Rant and File

It’s the late 80s and a corporate futurist in an oversized suit clicks through slides on an overhead projector, gleefully declaring to a room of hopeful junior execs: “By the year 2000, our offices will be completely paper free. No filing cabinets, no shredders, no clutter, just the hum of a pc and the clicks of a keyboard.” The audience nods, dazzled by the miracle of personal computers and the promise of databases to store all files.

Fast-forward to today, and that prophecy looks less like foresight and more like a bad joke.

Paper may have seen an initial decline, but eventually staged a strong comeback. Printers churned out stacks of documents, sticky notes colonized every cubicle, and meeting tables groaned under the weight of neatly stapled decks. The irony is, computers didn’t kill paper; they made it easier to summon. Suddenly, anyone could produce twenty professional copies of a draft at the touch of a button.

And yet, the real twist wasn’t just convenience. As our digital world grew more fragile; file corrupting, systems crashing, clouds occasionally leaking; paper became a symbol of permanence. A signed contract carried ceremony, a scribbled note carried intention, a sticky post-it on a monitor carried reality (and most likely a password or 2.) Paper was no longer the future’s enemy; it was its talisman.

The so-called paperless office never arrived because, truthfully, we never wanted it to. What we built instead was a hybrid: digital for speed, paper for significance. Email replaced memos, but agreements still deserve ink. Cloud servers hold terabytes, but the critical page still gets printed “just in case.”

The prophets asked the wrong question. It wasn’t when paper would vanish, it was, what role would it play once it didn’t have to be everywhere? And the answer is charmingly human: paper became exactly what we wanted it to be, something solid, permanent, and reassuringly real in a world of vanishing pixels.