Nick Gillespie in Reason:
Teutonic-style outrage over the infinitely exploding amount of spam – unsolicited bulk emails – has officially replaced weapons of mass destruction and even monkeypox as the leading threat to all that is good and decent about life in these United States. …
In the current climate – which includes various pending and sure-to-be-useless legislative fixes – isn’t anyone brave enough to say something good about spam? Well, I am. I love spam – and not only because I just placed an order for a guaranteed system that will enlarge my penis so that I can use it to clean my septic tank while playing solitaire with a deck of Iraq’s Most Wanted cards. (As long as I’m sharing, I should mention that I only paid $59.99 for all this, using the same unsecured credit card that allowed me to take advantage of Mr. Kwame Ashantee’s generous and urgent invitation to invest heavily in the Ghana Gold and Diamond Mining Corporation. As a highly valued early investor, I also received 30 lbs. of herbal Viagra and refinanced my mortgage at the absolute lowest rate of negative 3.4 percent. Who said the Internet hasn’t delivered the goods?)
Gillespie goes on to cite the entertainment value of the spam he receives, opening a window on an alternative universe he would not otherwise know existed. But his main point is that legislative approaches to controlling spam are going to be ineffective. Since spam transcends national boundaries, no jurisdiction can effectively regulate it. Furthermore, spam is in the eye of the beholder. For these reasons, the only approaches that stand a chance of working are decentralized ones that empower the end-user. And that Gillespie finds worth appreciating. [Of course, this argument is a little like the one saying you should bang your head against the wall because it feels so good when you stop… — FmH]
A reader commenting on his article makes another point in favor of spam, claiming; that it is a great guarantor of personal privacy, making it much harder for the information-awareness Carnivores of the world trying to monitor the email traffic of strangers to recognize what is relevant. I don’t agree with this argument at all, though. Even if 90% of the email traffic is at some point spam, this would just make the surveillance effort more demanding; not impossible. The extra filtering is just an inevitable cost of doing business, but not a prohibitive one.
