Lies, Damned Lies, and Spam

The first fact to realize about any spam you receive is that it is almost certainly packed with lies. Honest people do not spam.

The following text, from a spam by outerspacegames.com, March 1, 2002, goes beyond disgusting to funny, it has so many nonsensical claims in a single paragraph.

You are receiving this email because you have agreed to receive special offers from OuterSpaceGames. or an affiliate of OuterSpaceGames.
This message is sent in compliance of the proposed bill SECTION 301. Per Section 301,Paragraph (a)(2)(C) of S. 1618. By providing a valid "Remove" feature it cannot be considered SPAM. We make every effort to insure that the recipients of our direct marketing are those individuals who have asked to receive additional information on promotional offers from companies who offer Internet marketing products. Again we apologize if this message has reached you in error. This Message Is NOT Intended for Residents Of WA, NV, CA, VA, or CO. Screening of addresses has been done to the best of our technical ability. We honor all removal requests. If you want, you can be removed by Clicking Here.

Here is a quick analysis:

(1) I never agreed to receive anything from OuterSpaceGames or any of its "affiliates." Claims about "affiliates" are commonly used in false assertions of permission, since they are impossible to refute. Not knowing who all the "affiliates" of this spammer are, I cannot demonstrate that I never gave any of them permission to send me mail. But even if I did, that permission does not extend to anyone else.

(2) Outerspacegames neglects to mention that the "proposed bill" is one which died in committee years ago; note the lack of mention of any date. In any case, that law would not have forbidden anyone from calling anything "SPAM"; the First Amendment does not permit laws dictating what people can "consider." In addition, mail which the recipient has requested isn't considered spam by anyone; there would be no reason for outerspacegames to make use of this lie if they were sending mail only to willing subscribers.

(3) Outerspacegames says that the mail is not intended for residents of certain states; this disclaimer makes (limited) sense only if the mail which they are sending is in fact unsolicited. There would be no reason for outerspacegames to refuse voluntary subscriptions from residents of any state.

Not only does outerspacegames.com lie in its spam, its lies are mutually inconsistent. Unlike most third-grade students, they have not yet learned that saying "The cat ate my homework" and "I was beaten up and my homework was torn up" is far less convincing than either lie by itself.

And yet, this is only marginally more blatant than most spam.

Further thoughts, March 31, 2003

I wrote the above at a time when outerspacegames.com's lies could be considered "blatant." Today, they are positively mild compared with the claims of fortunes to be made by laundering a few million dollars. It's gradually become obvious that spam is a subculture (in the bacterial sense) built around a mindset which regards language not as a tool of communication, but as one of control. People whose minds function this way aren't confined to spamming, but they've found their natural outlet there.

The distinction between truth and lies depends on the premise that language is a means of communicating information. No one can completely escape this function of language without becoming a literal brute or lunatic, but for some people it's not the natural way of speaking. For the spammer-mind or the eyada-mind, language is just a way of growling or purring, to induce fear or favor in others. Their standard in formulating sentences is not, "Does this describe reality?" but "Will it cause others to act in the way that I want?"

Because this sort of mind avoids connecting language with reality, it doesn't take plausibility into account. It assumes that if it invents a "law" that prohibits people from complaining, some people will be intimidated into not complaining. That others will recognize that the person fabricating the law is a fraud artist doesn't enter into their calculations. If the lies are mutually inconsistent, the spammer-mind thinks only that each lie will have a cumulative effect. If the would-be victim receives 100 pieces of mail, each claiming a different African fortune to be had, the spammer thinks only that each successive piece of mail improves the odds. "This is not spam." "You have opted in." "We're sorry if you received this mail by error." "Spam is evil ... (pause two breaths) We follow ethical practices when we spam." (That last is the Direct Marketing Association's favorite growl-purr.) To the spammer-mind, each is just an emotive noise, not a statement of actual or invented fact.

Such people have always been around. We see them lurching around streets and subway stations, a bottle concealed in a paper bag. They can be seen in large numbers at some American hockey or European soccer games. But the advent of spam means that they can invade our offices and homes regularly.