FC: Gerard Van der Leun says stop whining about spam: "Stop the Spaminsanity"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 07:55:24 -0700
Subject: American Digest: Stop the Spaminsanity
From: Gerard Van der Leun <gvdl () cox net>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
CC: <gnu () toad com>

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




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