'I’m Moving You to BCC'

Have you ever been on an email chain, conversing pleasantly with colleagues and/or friends, and been suddenly informed that you have been “moved to BCC”? Was the announcement a tad startling? Maybe a bit confusing? Did the tiny part of you that remains a self-conscious tween wonder whether you had really just been informed that the party was over, while the party was so obviously still going on?

Such fears are, to an extent, well founded: You were, indeed, forcibly ghosted. To the extent that CCs and BCCs are email’s method, as the professional-resources site Levo, “of including multiple recipients in a hierarchical way,” you were demoted, and extremely publicly. But that’s also to say that, in this age of incessant conversation and information overload and , you were shown the greatest gift another human can offer to another, on email: You were given the present of non-presence.