The First Feed

The mail still comes to my house six days a week, whether or not there's anything in it worth having. Most days there isn't. A grocery circular, a credit card offer, something for a previous occupant. The whole ritual — a carrier going mailbox to mailbox, your walk to the box, opening the little door — feels like a leftover from another century. The post office is a national punchline: the line at the counter, the deficit, the stamp that costs a few cents more than it did last time you needed stamps.

But I've been reading about where this system came from, and I wanted to share some thoughts. The post office wasn't just America's first delivery service, it was America's first information network — the first feed — and the people who designed it did something important: they wrote the network a constitution. They wrote down what it was for.

In 1792, when Congress passed the Post Office Act, the existing models were not encouraging. Britain had opened its Royal Mail to the public back in 1635, so a "public post" was nothing new. But the European posts existed mostly to make money for crowns, and they came with secondary functions: surveillance and censorship. Governments ran rooms where correspondence was opened, copied, resealed, and sent along. Using the mail meant accepting that governments would be reading it.

The American design inverted all of it, on purpose. The 1792 Act made opening someone else's mail a crime — up to six months in jail and a $300 fine, which was serious money — at a time when peeking was standard practice for governments everywhere else. The Act also priced the network upside down. A letter cost between six and twenty-five cents to send, depending on distance. A newspaper cost a penny, a penny and a half at most. Printers could send their papers to other printers for free. The expensive personal mail subsidized the cheap public news on purpose. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison all argued, in their different registers, that a republic this size could only work if ordinary people could find out what was going on in it. The profitable thing paid for the informative thing, because the informative thing was the point.

Think about that. The first information network this country built was designed so that news traveled at a loss, privacy was protected by criminal law, and the system optimized for people's benefit rather than for profit.

Compare that to the feeds we scroll through today. They're free, which the 1792 designers might have admired for about a minute. But every other principle runs in reverse. Online, you are watched as a condition of use — not by a clerk steaming open an envelope, but comprehensively, automatically, as the business model itself. And where the old post subsidized the informative thing, the feed "subsidizes" the engaging thing, which in practice usually means the upsetting thing. Nobody in that value chain asks what an electorate needs to know. These are both information networks with opposite constitutions — one written asking what citizens require, one written to maximize private profit.

The postal ideal does have a scar on it. In July 1835, abolitionists mailed thousands of anti-slavery tracts to the South — arguably the country's first mass mail campaign. When the sacks reached Charleston, a mob pried open the post office window at night, took the abolitionist mail, and burned it in a public bonfire. The system's response was chilling: the Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, declined to punish anyone, writing that postal officers owed the law obedience but owed their communities something "higher" — that "it is patriotism to disregard them." President Jackson asked Congress for a censorship law. The mail's principles, it turned out, were only as strong as the people willing to keep them when it cost something.

The 1792 design didn't enforce itself. It got tested within a generation and failed the people who needed it most. What history shows is that the constitution of an information system is a set of critical decisions. They can be set for the citizen — subsidized truth and privacy with teeth — and they can be abandoned, quietly or in a bonfire, when keeping them gets inconvenient.

I wrote recently that the systems we love are the ones built to work for us. The post office might be the original case. Which leaves me with a question. Our current feeds have constitutions too. In 1792, a young, broke, half-formed country looked at an information network and asked what a free people would need it to be. We're older and richer, and our networks reach everyone. When's the last time anyone asked that question — and meant it — about the systems that now decide what we see?