A message that costs nothing to send

By mid-morning, the phone of almost anyone in Dubai tells the same story. A furniture shop she bought one lamp from three years ago. A gym she visited once. A clinic, a car wash, a property agent who found her number somewhere. Each has decided that her attention is free to take, and on their side of the screen it is.

That is the whole problem. One more message costs the sender close to nothing, so the sender who thinks only about this month writes to everyone, as often as possible. The cost does not vanish. It lands on the person holding the phone, who pays for it in small pieces of the day.

A paper letter never worked like that. Every envelope needed a stamp, so every envelope was a decision. Nobody posted the same flyer to a stranger four times in one week.

And it is about to get worse. The tools that let one person write a thousand messages, each sounding personal, are getting cheaper by the month. When everything sounds personal, nothing reads as personal.

So I keep coming back to a simple idea. Let any business that sends in bulk pay a tiny amount for each message, held to one side rather than spent. If the people receiving them are glad of them, the money stays with the sender. If enough people mark them as unwanted, the money goes to a good cause and the sender has to pay again. Ordinary people writing a few messages to people they know would pay nothing at all.

The honest shop that writes when it has something worth saying would barely notice. The ones who write because writing is free would stop quickly, because it would no longer be free.

We put a price on paper long ago. It seems stranger every year to leave attention, which is worth far more, open to anyone who wants to take it for nothing.