When I was young, in the golden age of the landline, a phone call was an event. It was announced by a bell loud enough to startle a ghost, and crucially, it cost the caller actual, physical money. This minor economic friction acted as a filter for sanity. You didn't call someone to say "lol" or to send them a meme because the cost dictated that your nonsense had to be worth at least the price of a 10p connection.

Today, email spam is an infinite grazing pasture. Because the marginal cost of sending an email is effectively zero, and AI has makes generating terrible marketing emails easy, the value of the recipient's attention is also treated as zero. We have built the world’s most efficient system for bothering people, then wonder why our inboxes look like the floor of a nightclub at 3 AM.

The tech bro solution is to build better AI filters, resulting in a digital arms race between the spammer’s bot and the receiver’s bot. But the psychological solution is far simpler: we should start treating emails like stamps. Or better yet, like landlines. We should charge 1p to receive them.

Imagine if every email you received required the sender to "unlock" your inbox with a 1p micro-payment. To you, it’s a penny, to a Nigerian Prince or a "Growth Hacker" (shudder) sending ten million emails, it’s a £100,000 invoice. Suddenly, the economics of spam don't just wobble, they collapse.

We don’t value things that are free. By making the inbox free, we’ve turned our attention into a cheap commodity. A 1p "attention tax" wouldn't just kill spam; it would act as a costly signal. It’s the digital equivalent of buying someone a drink before starting a conversation. It’s not about the money; it’s about the etiquette of the toll.

We’ve spent decades trying to make the internet frictionless. Perhaps it’s time to admit that a little bit of friction is exactly what's needed to keep the riff-raff out. If you want my attention, it’ll be one penny, please. Drop it in the slot before you hit 'Send'.