Spam: Opportunity

When I was a kid, this neighborhood was really different.  People were trusting and respectful. They left their doors open. If anyone had news, good or bad, it was shared, and everyone offered congratulations or sympathy. Nobody shouted or mouthed off; nobody pretended to be a friend just to sell you something. And every night, as the electron wind whispered through the silicon leaves, we slept contented… well, the leaves are an invention. And I wasn’t a kid: because the neighborhood I’m describing is the internet. On this day in 1994, it lost its innocence.



The serpent in this electronic garden was the firm of Canter & Siegel, husband-and-wife practitioners of immigration law in Phoenix, Arizona. Their plan was to get clients to pay for something – Green Card lottery entries – that the government actually provides free of charge; not, you rightly assume, a new dodge in the legal profession. The difference is that instead of a small ad in La Voz or Prensa Hispanica, they put their spiel up on Usenet, the internet’s first forum system – in six thousand places:

55,000 Green Cards will be 

given to those who register correctly.  NO JOB IS REQUIRED.

THERE IS A STRICT JUNE DEADLINE. THE TIME TO START IS 

NOW!!

They received, they said, around twenty thousand favorable replies, which translated into a thousand paying clients and $100,000 in income: an amazing result when compared with conventional print advertising or direct mail. They also received some 25,000 outraged messages from other Usenet members – so many that their ISP’s servers crashed. Programmers rushed to create methods to intercept and bulk-erase Canter & Siegel’s postings (called, in a nerdly tip of the hat to Monty Python, “spam”). The two were expelled from the American Immigration Lawyer’s Association; Canter was disbarred in Tennessee for “illegal advertising.” Martha Siegel and Laurence Canter remained, though, unrepentant: “Freedom of speech has become a cause for us.” “The Internet is a very powerful communications vehicle, and it should be available for everyone.” They switched from law to internet-advertising consultancy and wrote How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway, a guide to marketing on the Internet. How to Make a Fortune did not itself make a fortune. The consultancy, Cybersell, was dissolved in 1998; but Canter & Siegel’s influence remains pervasive. Your owe to them your constitutional right to be offered Viagra and viagra cialis online pharmacy pharmacy two hundred times a day.



“Somebody would have done it, if we hadn’t done it,” explained Laurence Canter in 2002, during an interview in which he also complained about the volume of e-mail spam he received. He’s right: the discrepancy between cost and return is too large for a thick-skinned marketeer to ignore.  When you have essentially free access to people’s electronic doorsteps, it doesn’t matter if 99.999% slam their doors in your face and threaten to let out the dogs. One sale in a hundred thousand attempts is still profitable – indeed, the estimated conversion rate for pharmaceutical e-mail spam is one in 12,000,000. No wonder the vast bulk of message capacity, energy, and money invested in the internet is wasted.



Computer simulations of trusting and suspicious communities, using game theory’s well-known “prisoner’s dilemma” as a generic transaction, reveal that the unscrupulous go through an open society like a buzzsaw through balsa – but that simple social conventions soon repair the damage. Merely preferring to transact with a known person or a neighbor in preference to the traveling stranger allows the law to return to Dodge City. We have neighborhoods because neighborliness is the prerequisite for all the benefits we seek from society. The internet, though, is a metropolis of conflicting desires: we want to be visible – yet, at other times, anonymous; we want trustworthy information, but don’t want to be held to account; we want to make money (I wouldn’t object, for instance, if you bought a copy of one of my books); but we don’t want to be asked for it. We live here as in a medieval market-town, where honest citizens feel themselves surrounded by beggars, cutpurses, voyeurs – all sins are catered for, and only a mug lets himself be taken. We can never go home to the old neighborhood.