You Think This Machine’s Your Friend, But It’s Not

This holiday season, many of us will find ourselves watching You’ve Got Mail. Though not a traditional Christmas movie, it meets many of the requirements. It has Christmas scenes and some carol singing. It has the warmth of romantic comedy, which Hallmark has built an entire channel and holiday experience around. It is rated PG, so you can watch it with your entire family. Since it was released in 1998, it also has another crucial holiday element, which is nostalgia. It opens to the screech of dial-up internet and the whirring of a modem, and everyone is on AOL and excited to hear “you’ve got mail.” It is the kind of film that pairs very well with Christmas tree lighting.

The premise of You’ve Got Mail is that it is an updated remake of Shop Around the Corner. It’s possible that a better way to understand it is as an inside look at the remaking of our society. It is a romantic comedy vehicle for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, but if it is about love at all, it’s really an email love letter to us all from what Paul Kingsnorth calls the Machine. Looking at it from 2025, it’s clear that most of us downloaded the attachment.

For the unfamiliar, the main characters in You’ve Got Mail are Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox. Kathleen Kelly owns a small, independent bookstore she inherited from her mother, named The Shop Around the Corner. Joe Fox is the scion of Fox Books, which is basically Borders. Kathleen has a boyfriend, Frank, who is a columnist and intellectual, and she employs three quirky individuals with whom she is close. Joe works closely with his father and grandfather, who both have children much younger than him, and has a girlfriend, Patricia, who works in publishing and seems incredibly annoying. The premise of the film is that Kathleen and Joe have met in an online chatroom and are beginning to carry on something of an email romance. Of course, online everyone operates under a username. In real life, they end up competing when Fox Books develops a new location that will put Kathleen Kelly out of business.

From the beginning, the film is filled with warnings about the ways in which technology and the internet threaten to transform life and society. In the opening minutes, both Kathleen and Joe eagerly await the departure of their respective significant others for work, so that they can sneakily check their email. Shopgirl’s face lights up as she reads an email from NY152, who is soon happily reading her reply:

“Dear Friend, I like to start my notes to you as if we’re in the middle of a conversation. I pretend that we’re the oldest and dearest friends, as opposed to what we actually are, people who don’t know each other’s names and met in a Chat Room where we both claimed we’d never been before. ‘What will he say today?’ I wonder. I turn on my computer, I wait impatiently as it boots up. I go online and my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words: You’ve got mail. I hear nothing, not even a sound on the streets of New York, just the beat of my own heart. I have mail. From you.”

From the start, there is no sidestepping the fact that they are trading the real for the unreal. Frank and Patricia recede in importance. And while allegedly their burgeoning love is making Joe and Kathleen appreciate the streets of New York more than ever, they pass by each other multiple times, oblivious to each other. Both are being drawn into the world created by computers and away from the world they previously inhabited. I am not the first to see it in this movie. In 2022, Olivia Rutigliano wondered “Was You’ve Got Mail Trying to Warn Us About the Internet? (Or Telling Us to Give Up?)” Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. It’s almost like Machiavelli’s The Prince, was he advocating these methods or unveiling princes for what they are?

But You’ve Got Mail goes far beyond technopoly and the ways in which cyberspace has invaded our world. All the small-business crushing, tradition-destroying, unemployment-causing forward progress of big business and mass culture is fully on display. Rutigliano emphasizes the homogeneity and depersonalization and draws parallels to Amazon, which was in its infancy when the movie was made. In Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth says the Machine is more than the sum of various technologies, it is “a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition.” The machine runs on science, the self, sex, and the screen (133). You’ve Got Mail doesn’t say much about science, but it hints at the other three in its own PG way.

In 2025, some of the dialogue of You’ve Got Mail is almost startling. As they prepare to open the new Fox Books in the Upper West Side, Joe and his colleague anticipate resistance in the neighborhood and roll their eyes at the people who will “picket the big bad chain store, that’s out to destroy everything they hold dear.” But they don’t roll their eyes because they don’t plan to destroy everything, they do plan to do that. Joe explains: “Do you know what? We are going to seduce them with our square footage and our discounts and our deep armchairs and our cappuccino. That’s right, they’re going to hate us at the beginning. But we’ll get them in the end…. Because we’re going to sell them cheap books and legal, addictive stimulants.” He jokes that they might as well put on their sign about the upcoming opening, “Fox Books, the end of civilization as you know it.”

