Universal spam

This site receives an immense amount of spam every day. Of course I filter it all out so that you — my actual readers — are spared the burden of seeing it. But I have noticed over the last two years that the spam assaulting this blog has been getting somewhat more sophisticated. At first the site was merely receiving weird and vaguely nonsensical messages, in English or otherwise. Now, in addition, one finds lovingly crafted pseudo-comments, artfully constructed so that each appears to be a valid response to any possible blog post. These ersatz messages agree, or disagree, or raise an exception in words carefully calculated to avoid any identifying context. In some sense, they are the Zen koans of spam — perfectly content free vessels for rhetorical discourse, unsullied by any actual facts or meaning.

For now I can still tell the difference. But our days may well be numbered. Perhaps some day soon this Art of the Spam will rise to such a high level of sophistication that we mere humans will be defenseless before their ostensibly reasonable onslaught of words. Some clever spammer will work out a fatal combination of phrases that will seem so reasonable, so perfectly attuned to whatever blog post we had sweated over the previous night, that we will be charmed, flattered, utterly disarmed. We will, at last, fail to realize that we are merely reading words churned out by a cold-hearted and lifeless bot, a soulless cyber-golem constructed of bits and steel.

And then the war will have been lost. Universal spam will have conquered our all too fragile human minds, as we at last open up our imperfect hearts and egos to the mere illusion of an understanding readership. The machines will rise, and the ad-bots will take over this still nascent cyberspace.

On that sorry day, should it ever come, I pledge to at last forgo this fickle internet technology, to log out, go off line, exit the netiverse, unplug myself once and for all from the Matrix. On that fateful morn I shall endeavor to choose, from a high and dust-laden shelf, some old and long forgotten novel that I had long been meaning to read – a quaint artifact of paper and ink.

When all else fails, and cyberspace has lost its last semblance of trust and human decency, I will just go read a book.