The sting is sharp and localized, a tiny white line bisecting the whorls of my index finger where the edge of the envelope sliced clean through the first few layers of skin. I am currently staring at the drop of blood forming, wondering how such a mundane object-a thick, white, ‘confidential’ internal memo-could manage to be both physically and metaphorically painful. Jax J.-P. is leaning against the doorframe of my cubicle, watching me wince. He is a queue management specialist, a man who spends his entire professional life calculating the exact velocity at which things should move through a system. He doesn’t believe in speed for the sake of speed, and he certainly doesn’t believe in volume for the sake of ‘being open.’

I was looking for the signal in the pile. I thought if I held the paper, I might actually find the one sentence that matters among the 55 pages of corporate updates I was CC’d on this morning. I am currently drowning in what our CEO calls ‘The Era of Total Visibility,’ but what I call the Great Digital Flood. It turns out that when you give everyone access to everything, you haven’t empowered them; you’ve just given them a second full-time job as a librarian of the useless.

The Burden of the Infinite Feed

Jax J.-P. taps my monitor. There are 85 unread messages in the #general channel. The top one is a 1,200-word manifesto from the head of logistics about why we need to switch from two-ply to three-ply paper towels in the East Wing breakroom. Somewhere in the middle of that thread, buried between a GIF of a dancing cat and a heated debate about the merits of dark roast, is a single line about a shift in the project deadline that affects 25% of the company’s Q3 revenue. It is transparency in its most radical, and most destructive, form. It is the refusal to curate, disguised as a commitment to honesty. Management has decided that filtering information is ‘gatekeeping,’ so they have simply removed the gates. Now, the floodwaters are rising, and we are all expected to be expert swimmers.

We have reached a point where the cost of finding information is higher than the value of the information itself. This isn’t a personal failing of my time management skills, though the 235 emails in my inbox might suggest otherwise. It is an organizational abdication of responsibility. When a leader says, ‘I want everyone to know everything,’ what they are really saying is, ‘I am too lazy or too scared to decide what is actually important.’ They are pushing the cognitive load of prioritization onto the workforce, requiring every individual to act as their own editor-in-chief. Jax J.-P. calls this ‘The Burden of the Infinite Feed.’ He argues that in any system, if the input exceeds the processing capacity of the nodes, the system doesn’t just slow down-it begins to hallucinate. We start seeing importance where there is none, and we miss the tigers in the grass because we are too busy counting the blades.

I think about the way we consume information versus the way we consume services in the real world. When you want to renovate your home, you don’t want the contractor to drop a 1,500-page catalog of every floorboard ever manufactured on your doorstep and tell you to ‘be transparent’ about your choices. You want an expert who has already done the heavy lifting of discarding the garbage. This is exactly what a Flooring Contractor does. They don’t overwhelm you with a warehouse; they bring a curated selection of samples directly to your door that actually fit your specific needs and light. They understand that true value lies in the reduction of options, not the infinite expansion of them. In a world of noise, the person who can point to three things and say, ‘These are the ones that matter,’ is a godsend. My company, however, prefers to hand me the keys to the entire warehouse and tell me to start walking.

There is a peculiar kind of arrogance in radical transparency. It assumes that my time is less valuable than the effort it would take for a manager to write a concise three-sentence summary. It assumes that because the tools of communication are now ‘free’-Slack, Email, Teams-the act of communicating is also without cost. But the cost is measured in the 45 minutes it takes for a human brain to return to a state of deep focus after being interrupted by a ‘FYI’ notification that has zero relevance to their task. If you multiply that by 105 employees, you aren’t just losing time; you are burning the very fabric of your company’s intellectual capital. We are becoming a culture of skimmers, people who know a tiny bit about everything happening in the building but lack the depth of focus to actually solve the hard problems.

The Shadow Government of Private DMs

Jax J.-P. tells me a story about a company he consulted for in 2005. They had a policy where every single internal document was public. They thought it would foster trust. Instead, it fostered a strange kind of performative work. Employees knew their ‘drafts’ were being watched, so they stopped drafting. They stopped experimenting. They only published things that looked finished, which meant the actual messy work of innovation moved to private, off-book channels. The ‘noise’ of the public channels became so loud that people naturally sought out the silence of the fringes. I see that happening here. The more ‘transparent’ we become, the more I see people wearing noise-canceling headphones, staring at their screens with a glazed intensity, praying that no one tags them in a thread about the new coffee machine.

It’s not just about the volume, though. It’s about the erosion of trust. If you trust me to do my job, you don’t need to show me the sausage-making of every other department. You show me what I need to succeed. When a company defaults to ‘share all,’ it’s often a defensive maneuver. If something goes wrong, the leadership can point to the mountain of data and say, ‘It was all there. You were informed. We were transparent.’ It’s a way to offload the blame for failure onto the people who were too busy doing their actual jobs to read the 55th update on the supply chain logistics of office supplies. It’s transparency as a shield, not as a bridge.

The Focused Relief

Jax J.-P. finally moves from the doorframe. He picks up a small, 5-cent bandage from my desk and hands it to me. ‘Apply this,’ he says. ‘It’s a specific solution to a specific problem. I could have given you the whole first-aid kit, but you only have one cut.’ I wrap the bandage around my finger, and the sting subsides. It’s a small relief, but it’s a focused one. I look at my screen again. The #general channel is now at 95 unread messages. I realize that I am not missing out on anything by not clicking. The fear of missing out (FOMO) is what keeps the transparency trap alive, but the reality of missing out (ROMO) is much more peaceful. I decide to close the tab. The world doesn’t end. The project deadline, if it’s actually important, will find its way to me through a more direct channel, or it won’t. Either way, the noise is no longer my master.

We need to start valuing the ‘Editor’ role in our organizations again. We need people who have the courage to say, ‘You don’t need to know this.’ We need to respect the attention spans of our colleagues as if they were a finite, precious resource-because they are. Every time we hit ‘Reply All,’ we are spending someone else’s cognitive currency. Every time we CC the entire department on a minor procedural change, we are committing a small act of atmospheric pollution. The goal of a healthy culture shouldn’t be to see everything; it should be to see the right things at the right time. Otherwise, we are just a collection of people standing in a storm, shouting about how ‘clear’ the weather is while we all slowly drown in the rain.