--- Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 07:55:24 -0700 Subject: American Digest: Stop the Spaminsanity From: Gerard Van der Leun <gvdlat_private> To: Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> CC: <gnuat_private> Stop the Spaminsanity One more time. Listen up! See A, hit B!" Professional Internet and government gadfly John Gilmore (He coined the phrase, "The Internet interprets censorship as system damage and routes around it.") is taking spam hysteria to task over on Politech in his note addresssed to Declan McCullagh:On NOT obfuscating email addresses Why have you fallen into the all-too-common fallacy of thinking that if email addresses aren't published anywhere, that will help "solve" the problem of unwanted communications? .... Have we reached a Brave New World in which we all start rewriting online history to suit today's prejudices? Unwanted communications would exist even if every "spammer" was flayedand burned at the stake. You should know -- reporters get more unwanted press releases than anybody.The only viable solution is for the recipient to filter their incoming email. It's the only viable solution because only the recipient knows what they are interested in. The anti-"spam" crowd seems to thinkthat there is a category of communications that NOBODY is interested in, and that therefore should be suppressed. That is obviously false with regard to commercial spam, or the "spammers" would not persist in sending it, since they wouldn't make any money from it. Since some people ARE interested in it, it's our job (if we choose to accept it) to create a cheaper way for senders to reach those people -- cheaper than sending a copy to all of us as well as the recipients who desire it. We cannot compel people to stop communicating, unless we break the basic foundations of our free society. Good luck at finding a cheaper way; my efforts are going into reducing the cost to recipients of unwanted communications, rather than the cost to senders. (There may be religious or political unwanted communications that indeed NOBODY is interested in; these would also be solved by reducing recipient costs to near-zero.) Gilmore takes a lot of positions on a lot of issues and, more often than not, he's right. He's right here as well. I've never quite gotten the fuming, sparking and sputtering that takes over otherwise sane individuals when it comes to SPAM. SPAM is merely a bit of static in the background. Arguments that it "injures productivity" are bogus since that presumes that employees don't spend a good part of their day injuring productivity on the job by reading web pages such as Politech. White collar employees will, when given a net connection, always fritter away hours of their day. To presume otherwise is to presume they are all on some sort of cyberassembly line where if the next email message isn't right on target our massive economy is headed down the drain. Some people making their living selling consulting services on productivity to underworked executives may like to pretend otherwise, but the fact of the matter is that there's always been a huge amount of slack in office jobs and SPAM elinination won't make it stop. It will merely be spent on some site that offers flash Tetris. The Zero-Spam Tolerance cult is just another manifestation of the Nanny Culture where individuals want someone, somewhere (aka "The Government") to solve their quite stupidly simple and simply stupid problems by "passing a law," "making a regulation," and then "enforcing it" across the World Wide Wimpdom. This from a group of users who can actually go in and wade through the process of correcting the Windows Registry? Simps and weaklings the lot of them. Cowboy up, dudes and dudettes! Indeed, the flaming anti-spammers are more and more looking like online's version of the real world's envirowhackjobs who need to torch anything on the landscape that doesn't map to their fantasy of a perfect humanity free world. "Oh, if only there were no SPAM what a bright cyberworld this would be! EXterminATE them!" Everybody who is spending endless cycles on SPAMrage needs to step away from the keyboard, take some Tantric breaths and ask themselves... Two questions: 1) Just how much easier do SPAM filters have to be for you to use them, First Grade or Kindergarten? 2) What do you think God made the 'Delete' key for? I've been listening to this endless group rant since the dawn of "The Great Green Card" flame war and I've had it up to here with the ceaseless sour, ill-made whine. It sometimes seems that if SPAM did not exist, Wooly Webheads would invent it just so they had something to spew about whenever the latest outrage from Microsoft or the Justice Department paled. Gilmore has it right. Spam's here. Spam's clear. Filter it. Delete it. Get over it and pour youself a nice hot steaming cup of STFU. http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/000495.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? 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