Have you noticed how every few years there's a new wave of articles lamenting the death of the gentleman or the total collapse of common courtesy? It's like a recurring seasonal event, right up there with the cherry blossoms or the first snow. People seem convinced that we're sliding into some kind of Mad Max style social wasteland where nobody knows which fork to use or how to say thank you. They look at a teenager in a hoodie or a professional email that starts with "Hey" and they see the end of the Roman Empire.
It's a classic trope, Corn. I'm Herman Poppleberry, by the way, for anyone just joining the fray. This whole narrative of decline is something that historians have tracked back for centuries. Every generation looks at the one following it and decides that the lack of hats or the presence of slang is the final nail in the coffin of civilization. In the 1920s, people were horrified by the "flappers" and their lack of formal chaperones. In the 1960s, it was the long hair and the rejection of the necktie. Today's prompt from Daniel is about this exact phenomenon, focusing on the evolution of manners and etiquette over the years. Daniel's curious if we're actually becoming ruder or if we're just rewriting the manual in real time. He's seeing a world where the old rules don't seem to apply, but new, invisible ones are popping up everywhere.
Because it challenges the assumption that informality is the same thing as a lack of manners. I think we often mistake the changing of the guard for a total abandonment of the post. If you look at Daniel's work in technology and automation, he's constantly dealing with protocols. And that's really what manners are—social protocols. They're the software that allows the hardware of human society to function without overheating.
I love that framing. Think of them as a coordination protocol. They aren't necessarily about moral virtue, although we often wrap them in that language to give them more weight. At their core, they're a low-latency data compression tool. When you have a set of agreed-upon social scripts, you don't have to spend cognitive energy figuring out how to initiate a conversation, how to end a meeting, or how to show respect to a stranger. The script does the heavy lifting for you. In episode 816, we talked about the evolution of human order, from scrolls to modern databases, and manners really fit into that same category. They're the S-Q-L of human interaction. They provide the schema we use to query and interpret social situations without the whole system crashing. If I know the schema of a formal dinner, I don't have to panic when I see five different glasses. I just run the dinner query and my behavior follows the pre-written code.
So, if manners are just a protocol, then what we're seeing today isn't a decline, but a structural shift. We're moving from what I'd call rule-based etiquette to context-aware etiquette. Think about the Victorian era or even the mid-twentieth century. You had books like Emily Post's Etiquette, which sold 500,000 copies right after it was published in 1922. That was a period of mass-market social standardization. People wanted a rigid, universal rulebook because they were moving into new social classes and needed a cheat sheet to fit in. They needed to know the exact distance to stand from a Duchess or which specific card to leave when visiting a sick friend. It was a manual for a world that was trying to act like a single, giant machine.
And that rulebook was very much about performative hierarchy. It was designed to signal your place in a vertical structure. Who bows to whom, who speaks first, which side of the plate the oyster fork goes on. It was a high-friction, high-cost signaling system. If you knew the rules, you were signaling that you had the time and resources to learn them. It was a gatekeeping mechanism. If you didn't know the rules, you were "out." But today, we've shifted toward performative authenticity. In a modern professional environment, being too formal can actually trigger suspicion. If someone sends me an email that's too stiff, too Victorian, my first thought isn't that they're polite. My first thought is that they're either a bot, a scammer, or they're trying to hide something behind a wall of formality. We've moved from "Respect the Rank" to "Respect the Vibe."
It's the signaling of social intelligence. If you can't read the room well enough to know that a "Hey" is better than a "Dear Sir or Madam," you're signaling a lack of adaptability. You're showing that you're running an outdated operating system. It's wild how the definition of "rude" has flipped. In 1950, it was rude to be too casual because it signaled a lack of respect for the institution. In 2026, it's often seen as rude or at least socially inept to be too formal because you're forcing the other person into a rigid script they didn't ask for. You're creating unnecessary friction. You're making them do the work of translating your "Dear Sir" into a modern context.
