Modern Blank Envelopes
This is what happens when computers take over. Forget blank envelopes! You won’t find them anymore. Never mind the standard sci-fic trope about computers controlling everything; real life is at once more imaginative and less exciting (so far!). Well, actually, it’s exactly that kind of a nightmare for those whose livelihoods have been lost on account of computer automation!
Now it’s true that technology has always changed our lives, often in a most disruptive manner, and blank envelopes won’t be made here again anyway – and even then, it will be machines that do the making. Whereas making paper was once a craft in its own right, it’s all done automatically by machines now. But even these overseas workers will be thrown out of work soon enough thanks to all the wireless communications that’s revolutionized just about every facet to how people interact.
Why write a letter and stick it in an envelope when e-mail and the like can transmit your message so much faster? Nothing to be printed out, no postage to fumble around for, and never a necessary wait on a response – never mind having to go out and do a drop-off at the nearest mailbox! Well, at least not unless one’s correspondent isn’t interested in communications anyway!
Demand for blank envelopes is at the lowest point yet. It’s now hard to find them, even, and one must resort to dedicated stationary stores oftentimes. All thanks to the computer revolution that’s upended whole industries worldwide. It’s nothing like the first envelopes used by man, which would appear to us today to be more like pottery than anything else, made as they were from clay that were dried or even baked in order to be “sealed” – never mind the breaking necessary to be opened!
There is nothing new, then, to the impact of technology. It is, moreover, dramatic in impact but not necessarily in that immediate, visceral way of fiction. Hence, the actual year of 2001 gives us unmanned drones and the worldwide web while the film 2001 envisioned moon bases, space travel, and artificial intelligence.
So no more blank envelopes. You can bet the family jewels that that will be the most dramatic impact of our advancing technology. Soon there won’t be any envelopes at all in the whole world!
