I read a lot of biographies. They're a genre of writing that relies heavily on people's former habit of letter writing. For many people from the 19th and 20th centuries, much of what we know about their lives comes from their preserved letters. Letter writing is now becoming extinct, and with it that literary tradition. If you can't even post a letter, surely it's the very end of it.
Yes, future biography writers will have social media posts and online writing to mine for material. There's vastly more of it than the preserved letters in the world's libraries. But there's an intimacy about letters that online writing rarely has.
Other countries will now be facing the decision Denmark has just made. If delivering letters is a permanent loss-making venture, when do you pull the plug?
Denmark to shutdown post office, end delivery of physical mails
First started in 1624, the Danish Postal Service says it will discontinue the delivery of letters from 2025. Will more countries soon follow?
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
13 Comments
[deleted]
Always feels sorta weird to run a national service as a profit-making enterprise tbh
PostNord – a single company – is stopping letters in Denmark.
I can see this happening in the UK as they are slowly cutting back services, though I thought the massive increase of delivering packages would have made up for shortfalls for delivering letters but apparently not.
It’s sure as hell time for it. It’s an obsolete technology that no longer serves any purpose. Last time I sent someone actual letter was maybe 18 or 20 years ago, from a school trip. And I don’t remember the last time I received one. The only things coming to my post box are spam leaflets and official government correspondence – and even that is already being digitized, and used less and less every year.
The real reason, is we transitioned to a digital solution for all government mail. Other companies (insurance, power etc.) could use that to. So 90-95% of all mail like that disappeared.
There’s no real business in delivering a handful of postage cards and invites, countrywide.
Packages are mostly delivered using a system of pick-up points, with several carriers. I guess the letters will end up there also. Bye-bye mailbox!
There’s people who still write each other letters and postcards though. What are we gonna do if noone would deliver them anymore? Maybe, if some kind of services remain, they would be much more expensive?
They sold out the royal mail as Postnord, and Sweden did the same. Because privatisation is great. /s
Only Postnord will stop delivering mail. *They* lost the contract with the Danish state. There is allegedly *other* services (but I need to hear it from a dane to be sure), just that Postnord failed so hard they completely lost the game.
You’ll still get junk mail, so there’s that…
Perhaps there’s a series of emails out there… That’s just a faster delivery mechanism for letters…
I am surprised they would discontinue letters since parcel service will persist. If the core system is still running, and it’s keeping the economy moving with more jobs, it seems like a short sighted decision.
This will truly be a dark age in a few hundred years because we are in a period where we no longer use durable materials for communication and haven’t invented durable digital storage media either. By durable I mean “stick it in a dry drawer and it lasts for 500 years” which is the case with any quality paper but hard drives fail in a decade or two.
Link redirects to a scam.
BBC story on the same subject — Danish post will deliver profitable packages, but not letters: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3v37plv2edo
Possibly relevant that the postage on a single letter has gone up to 3.55 Euros !
Maybe we’ll end up with Uber Letters given we already have Uber Package delivery