More Spam, Please
Mark Pilgrim posted a rather depressing commentary on weblog spam earlier today. All valid points, to be sure, but still depressing. Why? He portrays spammers as a sort of perpetual motion gauntlet, forever assaulting us with no forseeable end in sight. I won’t regurgitate what he’s said here, but I’d like to say something to the computer people among us.
Spammers themselves are powerless. Like any person who portrays an image of power, this power is only derived from those willing to support them. Spammers do not know how to exploit Windows vulnerabilities to create a distributed network of SMTP servers. They don’t know the first thing about XML-RPC, or programming, or circumventing filters, or any of the other things that have made them successful. Their only skill is the cruel efficiency of their exploitation.
So, to my fellow geeks, I say this: just as the true ninja does, strive to use your powers for good, not evil. Some day you may get a phone call from a spammer offering you a respectable salary to bludgeon Internet-goers with offers of Viagra and pornography. Please, for all of us (and not least of all, yourself), just say no.
Optimistic? Yes. Naive? Probably. I know what my answer would be, though.
Karl is my favorite True Ninja
It’s not a perpetual motion gauntlet, it’s basic market forces. As long as the commons (senselessly cheap communication) exists to be polluted, it will be polluted.
Your request seems to be dependent on geeks having stronger social ties to the rest of civilization (and therefore stronger moral disincentive to take part in spam operations) than marketers do. That’s not credible.
Probably not, but I’d like to think that my fellow geeks hold themselves to a higher standard. The hacker persona has already been tarnished by malicious crackers, probably beyond repair. It would be a shame to see the same thing happen to geeks.
The problem is, it only takes a few professional spammers to cause a big problem. Even if most geeks hold themselves to a higher standard, there will inevitably be a couple who think they can get rich quick becoming spammers or a few who do it out of necessity.
My sister was lived in Portland after the dot-com burst and she said most of her friend who majored in a computer related field were jobless. While many people who are unemployed still wouldn’t work as spammers, I’m sure there’s a few that saw it as their only way to survive. I mean, people do worse things to make money when they’re unemploed.
Desperate times, desperate measures.
Let’s hope times don’t get too desperate, or it seems Adam and I may be living in a cardboard box in Portland before sending spam for food