Last week great broadcaster and friend of Big Issue Matt Chorley devoted part of one of his shows to listener gripes about overly familiar emails from organisations people have interacted with once. They were particularly annoyed by the forced jollity of return-to-work mails that wish well at the turn of the year. There were a number of hard solutions suggested, and requested.
I don’t mind these emails, though. They’re part of the way we live now. It’s interesting to see how various organisations attempt to keep threads connected. Besides, there is no way I’m going to park ANYWHERE else when I drive to Manchester Airport.
But, if there is a need to get something done, if there is a wider desire to really get into this issue, there is only one person for the job. It needs somebody both petty and thin-skinned enough to be enraged by something they know little about, and also to feel so self-obsessed and inflated they believe they have ultimate power, and that only they can make a change.
The only person to stop the evil email tyranny is, obviously, Elon Musk. He will send multiple messages asking – demanding – to be removed from the database. OR ELSE. It’ll give him something practical to do. He is the only real bulwark between another missive from webuyanycar and the collapse of western civilisation.
Just over a century ago, Andrew Carnegie, then the richest man in America, and one of the richest to have lived, funded 3,000 public libraries. He believed that the wealthiest on Earth had an obligation to give what they had for the betterment of all.
There are questions over some of his ethics and business practices as he built his steel conglomeration to what it was. But he tried, for the final few decades of his life, to give as much of his vast fortune away as he could. He felt knowledge was the essential torch, that information could lead to a better future for the left-behind, that it would be the engine and liberator.
Over the front-door pediment of many of his libraries, and many still remain, the words ‘let there be light’ are cut into stone. Coming from poverty, a self-made immigrant in the US, he wanted to offer a hand up.
I’ve not come across any libraries funded by Elon Musk.
Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.
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