Sunday, November 06, 2005
(10:50 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Spamness of the Spam
As Gmail's spam filtering system has tended from localized breakdowns to outright crisis, I have been increasingly subjected to spam e-mails like the following:Good afternoon,The proper name and the e-mail address are different each time. There is no link. There is no attachment. There is no indication of any telos for such a message -- and hence, I propose that this particular spam e-mail represents spam in and for itself, the very spamness of the spam.
You are very good, thank you!
Rosa
Bye
It is not so much meta-spam as arche-spam, the fundamental ontological grounding of something like spamosity. Cut loose from any commercial or pornographic purpose, spam reveals its most basic properties -- the flattery and the mild agrammaticality. Although every other aspect is plausible as a human-generated e-mail message, no human writer would ever put "bye" after the signature. This is because spam fundamentally wants to be recognized as spam. (John Holbo has pursued this line of thought quite voluminously.)
The development of spam can be seen as an attempt on the part of spammers to push anti-spam filters toward ever more effective methods of recognizing spam and thus allowing genuine human communication to reach the user. In this sense, spam is necessary to the experience of e-mail in the Internet age -- seeing the vast number of messages summarily dispatched by the spam filter, we are reaffirmed in our belief that e-mail provides us always and only with desired communications: convenience-enhancing self-chosen bulletins and, more importantly, real human interaction.
The automated refusal of the false intimacy of penis enlargement, call girls, and debt consolidation underwrites and guarantees the real intimacy that electronic communication has always promised. Indeed, the very experience of the stray fugitive spam message as invasion serves to reinforce the illusion of the electronic medium as a privileged site of intimacy and privacy -- an illusion that is increasingly necessary as the model of security and surveillance comes to dominate what we once thought of as our public life. In this way, spam is the essence and condition of "cyberspace" itself as an adjunct of political control -- and, we may perhaps conjecture, as the possibility of future liberation.
