scrapbook

All hail to the bards of cyberspace

Here's my "Reply All" to email spammers: I surrender. No, I haven't broken down and paid money in the hopes of obtaining "amaz.ing price:s on pop.ular soft,war.e" or even "a bu'lky p0l-e". Nor have I forged a financial relationship with a down-on-her-luck Nigerian princess.

Rather, I have given in to the mysterious wisdom of it all. I've become mesmerised by the unintentional elegance of the language of spam. It's as if some marketing matrix has been disseminating pure but encoded poetry, and suddenly, like Keanu Reeves's Neo, I can see it all so clearly. I realise I can't do anything about the hundreds of breathless - and, in most cases, shameless - come-ons cramming my inbox every morning. But I no longer want to. Powerless against the barrage, I've decided to treat it as the art I now understand it to be.

Many mailings seem to follow a pattern: a strange, randomly generated name in the "from" line ("Clarissa Cortes", "Damien Foote," "Debbie Butts") followed by something innocuous in the "subject" line ("your account", "re: approved", "he is your brother in the video inequitable").

Then comes a message that starts with a few words of gibberish to throw off filters looking for spam keywords. And the sales pitch, hawking those all-too-familiar, totally unwanted products: diplomas, discount pharmaceuticals, physical enhancements of every conceivable (and occasionally inconceivable) type, home mortgages, etc - often all from the same vendor.

The sales pitches are expendable, but everything else in these messages fascinates me. I am hooked on the accoutrements, the anti-spam countermeasures. They are not only creative, they are erudite. More than one has sent me scurrying to the reference shelf (or at least AskJeeves.com).

One mailing begins: "They are eloquent who can speak low things acutely, and of great things with dignity, and of moderate things with temper. The little trouble in the world that is not due to love is due to friendship." Yes, the first part is a quote from Cicero, but after searching, I've decided the second - despite the patina of philosophical authority - is the matrix's creation.

Quotations, always unattributed, are in these messages. When the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said that "Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing", little did he know that his words would be used to pitch "cheep vigr".

As for the randomly generated names, I'm captivated. Sometimes they're believable, with a certain ring. "Concepcion Quinones", for example, sounds like an MSNBC anchorperson. At other times, though, the marketing matrix outwits itself. How else to explain "Mohammad McLaughlin"?

The names almost always have a middle initial, like the wonderfully named Ameslan G. Oversaw.

In one message, the word generator seemed to have spiralled out of control, producing a DeLillo-esque cascade of consonants: "cheeky flaxen cowboy guano fuchs gallery durance assumption apothegm commission clove gave chromium haney burlington pagoda halite denny rowdy itinerary saccade significant eastland corrigible emerald." It gets better every time I read it.

Oops, my Microsoft Outlook tells me that I have incoming spam. This just might be the most eloquent of all. It says: "wrinkle disappearance. yo." Cicero couldn't have said it better.

Posted by thinkum at June 16, 2004 04:38 PM