The Next Phase After Fax: A Return to Meaningful Simplicity
The fax machine, once a marvel of modern communication, now feels like a relic—a dusty artifact of a time when sending a message across distances was a tangible, deliberate act. In today’s hyper-digital world, we’ve long since abandoned the whirring hum of fax for instant emails, cloud-shared files, and video calls that stream at blinding speeds. But where does this relentless march of “progress” leave us? What comes after fax—and more importantly, why should it matter? The answer might not be what you expect. It’s not about more bandwidth, higher resolutions, or AI-driven interfaces. The next phase could very well be a step sideways, toward something like Meshtastic—a decentralized, point-to-point messaging system that echoes fax’s simplicity while shedding its physical shell. And that’s a future worth caring about.
Meshtastic, for the uninitiated, is an open-source project that uses low-power, long-range radio to create mesh networks for communication. It’s not flashy. It doesn’t promise 8K video or holographic memos. It’s just a way to get a message from one place to another—verified, direct, and free of the bloated infrastructure we’ve come to rely on. Like fax, it’s point-to-point. Like fax, it confirms delivery. Unlike fax, it doesn’t need paper or phone lines—just a device with an endpoint. It’s not the full future yet, but it’s a whisper of what could be: a communication system that prioritizes the message over the medium.
Contrast this with the trajectory we’re currently on. We’re addicted to excess—2K/4/8K + displays, terabytes-per-second internet, apps that sync every thought to every device in an instant. Where does it find a point of rest? It’s a world where convenience is king, and efficiency is the god we worship. But what’s the cost? Every leap in speed and bandwidth piles on more latency under the hood, more back-doors for hackers to exploit, more vectors of attack in a system too complex to secure. We’ve built a digital Tower of Babel, and it’s creaking under its own weight. The slop—the inefficiency masked as progress—keeps growing, and we keep throwing more resources at it, hoping the next upgrade will fix what the last one broke. And in our market reality this creates incentives to engineer inefficiency to drive people on this path. Because contentment with keeping that Commodore 64 as the POS system in a car dealer just continues to get the job done. If it ain’t broke then why the hell should there be a fix?! We live in a viscous cycle of broken where more resources becomes the solution. Not better software engineering. In today’s market of computing technology, POS have become literally POS!
That’s not my kind of future. I’d rather take a walk to deliver a message by hand than trust it to a system that’s more machine than meaning. There’s something human in the act—something mutual, intentional, even joyful. This obsession with the shortest distance between two points has stripped us of that. We’ve traded the scenic route for a sterile shortcut, and in doing so, we’ve forgotten what it means to connect. Efficiency matters in a factory, sure—but in life? In relationships? Hell with it. We’re not cogs in a machine. We’re people, and people thrive on the simple, the slow, the real.
This isn’t just nostalgia talking. It’s a warning. If we let our gluttony for efficiency run unchecked, we’ll end up with a world where machines don’t just serve us—they replace us. That’s the singularity in its rawest form: not some sci-fi utopia, but a slow fade of the human condition into a hum of optimized code. The future of communication doesn’t need to be a race to the fastest, flashiest tech. It could be a return to basics—tools like Meshtastic that keep us in control, not at the mercy of bloated networks or corporate overlords.
So why should this matter? Because communication isn’t just about data—it’s about us. It’s about intent, trust, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing your words reached their mark. Fax understood that in its clunky way. Meshtastic hints at it in a modern one. The next phase isn’t about outrunning the past; it’s about reclaiming what made it work. Simple still works. Let’s not lose that—or ourselves—in the rush for more.
