The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

Dorsey Nunn was sentenced to life in prison in 1969. When he was released after twelve years, he started an organization advocating for former prisoners. One of the innovations he pushed was advising employers to “ban the box”—the question asking if the applicant had been convicted of a crime. What if employers only asked the question after they had reviewed the application? Nunn traveled across the country to sell his idea. When Walmart took the box off its form, other businesses—Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Starbucks—followed. Thirteen states have banned the box for all employers. Now more than two hundred million Americans live in places where asking about criminal history at the initial application stage is limited by law.

On his computer, Chris pulled up a list of all the things you can’t do without an address: get an ID card, a passport. You can’t get a marriage license without a street address, nor, in the UK, can you use a post office box. Credit agencies use them to give your credit score. To inform patients of their appointment dates, the National Health Service sends out letters. I knew this firsthand: I’ve missed NHS appointments I didn’t know about, simply because I hadn’t paid attention to my mail. And while you can technically vote without a street address, you will struggle to obtain the forms of identification you need to prove your eligibility.

To receive unemployment benefits—known as “Jobseeker’s Allowance” in the UK—the applicant must turn up in person at a Jobcentre. Jobcentres, too, still issue their appointment letters by mail. If you miss an appointment after a letter was sent out, you can be sanctioned by losing your benefits, Chris told me, for between four weeks and three years.

Digital addresses have the potential to revolutionize e-commerce around the globe. In much of the unaddressed world, the problem is not shipping the item from, say, China, to Tanzania. The problem, instead, is what logisticians call the “last mile”—more specifically that the last stretch of delivery can sometimes make up half the total delivery cost.

Of course, if this book has taught me anything, people don’t always unite around street names. Digital addresses bypass arguments over the meaning of street names. But I like the arguments. Arguments are what divide communities, but they are also what constitutes them as communities. And digital addresses don’t make communities. In a way, they can divide them. Your neighbor’s what3words address is completely unrelated to yours. You can’t learn her address from looking at her house—you have to ask an app, a third party. You can’t ask anyone on the street for directions. And, as Graham Rhind, an addressing expert, told me, digital addresses like what3words “don’t provide any link between our mental maps and addressing, and removing that link stops addressing being effective. There is no relationship between horse.town.faster and what I experience when I traverse through my world.” Digital addresses create a world in which we all exist as dots on a map, each our own island, named by a corporation. And they can also create a world where, as open data expert Terence Eden points out, the address for an Auschwitz camp is grouchy.hormone.elevating.

History is probably against me. This isn’t the first time we have revolutionized the ways we find each other. But in the eighteenth century, residents protested violently when officials marched through their villages painting numbers on their homes with that thick ink made from oil and boiled bones. The people understood the new numbers meant that they could now be found, taxed, policed, and governed, whether they liked it or not. They understood that addressing the world is not a neutral act. Do we?