There's a real cost to abandoning those universal scripts, though. When you have a context-aware system, the cognitive load actually goes up. You have to constantly calibrate your behavior based on the platform, the relationship, and the specific digital environment. Slack has a different etiquette than Discord. Email has a different etiquette than a LinkedIn message. We've traded a single, heavy manual for a thousand tiny, invisible pamphlets that are updated every week. This is why people feel so socially exhausted. You aren't just being polite anymore; you're performing a real-time sentiment analysis of every interaction to ensure your level of formality matches the other person's expectations. If you're one degree too formal, you're a "narc." If you're one degree too informal, you're "unprofessional." The Goldilocks Zone of modern manners is incredibly narrow.
This really ties into signaling theory in modern informality. Why does rigid formality feel so weird now? I think it's because we value transparency and speed. Formal etiquette is, by definition, a layer of obfuscation. It's a buffer. It's a way of saying things without actually saying them. In a world of high-frequency communication, those buffers feel like lag. If I have to spend three sentences on pleasantries before I ask you a technical question, I'm essentially taxing your attention. I'm saying, "My need to feel polite is more important than your need to get your work done."
You're increasing the latency of the interaction. And that's where the "manners are dying" crowd gets it wrong. They see the removal of the buffer as a loss of respect. But in a high-bandwidth world, removing the buffer is an act of respect for the other person's time. We've moved toward a philosophy where brevity is the new politeness. If you send me a message that's just the question, with no "Hope you're having a great Tuesday," I don't think you're a jerk. I think you're a hero who's helping me clear my inbox. We're moving toward a zero-overhead social model.
I love that. Brevity as the new politeness. But it creates this high-context trap. If you and I have a shared context, we can be incredibly informal and it works perfectly. We have a shared A-P-I for our friendship. But if you're an outsider trying to break into a new professional circle or a new subculture, the lack of a clear, formal rulebook makes it much harder to navigate. We talked about this in episode 1152 regarding the science of being weird. Being perceived as "off-center" or "weird" is often just a failure to pick up on these unspoken, fluid protocols. When the rules aren't written down in a book by Emily Post, the in-group becomes much more exclusive because you have to "just know" how to behave. It becomes a form of gatekeeping that's much harder to hack than the old-school class-based version.
It's a move from explicit knowledge to tacit knowledge. And that can actually be more exclusionary than the old-school formal systems. At least with formal etiquette, you could buy the book and learn the rules. You could study your way into the room. With modern context-aware manners, you have to soak in the environment to understand the nuances. For example, look at the evolution of the professional email. It used to be a digital letter. Now, it's more like a persistent chat thread. If you send a "Best regards" every single time in a fast-moving thread, you look like you don't understand how the technology works. You're essentially making the other person scroll more than they need to. You're being noisy in a system that prizes signal.
Let's talk about digital friction because that's where the new manners really reveal themselves. There was a study just last year, in 2025, that found 78 percent of Generation Z employees view unsolicited phone calls as a form of workplace harassment. Now, to someone from the 1980s, that sounds insane. A phone call was the standard for being proactive and polite. It showed you cared enough to use your voice. But in the current etiquette framework, a phone call is an act of aggression. It's a synchronous interruption of an asynchronous workflow. It's a Denial of Service attack on someone's focus.
It's a demand for immediate, high-priority attention without any prior negotiation. The new etiquette says that you should send a text or a message first to ask if someone has a moment to talk. You're negotiating the entry into their cognitive space. That's an incredibly sophisticated form of manners. It's not that we have fewer rules; it's that our rules have become much more sensitive to the mechanics of attention and focus. We've moved from respecting the person to respecting the person's bandwidth. If I call you out of the blue, I'm saying my thought is more important than whatever you're currently doing. If I message you first, I'm acknowledging that you're a sovereign agent with your own priorities.
It's the etiquette of the Do Not Disturb mode. We've developed this whole invisible layer of manners around notification management and data privacy. For instance, if you're screen-sharing in a meeting and a personal notification pops up, the polite thing for the other people to do is to look away or pretend they didn't see it. We've developed a digital "civil inattention," which is a term sociologists use to describe how we ignore people on a crowded subway to give them a sense of privacy. We're now applying that to the digital world. If I see that you're active on Slack at two in the morning, the polite thing is to not mention it. I'm granting you the privacy of your own schedule.
