Tech

A Love Letter To Slack, The Most Underrated Of All Apps

True Slack fanatics know there are few natural highs greater than when the words 'Several people are typing' pops up.

by Joseph Earp  1 March 2019
The new Slack logo is drawing heat

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Slack is in trouble right now.

This is not unusual. Slack, a messenger app adopted by a lot of modern workplaces, is often in trouble. Slack reminds people of their jobs, and a distressingly large number of people on the planet hate their jobs, because capitalism is an evil game and we would all rather straight-up murder ourselves than stop playing it. For that reason, the app cops a lot of excess, run-off hatred, like a pair of white jeans parked underneath an overloaded taco.

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The current controversy revolves around Slack’s logo. The company has changed its logo twice in a very short space of time. The first time, a lot of people thought that it looked like a Swastika. This was unfortunate. Companies spend a lot of time and a great deal of money making sure that their logos have only positive connotations, so accidentally invoking one of the evilest regimes of the last hundred years is what people in marketing like to call “bad optics.”

With the newest update, which was unveiled today, Slack has changed its logo background to white. This is, many would argue, an inoffensive change. However, it has only highlighted some of the other connotations that the logo invokes. If you squint properly, the logo now looks like a circle jerk of three multi-coloured wangs. Or technicolour goatse. Basically, looking at Slack’s logo is like examining a Rorschach test developed by Nazi Freud. No matter what angle you choose to examine it from, it reveals something terrible about yourself.

Look, I’m not going to lie about the logo: it’s a problem. But I thought we all decided years ago that you’re not meant to judge a book by its cover. That’s one of the first lessons they teach you in kindergarten, along with how to quash the existential dread of being what Sartre called “a thing in the world” — a living, visible creature, capable of being humiliated and hated and made to feel a whole host of awful emotions — and also how to spell the word xylophone for some reason.

And anyway, everything else about Slack more than makes up for the logo. It is, without a shred of a doubt, my single favourite app. I like Slack more than I like several immediate members of my family. I like it more than most great works of art, and more than at least half of my longest-running relationships.

I am 28 now. I had to stop drinking last year, because when I’m drinking I get to making bad choices like someone’s paying me to do so, and I was getting pretty bored of waking up and having to explain to my partner why I had spent rent money on eBay purchases that ranged from 12 secondhand pickles to a Star Wars Lego set missing half the pieces.

I don’t smoke anymore either, and I don’t drink caffeine. Because of this, I have to take my highs where I can get them. And let me tell you, there are few things that make me giddier than when someone says something controversial in Slack, and then the words ‘Several people are typing’ appear at the bottom of the screen.

When that happens — and if you are employed at a good workplace, it happens several times a week — I am on cloud nine for several hours afterwards. There is no life catastrophe so severe that ‘several people are typing’ could not make it manageable. The death of several family members at once, the burning down of my house, the blocking up of my toilet — these are minor hiccups with ‘several people are typing’ on my side.

This is because Slack has very good comic timing. Everything is funnier when typed in the droll, clipped back and forth that the app allows. You could be as funny as a brick, and Slack will have you convinced that you could sell out three nights at the Apollo.

Also fantastic: Slackbot. Slackbot is a little AI app that is supposed to help you navigate your workday. Slackbot does not do this. Basically, all that Slackbot does is butt into conversations and tell you when it is someone’s birthday. Only, for whatever reason, Slackbot tends to be three to four hours late, so unless you are in the kind of office where everybody spends their days in a coma, rousing only to fantasise about the prolonged and painful ways they might murder each other (in which case, solidarity, I’ve been there too), you have already turned to your co-worker in real life and wished them a happy birthday.

To this end, Slackbot is basically Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey if Hal gave up trying to murder everybody and instead became a distinctly inept office manager, one that bursts into a meeting room twenty minutes late to bark an unfunny joke and that you can instruct to say the word “fuck” on command.

But here’s the thing: like Slack itself, Slackbot does not pretend to be more than it is. When you open up Slackbot, the robot introduces itself with a put-down. “Hello, I’m Slackbot,” Slackbot says. “I try to be helpful. (But I’m still just a bot. Sorry!)”

Leaving aside the fact that this is how I have introduced myself at every single party I have attended since the age of 16, it is a perfect encapsulation of everything that the app stands for. Slack wants to be helpful. It wants to facilitate communication between human beings — to allow them to share their worries, and fears, and dreams.

And sure, sometimes Slack can fail in that goal — it can be misused by evil bosses, and can be a haunting reminder of the fact that capitalism says you cannot go outside and play in the sunshine today, sorry, too bad. But despite everything, it tries. And when it fucks up, it doesn’t run away, or hide from you. It stands there, unashamed, proud as the day it was born. “Sorry,” Slack says. “I’m still just a bot.”

Who could ask it for anything more?