What Happens When Work Becomes a Nonstop Chat Room⁠↗

She likes Slack, but she sees how it can get to be too much. “Sometimes I felt that I needed to mute every single channel in order to get stuff done.

In other words, people didn’t act like they were in the office. They acted like they were on the internet. Slack is sometimes described as a digital watercooler, but watercoolers are often places for dutiful small talk — the exact kind of workplace nicety with which Slack dispenses. Losing that veneer of fake office politeness means seeing things (and revealing things) that you might have preferred to ignore. And Slack does not merely provide a means of talking about one another; Slack also provides more material. You pivot from a group conversation to a back-channel rehash of the conversation — it’s a move that makes you feel slightly craven (why can’t you stop yourself?) and also, because it could so easily go awry (and because you know this!), sort of dumb.

Slack is a compulsion, a distraction. A burden. Often, though, our complaints about it carry a note of aggrieved resignation. They’re delivered in the same tone used for laments regarding air travel, Facebook, or Time Warner. Slack has become another utility we both rely on and resent.