Any fully open system of digital communication will corrode over time. Bad messages will crowd out the good ones.

The new normal: Someone finds a database of every residential property, then another of cell phones. An AI is trained to call every homeowner, every day, asking if they’re thinking of selling their home. Millions of calls an hour. The leads (one out of 40,000 calls, perhaps) are sold to real estate brokers.

Multiply this by 500 different hustlers in a dozen industries, and now the open nature of the phone is gone forever.

And then texts.

And of course, email. An inbox with 100,000 unread messages in it is no longer a functional tool.

Open systems come with the requirement of self-restraint and humanity. When we replace those with automated stealers of attention with a profit margin, the system can no longer remain open.

Permission and trust keep going up in value, precisely as quickly as selfish forces work to succeed without them.