That's a brilliant connection. We're building digital subways every day. And the manners we're developing are all about managing the friction of being "always on." Think about the etiquette of the Slack status. If someone's status is a little focus icon, it's the modern equivalent of a closed office door. In 1995, you'd see the door was closed. In 2026, you have to check the metadata. If you message them anyway for something non-urgent, you're being rude in the new sense of the word. You're violating their stated boundary. You're knocking on a door that has a Do Not Disturb sign clearly posted in the code.
So, we aren't becoming more informal; we're becoming more granular. We're moving away from "The Way One Behaves" to "The Way I Behave with You on This Platform at This Time." It's a much more complex system to manage. I think this is why people feel so exhausted by social interaction lately. It's not that people are meaner; it's that the social stack has become incredibly deep and requires constant maintenance. You have to remember that you use emojis with your team on Discord, but you use bullet points with your boss on email, and you use voice notes with your sister on WhatsApp. Each one is a different language of politeness.
And if you fail to maintain it, you get labeled as toxic or difficult, which are the modern versions of being unrefined or low-class. The labels have changed, but the function of social gatekeeping remains. We're still using manners to decide who belongs in our tribe. It's just that the tribe is now defined by how well you handle asynchronous communication and whether you know how to use an emoji to soften a direct critique. If I give you feedback without a smiling face or a thumbs up, I'm being aggressive. The emoji is the new "Please." It's a linguistic buffer that signals I am not a threat.
That's another great point. The softening of language. We've moved away from formal honorifics like "Sir" or "Ma'am," but we've replaced them with a massive array of linguistic buffers. "Just checking in," "No worries if not," "I might be wrong but." These are the new "Please" and "Thank you." They serve the same purpose of reducing social friction and signaling that you aren't a threat. Critics of modern language call that weakness or a lack of clarity. But from a protocol perspective, it's a way to signal that you're leaving room for the other person's agency.
It's a very democratic form of etiquette. It assumes that we're all peers negotiating a shared space, rather than participants in a fixed hierarchy where the person at the top can just bark orders. In a hierarchy, you don't need "No worries if not." You just give the order. In a peer-to-peer network, you have to constantly re-verify the connection and ensure the other node is ready to receive the data. It's a shift from a command-and-control social model to a peer-to-peer negotiation model.
And that's a much more difficult model to run. It requires more empathy and more constant calibration. I think we should give ourselves some credit. We're actually performing a much more complex social dance than our grandparents did. They just had to follow the steps printed on the floor. They had the Emily Post map. We have to improvise the dance while also building the floor as we go. We're navigating a world where the rules change every time an app updates its interface.
That's the thing. The improvisation is the key. And it leads to these fascinating second-order effects. For example, look at the rise of ghosting. Everyone agrees ghosting is rude, right? But from a certain perspective, ghosting is the ultimate expression of the low-friction etiquette. If the interaction has reached a point where a formal goodbye or rejection would cause more emotional friction than simply disappearing, some people see the disappearance as the path of least resistance for both parties. They think they're being polite by not forcing a confrontation. I'm not saying it's good, but it's a logical endpoint of a system that prioritizes the avoidance of awkwardness over the adherence to a script.
It's the dark side of context-aware etiquette. When the rules are fluid, people will always find a way to interpret them in their own favor. If there's no rule that says you have to send a follow-up after a date, then you can convince yourself that staying silent is actually respecting their space. It's a convenient way to avoid the hard work of being a person in a community. It's the C-P-U cycles of emotional labor being saved by a ghosting protocol.
That's the risk. When you lose the universal script, you lose the shared moral floor. Manners used to be a way to ensure a baseline of human dignity even between people who hated each other. If you both agree to the duel protocol, you have a way to resolve conflict without it turning into a chaotic brawl. If you both agree to the polite dinner protocol, you can eat with your enemies. When etiquette becomes purely about personal context and vibe, it becomes much harder to interact with people who aren't like you. You lose the common interface.
