Image: Office Space screengrab
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Faxes are marginally less vulnerable to interception than messages sent, unencrypted, over the Internet. In some countries, electronic signatures aren’t recognized by law, so faxing is still relatively commonplace. And the humble fax retains a great deal of cachet in business and legal circles; fax machines lurk behind doors in hotels, doctor’s offices, and business centers. But for personal use, to send letters and drawings between individuals for no reason other than the joyful impulse for communication, they were omnipresent for only a brief lacuna of time before being subsumed by other mediums—namely email.The relative privacy and authenticity of messages sent via fax is the product of the technology itself, compounded with its own slowly looming obsolescence. This makes them interesting not only as devices for secure business transactions, but as engines for personal discretion—a fax is as private as a letter, as instant as an email. The best, in a sense, of both worlds. And yet the likeliness of discovering a real fax machine in someone’s home is low; remotely hosted fax-server services are now are widely available from VoIP, e-mail providers, and online, fulfilling most laypeople’s fax needs.Old school paper-and-toner fax machines likely aren’t long for this world, but you can totally still buy one. They fetch as little as $40 on Amazon, to say nothing of the countless thousands languishing in thrift stores and scrap heaps around the world. A long distance phone line won’t break the bank, either. And although faxes, in their halcyon days, were receptacles for constant junk messages, the spam hysteria has died down, both through legislation and as an inevitable consequence of the fact that there are few people with fax lines left to advertise to.These are quiet times for the fax. Perhaps it’s time to turn those 1,300-Hertz tones back up—to couch fax machines in nostalgia and reimagine them, much as music geeks have held fast to the vinyl record and rekindled the cassette, as aesthetes have sniffed out analog synths and typewriters, and steampunks have fetishized the bellows and brass of the industrial revolution.Culturally, the moment is right for fax nostalgia. A generation raised on the web is beginning to sniff out and claim the aesthetics of the early Internet; at the same time, malaise about our constant connectivity is growing increasingly manifest. We talk of unplugging, of going off the grid. But what if we stayed plugged in, only differently? What if we picked and chose, as from a buffet, selective varieties of connection?Imagine building an “offline” network of friends and family who fax. It’d be a small club at first—fellow pioneers of the retro-future. But as conspiratorial notes, love letters, and doodles started emerging from the plastic jaws of consumer-grade fax machines in living rooms around the world, the network would grow. Its members might imagine, although they could never be quite sure, that they were casting a wrench in the surveillance state. And every morning, they’d wake up to a small stack of hand-written love letters, sent over buzzing telephone wires in the dark fax of night.Imagine building an “offline” network of friends and family who fax. It’d be a small club at first—fellow pioneers of the retro-future.