Spam

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.