This connects back to what we discussed in episode 750 about the architecture of why we divide. If our manners are now platform-specific and subculture-specific, then etiquette is no longer a bridge between different groups. It becomes a wall. If I don't know the specific Slack-speak or the specific inclusive language protocols of your group, I'm immediately flagged as an outsider. The new etiquette can be very unfriendly to anyone off-center. It demands a high level of social conformity to very specific, often invisible, standards. It's a shibboleth masquerading as a manner.
It's the paradox of the inclusive era. We want to be more inclusive, but our social protocols have become so specialized that they're actually harder to join. It's like moving from a world where everyone speaks a simplified version of a common language to a world where everyone speaks a highly complex, localized dialect. The dialect is beautiful and rich for those who speak it, but it's a nightmare for a traveler. We've created high-context silos where the manners are so refined that they're impenetrable to anyone who hasn't spent six months in the Discord server.
So, what's the takeaway for someone trying to navigate this? If you're feeling like the world is getting ruder, maybe the first step is to audit your own latency. Are you using 1990s protocols in a 2026 environment? Are you calling people when a message would do? Are you being stiff when the environment calls for fluidity? Are you using a top hat protocol in a t-shirt world?
And on the flip side, are you being so context-aware that you're actually being inconsiderate? Are you using the lack of a formal script as an excuse to avoid the basic duties of being a human? I think the new etiquette should be about respecting the other person's cognitive bandwidth and time, but it still needs a foundation of reliability. Being polite today means being the person who does what they say they will do, in the format that's most helpful to the recipient. It's about interoperability. Can I interact with you without having to install a new social driver?
It's about being a low-noise participant in the social network. If you can communicate clearly, respect boundaries, and reduce the work other people have to do to interact with you, you're the modern equivalent of a perfectly mannered Victorian. You're just doing it with an iPhone and a Slack status instead of a calling card and a top hat. You're providing a clean A-P-I for your personality.
I think that's a much more hopeful way to look at it. We aren't in a decline; we're in a massive, global-scale reorganization of how humans coordinate. It's messy, it's confusing, and it's often exhausting, but it's also an incredible testament to our adaptability. We're building a new language of respect for a world that moves at the speed of light. We're moving from static etiquette to dynamic etiquette.
Which leads me to a final thought. If manners are just protocols for social negotiation, what happens when we aren't the ones doing the negotiating? We're already seeing AI agents that can handle our scheduling, draft our emails, and even respond to comments. Are we moving toward a future of algorithmic etiquette? Where my bot is polite to your bot so that we don't have to be?
It's already happening. When your email client suggests a smart reply like "Sounds good!" or "Thanks for the update," that's an algorithm enforcing a social protocol. It's providing the script so you don't have to. The danger, of course, is that we end up in a loop where bots are being polite to other bots on our behalf, and the actual human connection—the part where manners are supposed to show that we value the other person—gets completely lost in the automation. We might achieve perfect politeness while simultaneously achieving total isolation.
It's the ultimate low-latency solution. Zero-latency manners. But if it costs you zero effort to be polite, does the politeness still mean anything? If a bot sends a sincere thank you note, is there any sincerity in the room? That's a question we're going to have to grapple with as these tools become more embedded in our daily lives. We're automating the protocol, but are we losing the purpose?
It's the difference between the protocol and the purpose. The protocol can be automated, but the purpose of manners—acknowledging the humanity of the person in front of you—that's something only we can do. No matter how much the rules change, that core requirement stays the same. Whether it's an oyster fork or an emoji, the goal is to say, "I see you, and I respect your space."
Well, that feels like a good place to wrap this one up. We've covered everything from Emily Post to the harassment of a phone call. It's been a wild ride through the social stack.
It really has. Thanks as always to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the gears turning behind the scenes. And a big thanks to Modal for providing the G-P-U credits that power this show. They make it possible for us to dive into these weird prompts every week.
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Until next time, stay curious and maybe send a text before you call.
Good advice. See you later.
