Spam
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What spam is, how it works, and how it has shaped online communities and the Internet itself. The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms—spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent governance for themselves.
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Aaah. Superbly brilliant. Maybe the best book I've read this year? SO GOOD.
This was basically like a five-hour Idea Channel episode, what with the charismatic host (Finn Brunton's writing - so clever! so fun!), the combination of technology/futurism/literary criticism/culture theory/sociology, the awesomely interesting asides and mind-blowing anecdotes. This was one of those books that my brain absorbed like a giant sea sponge dumped into crack-filled water; I was just so thrilled, so stimulated, SO INTO IT, all the time.
Briefly: it covers the parallel development of the spam and non-spam Internets. Like yin and yang, you kinda realize that one can't exist without the other: what with spam being the gummy, gray gooey, reptilian brain, capitalist slush that inevitably fills the tubes (ALL OUR TUBES, not just the Internet), pushing the edges of our global network's technical capacities and acceptable social behaviors. It runs from the earliest proto-spams of ARPANET to the really creepy blurred-lines spam of clickbaity nonsense like, well, any post-AOL-acquisition Huffington Post article(hoo boy, did they jump the shark there, eh).
The book was amazing because it charted, basically, my experience of the Internet, structuring and contextualizing that experience. Yo, I been online since 1995 (twenty long years, people), and I distinctly remember each spam phase: the proto-spams of AOL, the weird litspam of the mid-2000s, and now the Orwellian awfulness of Upworthy et al. and the linkbaitification of journalism. So, it was like, I FEEL THIS. And, I HAD NO IDEA.
Another great thing about this book is that it's a bit of an action-packed cyberpunk rollercoaster, better than the best Gibson because, well, it's real.
Highly highly recommended. Eleventy stars.
