What the Hell Happened: Voicemail is Dead, and Kim Kardashian West Killed It

It was an average Wednesday in the late-night television cosmology, by all discernible metrics — until Kim Kardashian West, during the evening’s compulsory Kardashian appearance, revealed that she does not have a voicemail.

The disclosure occurred during a friendly game of “Show Me Your Phone” between Kardashian West and human wind-up toy Jimmy Fallon, in which various buttons on a screen prompted the two to display some element of their private phone usage to the viewing public. Previous demands had included “show us the last texts between you and your spouse” and “show us your last Google search.” (Kardashian West, a billionaire multi-hyphenate mogul with robust resources and immense product-testing enginery, had Googled: “is shapewear better with pee hole.”)

The next shock unfolded in real time. Five minutes into the segment, a benign question appeared: “What is your voicemail greeting when people call you?”

“It’s normal, I think, it’s just me saying I’m not here,” Jimmy Fallon, indeed a “normal” human, said.

“I don’t even have voicemail,” Kardashian West responded.

A nervous hush swept the crowd, then a titter. Fallon furrowed his brow in a way that did not at all seem scripted.

“That’s, like, ancient,” she followed. “Just call me or text me.” Having decimated the stately bedrock of American communication, she turned to the audience. “Does anyone have voicemail these days?” A significant chunk of the faceless crowd — comprised, ostensibly, of New York City teenagers who were either far more with the times than this writer or pathologically compelled to satisfy the siren song of Kardashian’s West complete dissociation from the human condition — screamed, “Nooooo.”

Somewhere far away, Kim Kardashian West’s dentist gasped and realized why her star patient never showed up for her appointments.

As to how and why anyone would actually delete, or deactivate their voicemail in the present day, WikiHow makes a number of strong points. It notes that some phone providers charge extra for a voicemail service; that no one enjoys the cat-and-mouse game of phone tag that it can generate; that the process of deactivation is really quite easy on most phones.

Yet there are some obvious logistical and emotional benefits to the possession of a voicemail. A call from a pay phone, for instance, cannot be made again at a more appropriate time. Birthday messages that flood a line — Kardashian West’s, for the sake of argument — either go unheard or must be mutably translated into text, a far less effusive medium.

Plus, a good game of voicemail phone tag, both elusive and exhilarating despite its minor frustrations, is a truncated facsimile of exchanging snail mail over long distances. It allows excitement to build, for two individuals to work hard in order to hear the other’s voice. In the age of email, one’s voicemail can serve as a distinctly intimate space, preserved for the communiques too important for text yet too personal for Outlook.

Of course, the word of the Kardashians is not law, as of yet — especially not when decreed from the middling soapbox of late-night television. It is doubtful that Verizon will see a significant uptick in voicemail cancellation attempts. But Kim Kardashian West is indubitably a harbinger of certain tastes. And when Kanye West and family deployed to Wyoming for the making and spiritual celebration of his album “ye,” the Wyoming Office of Tourism took notice. If Kim Kardashian West ever turns this sound bite into a crusade, voicemail devotees would do well to administer last rites.

Voicemail isn’t analog, exactly. But it is a vestige of times past, when a phone call meant more than a text, when a text didn’t exist. Voicemail diminishes the immediacy of communication in the digital age. Without voicemail, the modern consumer is perpetually at the mercy of the digital connective tissue that erases time and individuation. A call, and thus a person, is either accepted or rejected; a text responded to or ignored. Any liminal space between a person and their social fabric evaporates, swallowed by read receipts and Caller ID.

But Kim Kardashian West said voicemail is dead, and so it soon must be. One hopes she is carving out quality time for herself and her loved ones in the nonstop choke of a voicemail-less world.

— Staff writer Amelia Roth-Dishy can be reached at amelia.roth-dishy@thecrimson.com.