by JeremyAbram.net The Age of Inbox Anxiety It starts innocently enough: a quick refresh of your inbox before coffee. Then, before you know it, you’ve lost 40 minutes triaging threads, deleting newsletters, and rereading “urgent” requests that weren’t urgent at all.Email — once the backbone of digital communication — has evolved into a source of…

Once upon a time, scam calls were easy to spot: a robotic pause, a clunky script, a bad line about your car’s extended warranty. Now the voice on the line sounds like your daughter. Or your CEO. Or the President. It reacts when you interrupt. It answers questions. It sounds tired, frantic, human. This shift…

SPAM BY THE NUMBERS (Compiled November 2025 • © JeremyAbram.net) Spam isn’t just annoying — it’s a measurable drain on time, money, and mental focus.Here’s what the latest data says about how much of our lives it actually consumes. EMAIL SPAM: A DAILY DELUGE Every single day, roughly 160 billion spam emails are sent worldwide.That’s…

In today’s hyper-connected world, one of the quietly destructive forces is the flood of unsolicited communications: spam calls, robocalls, junk e-mail, scam texts, and the like. These aren’t just nuisances—they’re eroding our attention, productivity, trust in communications, and even costing real time, money and stress. This article will unpack the full scope of the problem:…

Online “challenges” and viral share ploys—quizzes, memes, dares, tag-and-share prompts—can feel harmless, even community-building. But they also create privacy exposures and sometimes escalate into real-world injury or crime. Below is a deeply sourced look at how these trends work, why they’re risky, and how major platforms compare. 1) Two broad risk categories A. Privacy &…

When the time comes to upgrade or replace your smartphone, laptop, smartwatch, tablet, or computer, it’s easy to focus on wiping photos or logging out of apps. But modern devices store massive personal footprints—messages, biometrics, browser histories, Wi-Fi networks, location trails, and authentication tokens that linger far deeper than most users realize. Improperly disposing of…

In the sprawling ecosystem of the internet — where identities are fluid, interactions are instant, and validation can feel like currency — catfishing has evolved from a fringe phenomenon to a mainstream digital threat. Originally coined in the 2010 documentary Catfish, the term refers to individuals who create false online personas to deceive, manipulate, or…

By Jeremy Abram — JeremyAbram.net Executive summary When you tap an app or load a page, a vast human-and-machine system hums to life: cables on ocean floors, humming data centers, rooftop antennas, quiet standards committees, volunteer open-source maintainers, and on-call engineers who sleep with a pager. This article maps that hidden workforce and the physical,…

By Jeremy Abram · JeremyAbram.net Modern life quietly runs on layers of hidden dependencies—cloud services we don’t see, identity systems we don’t control, firmware we never touch, and platforms that can change under our feet. This piece maps those layers, shows how they fail, and offers practical ways to build personal and organizational resilience without…

The machines are learning—faster, deeper, and across more dimensions than any civilization ever imagined. Algorithms write code, compose music, diagnose illness, negotiate contracts, create art, predict markets, and generate synthetic worlds. For centuries, progress meant machines mastering physical labor. Today, they are rapidly mastering cognition. And so, a question once reserved for science-fiction now stands…