on it, with a pen.
- mdpopescu 9y agoSure, paper is still used for temporary stuff, like taking notes. However, for long-term use I prefer electronic storage - way easier to search. (Almost all my Visual Studio projects, for example, have a "notes.txt" file containing TODOs or general observations.)
- closeparen 9y agoWhy would anyone e-file their taxes? It's at least $25 for the most basic e-filing software, or 49 cents to drop in the mail.
- nickonline 9y agoThere are more countries than America. I do it each year for free.
- rimliu 9y agoYup. There you do it in your browser, which is free.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- geomark 9y agoAssuming you are referring to filing taxes in the US, and you live in the US, that may be true. But there are an estimated 9 million US citizens living abroad many of whom probably find it a lot safer and more convenient to file electronically even though it might cost more.
- Amezarak 9y agoI have been e-filing state and federal free for years.
- nofilter 9y agoI love how lots of people here assume America is the only land in the world. Most European countries have had online taxing for ages now at a cost of 0.
- verall 9y agoAnyone in the US who makes under $64k can e-file for free[0] https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
- 9y ago
- gozur88 9y ago>We don't send documents via fax or courier, we send them digitally. We still send messages via fax, because a document you sign and send by email isn't a legally signed document, wheras a fax is. I had to print out a PDF, sign it, and and fax it a week ago for this reason.
- craigds 9y agoIs that true? In NZ a digital signature is a legal signature. You dont have to print and scan it, just type your name. Legit signed.
- pishpash 9y agoFor acknowledgement of disclosure this is done or sometimes for vouching for truthfulness. These seem like relieving another party of liability. But for giving up rights and such, I haven't seen that (typing a name) being sufficient. There is technology to do true cryptographic digital signatures (not these fake "digital" signatures), but society doesn't seem particularly interested in that at the moment.
- gozur88 9y agoThere seemed to be a movement in that direction a few years back, but I haven't seen anything in awhile.
- nofilter 9y agoIn Estonia, an email is a legally signed document. We also have Digital Signatures via our Electronic IDs. You must live in a third world country, because I haven't even seen a fax machine in the past 15 years.
- gozur88 9y agoEstonia must be a veritable progressive paradise. For thieves.
- vadimberman 9y agoExcellent points. It just takes time. Just like with the "job-stealing automation", despite the hysteria in the press. These things take decades.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stinos 9y agoA decade or two? Did you think that through? I really, really doubt that is going to happen. Just take books for example: there's a couple of millions of books published & printed yearly. Replacing that and the market and the users within 20-something years? That would require a revolution of some kind. For which there is no significant drive whatsoever. We don't read physical books, we read e-books. I do, and really e-ink displays were truly a revelation to me, but it's not a book. Ok I'm one of those people who crave the feeling of well-designed materials/tools/things/whatever and some books fullfill that perfectly in a way no e-book-reader will ever do: a properly bound hardcover weighing over a kg and packed with information on a subject I care about? Gimme! But even for more 'normal' people: I'm wondering how many of those are saying 'I've got an e-book now, haven't read any paper books since'? I know none, but that's just anecdotal of course, they all say 'e-book is nice, but ...'. Not saying that cannot change. But a couple of decades? I'll be extremely surprised. And in any case, I'll still have and use many of the physical books I have now.
- mdpopescu 9y agoMy first ebook reader was the Franklin eBookMan [1]. Since I bought that one, back in 200X (don't remember when but it was after 9/11), I stopped reading paper books. I have a few (technical) books I was forced to read on paper, because reading them on a Kindle is a disaster, but I solved that once I got my 10-inch tablet. My Kindle has 1,029 books on it at the moment... though at least 50% of those are fanfiction, which I prefer to original books. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_eBookMan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_eBookMan
- stinos 9y agoHa I knew there wouldbe people giving up on paper books :] However where reading e-ink is almost like paper I really can't get used to lots of reading on a backlit screen (assuming your tablet is like that). Anyway, TIL there's a thing called fanfiction. Any recommendations? I read practically all genres but since English isn't my mother language preferrably something without too much uncommon vocabulary.
- Fnoord 9y agoGreat post, many good examples, but the elephant in the room is "Yes yes, I know people still do some of the above things." and the question is how much will remain being done. The babyboomers are on their way out. They're the people born right after WWII and they're in their 50/60/70s. They were born in a world where TV at home was a novelty. They witnessed the smartphone revolution in their late adulthood. When people who grow up in our current society, with the changes as you put, become adult without the old reference then we will see how important something like pen and pencil remain. And how usable will it be? For example, when I had to scribble down notes the other day, my handwriting was even more abysmal than it used to be because of a lack of practice. The movie Er Ist Wieder Da (which I saw recently on Netflix) where Hitler returns in Germany in the 21st century and gets confronted with a changed Germany also articulates these changes.