“That’s Slack”

When Slack started getting popular there was a profile of Stewart Butterfield in Wired (2014) that tainted my view of Slack ever since. I’ve recounted the snippet many times but my memory of it faded over the years and I started to think that I imagined the whole thing — but no, here it is in all its future-of-work dystopian glory:

Now: Imagine that weeks pass by. You, sadly, die unexpectedly. Now that you’re gone, your coworkers need to pull up the document, but they have trouble finding it in your disorganized Dropbox folder. So instead they search Slack for “massive thought bomb” and, presto, there it is, along with all your notes and the feedback you received from your team. That’s Slack.