[mob] Reason Mag's Nick Gillespie: "Why I love spam!"

[Robbie Honerkamp <robbie@shorty.com>]

http://techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-061603A

Why I Love Spam
By Nick Gillespie 06/16/2003


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. "To protect the viability
of e-mail," writes Digital Impact's Hans Peter Brondmo in a
representative, overheated squib on the topic. "This plague must be
eradicated." In The Weekly Standard, the usually perceptive Christopher
Caldwell argues that a rising tide of spam means that "there is no
chance that the Internet will return to its old level of 
user-friendliness until lawmakers recognize that the decision to leave
it unregulated" was a big mistake.

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?)

Even as spam clogs my inbox the way the Atkins Diet is clogging colons 
all over the country - I'd venture that as much as 90 percent of my 
email is spam (and that's not even counting unsolicited messages from my 
staff) - I remain thankful for the wonderful alternative universes that 
the junk opens up for me. Who knew, for instance, that barnyard animals 
enjoyed such interesting, if libertine, lifestyles? Charlotte's Web and 
even Animal Farm never prepared us for the inter-species hijinks going 
down at cyberspace's take on the Farmer in the Dell.

But what I really love about spam comes down to two large points quite
unrelated to bestiality, online gambling, and dozens of messages with
unreadable phrases such as "O?? o,?i >I?? ?u?i..." in the subject line.

First, in what is widely acknowledged to be an unprecedented age of rank
ideological bickering (unprecedented, that is, since the age immediately
preceding our current one), spam has managed to bring the right and the 
left together in a way that even a terrorist attack on U.S. soil failed 
to. "Spam Fight Unites Liberal, Conservatives" shouts a headline for an 
Associated Press story detailing how Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has 
taken the stunning step of teaming up with the Christian Coalition to 
choke spam - especially porn-related spam - off the Internet. Take a 
look at their respective agendas to get a sense of the distance between 
the two. The Christian Coalition's is here and the senator's
here. As John White, a political scientist at Catholic University 
observed, The Christian Coalition is "actually working with someone they 
disagree with on 99 percent of all other issues, and who they would like 
to defeat when he runs for re-election in 2004."

"I sort of had a brainstorm one night and said, `Why don't I reach out 
to the Christian Coalition?'...I called the lady, and she was very
enthusiastic," Schumer told the AP. Thus came into being the most 
unlikely, if unappealing, media coupling since Godzilla took up with the 
Smog Monster some 30 years ago. That spam has prompted a "brainstorm" in 
a politician whose previous legislative efforts have included attempts 
to regulate the cereal industry is itself nothing short of amazing. But 
surely the fact that spam has created not simply a dialogue but a 
partnership between these two is a sign that the Age of Miracles is not 
yet over.

The second large point relates to the legislation that Schumer has
introduced, the Stop Pornography and Abusive Marketing (SPAM) Act. For 
those of us who prefer decentralized, individualized fixes to 
overarching, top-down ones, Schumer's bill, which is one of many similar 
bills floating around Washington, D.C., helps to make our case. With 
certain exceptions (read: exceptions for politically connected groups, 
such as members of the Direct Marketing Association), the bill would 
require commercial emailers to insert "ADV" in the subject line of their 
messages, create a national "Do Not Spam" registry, and let people sue 
spammers for up to $1,000 per offending email (talk about making 
spurious legal action even easier than it is already). Schumer's bill 
would not only potentially outlaw anonymous remailers - a service that 
is part of what makes the Internet the Internet - it showcases how 
political solutions often miss their real mark. "Laws should focus on 
what is the harmful thing that's being done," privacy consultant Ray 
Everett-Church told CNET News' Declan McCullagh. "In the case
of spam, it's really a question of cost-shifting from the sender to the
recipient. If there were a law against shifting the cost of advertising 
onto the recipients, then you could go after junk faxes, spam and 
(wireless) spam."

Which means that Schumer's bill and others like it - not to mention the
nearly three dozen existing state laws - are not only misguided but 
likely to be ineffective. Part of the reason is that, as Pacific 
Research Institute's Sonia Arrison pointed out recently at TCS, "The 
problem with relying on law is that American legislation can only be 
enforced on American firms and much unsolicited email originates from 
outside the country." Even within these borders, she continues, "The 
U.S. already has anti-fraud laws that the Federal Trade Commission is 
frantically trying to enforce."

Another reason Schumer's SPAM Act would fail is that spam, like the
pornography it so often advertises, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, 
more precisely, the nuisance level of spam is highly subjective and can 
only be properly sorted out at the individual level. As The New York 
Times has detailed, the vastly popular "Iraqi Most Wanted" card decks 
were almost completely a function of spam-based marketing; clearly, the 
folks who bought over 1 million decks in a matter of days didn't 
necessarily find that particular piece of spam insulting.

That means that technology - including computer programs that are 
rapidly improving in quality and the innovative micro-payment approach 
favored by Arrison - that empowers the end user, rather than laws that 
seek to speak for all of us, is far more likely to resolve the great 
spam crisis of June 2003.

Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of Reason, which was just named one of 
the "50 Best Magazines" by the Chicago Tribune.