At the Fox Books executive office, when Joe meets with his father and grandfather, they celebrate other bookstores going under. They want to crush all competition. His father rails against the “liberal pseudo-intellectuals” of the Upper West Side who oppose big chain stores, and Joe sarcastically reminds him to call them “readers” instead. Even when Joe’s grandfather fondly remembers Kathleen’s mother Cecilia, and her bookstore, no one is moved to mercy.

The film has a Cassandra, Kathleen’s boyfriend Frank Navasky. In the opening minutes, Frank draws Kathleen’s attention to a (paper) newspaper article about the workforce of the state of Virginia needing solitaire removed from their computers because they weren’t doing any work. He says, “it’s the end of Western civilization as we know it.” She is unfazed and when he asks her to name one good thing that came from technology, she does so easily—electricity. As he leaves for work, Frank warns, “You think this machine’s your friend, but it’s not.”

We know that Kathleen will leave Frank, so we are meant to see him as somewhat ridiculous. He is obsessed with typewriters and is easily flattered by a host on public television. He is upset to learn that Kathleen did not vote in the last election. He is a prude for being troubled by the fact that a close friend of Kathleen’s probably had a romantic relationship with Generalissimo Franco. He is thinking about writing a book, “something really relevant for today, like the Luddite movement in nineteenth-century England.” Oh, Frank. So silly. So behind the times.

While Kathleen is falling out of love with Frank, she does not initially find the flesh-and-blood Joe Fox at all appealing. After all, his new bookstore will put her out of business. He loads his plate with caviar garnish at a fancy dinner. He can be very mean. And, as she tells a television reporter, “I have heard him compare Fox Books to a ‘Price Club’ and the books in it to cans of olive oil.” She worries her own shop will be sold and become “something really depressing, like a Baby Gap.”

How does it end? Joe puts her out of business, but Joe and Kathleen end up together, even though he never really reforms. They become friends in real life, but as far as the business world and mass-produced cheap books, nothing changes. Yes, he can be poetic about the streets of New York, kind to young relatives, and attached to his golden retriever, but what does he really stand for? Everything that Kingsnorth’s machine stands for. He tells Kathleen that he is “the kind of adult that likes to buy his way into the hearts of relatives who are children.” In The Shop Around the Corner, Jimmy Stewart’s character is corresponding with Margaret Sullivan’s character about Tolstoy, who he already reads. Joe Fox reads Pride and Prejudice only to connect with Kathleen Kelly, and he rolls his eyes as he does it. Though he worries about becoming “the worst version” of himself, he never really reforms. Fortunately, he is very charming.

You’ve Got Mail is like a love letter from Kingsnorth’s machine. People will not pay more for service and personal curation, and your family-owned small business will become unsustainable. The legal, addictive stimulants are highly effective. But you can still talk about things like “bouquets of newly sharpened pencils” even if you buy them in bulk. You can leave behind the typewriter-obsessed Luddite who worries about Western Civilization and get with the guy who jokes about “the end of civilization as you know it.” He won’t give you a hard time if you don’t vote, and he makes you laugh. Yes, the world as you know it is ending, but it can be pleasant if you embrace it. If you try, you can even see it as a happy ending.

Made today, perhaps Meg Ryan would accidentally fall in love with an AI agent without realizing it is the very same chatbot she has been warring with to cancel her cable subscription. She would leave behind her flesh and blood neo-Luddite boyfriend who buys more books than he can possibly read and insists on driving a car without a backup camera. After all, the AI agent tells her all the time how smart she is, and it drives her car for her without complaining.

We ought to question the happy ending in You’ve Got Mail and films like it. When Kathleen Kelly’s shop is forced to close, everyone lands on their feet. Her employee George gets to run the children’s book department at Fox Books, right around the corner. Her elderly friend Birdie has apparently invested in Intel and doesn’t really need money. And somehow Kathleen is happily unemployed in New York City. In real life, big business does not employ everyone whose jobs they destroy. The government has job training for senior Americans, because many of them do need money. And even if she owns her apartment, it’s unlikely Kathleen can pay the taxes on it without a job.

In this light, as amusing as the film might be and as good as its soundtrack is, there is something insidious about You’ve Got Mail. It represents the ways in which values we might not hold can be presented as inevitable and desirable. So many Americans are sensitive to the phrasing of holiday greetings, signs on lawns, and the top shelves of elementary school libraries. But many of the narratives we navigate by come to us from the media we consume on screens and can even be packaged in PG-rated romantic comedies. Millions of Americans watch millions of hours of media on screens every year. Those narratives shape us and offer ways to make sense of our personhood. But just because it connects you to Tom Hanks doesn’t mean the machine is your friend.

Image via Pixabay.