Ideas need handles: the thing about subject lines

A bureaucracy recently asked me to submit a few documents. They were very specific and the person on the phone said that the subject line of the email I sent should be blank.

This is really unsettling. Almost like taking the labels off bottles at the supermarket. My email software didn’t even want to let me send it.

Sumerians created millions of clay tablets but never managed to invent the subject line. As a result, the only way to know what’s on a tablet is to read the whole thing.

And a restaurant menu evolved to be the subject lines for the foods we’re about to eat.

Centuries later, SEO became an arcane art designed to create a subject line for a website. YouTube is filled with linkbait, with subject lines labeling videos creating the expectation of the best video you’ve ever seen, followed by the inevitable disappointment once you’ve invested a minute or two. The race for attention has relentlessly reduced the trust we put into subject lines, because they’re easy (and tempting) to game.

Books have had titles since Gutenberg. The title, of course, is nothing but a subject line. That, together with the genre it’s filed in give us a set of expectations for what the book will deliver. I’ve been to bookstores with a shelf labeled, “Famous authors.” We’d like to know what to expect–we care about genre and provenance, and guard our attention and resources.

But AI can’t be bothered with a subject line. It’ll just read the whole thing, watch the entire video and listen to the song from beginning to end. And then it’ll create its own subject line, on demand.

This is going to be unsettling in many ways.

Creators often use the subject line to create. It’s something to lean against. The blog title often comes before the blog. And giving up authority over the subject line to a robot that might not understand is hard to do.

And consumers have come to expect a handle for the next idea they’re going to consume, and often over-trust their instincts about what’s worth their time or not (which is why stupid ideas like the flat belly diet or snakes on a plane come and go). How are we going to help an AI sort though all the choices for what’s next?

It’s probably more efficient than clay tablets, but the transition is going to be one more way our culture changes as a result of the dominance of AI intermediaries like Perplexity.

There will still be handles. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when they’re written by a system we don’t fully understand.