Sunday, June 10, 2007

Eggs, spam, sausage, and spam

"Eggs, spam, sausage, and spam from Adam: The Weblog.

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."

- http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/
lol

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