Handwritten signatures are toast. Kaput. The number of times most of us sign our names on a weekly basis now versus, say, twenty years ago has significantly decreased, and that trend is not going to reverse itself anytime soon. In another twenty years, maybe sooner, you won't be signing anything by hand, ever. And that’s not a bad thing, because the act of name signing has, in many ways, veered into the realm of absurdity and farce.

At the moment, nearly everything about the process of signing one's name appears to be in place to dissuade the signer from giving it an honest go: Signature pads at stores are terribly awkward, credit card receipt signature lines are often far too tiny, and the people accepting our signatures tend not to care about the appearance of what we scribble. Unsurprisingly, we've adjusted our behavior to fit the circumstances. We shorten pen strokes, take liberties, and, ultimately, show very little reverence for the act of signing our names. Chicken scratch predominates—and not even chicken scratch that vaguely resembles one’s name or is repeatable. For many, writing a signature has become an exercise in flick-of-the-wrist renderings that in no way relate to or reflect the letters that are grouped to form our names.

And we'll all be doing that soon enough, as more and more uses for handwritten signatures fade away due to modern replacements. But why wait passively for the inevitable? There has to be a better way forward, and the sooner we arrive at some solid, reliable, certain-to-be-taken-more-seriously signature replacements the better. This chicken-scratch stuff is for the birds.

Fortunately, it may be possible to accelerate the erasure of the handwritten signature from our lives and move along to whatever is going to come next. Together we can expose the uselessness of the modern signature in the vast majority of situations where we are required to sign something by hand, thus hastening the implementation and acceptance of new and better alternatives. But before drawing up battle plans, it makes sense to take a look at how we got to this point.

According to historian Tamara Plakins Thornton, author of Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, the progression of how Americans have used and viewed signatures follows a fairly straightforward and easily traceable path. Prior to the late 18th century, the vast majority of people living in modern-day America could not write. Legal documents were often signed with an X while in the presence of a witness. For those who could write—mostly businessmen and the wealthy—signatures served the purpose of establishing identity, and little more. "There was no notion of [the signature as a form of] individuality at that time," Thornton says. "By the colonial period, some people began to realize that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a distinctive signature, simply to protect against fraud. But 'distinctive' did not mean something that would reflect individuality. That’s not the way an 18th century person would've understood the signature at all."