[HN Gopher] The father of modern spam speaks (2002)
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The father of modern spam speaks (2002)
Author : mattbee
Score : 34 points
Date : 2023-10-05 08:22 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnet.com)
| ceautery wrote:
| I was expecting Sanford Wallace.
| wifipunk wrote:
| Canter may have been seeking a quick marketing win, but he ended
| up shaping the internet's commercial landscape in a way that's
| still being debated so many years later. It's definitely a
| cautionary tale of how a single action can ripple through an
| ecosystem.
| convolvatron wrote:
| Carter himself posted in reply to some of the outrage at the
| time saying "don't look at me, this is clearly an opportunity
| to reach customers, and its going to be exploited, stupid non-
| commercial rules or not".
|
| its not clear how much that one post affected the eventual
| outcome
| mistrial9 wrote:
| game developers who do not recognize this opportunity are
| f**ing stupid.. I heard recently.. sounds familiar.
|
| It seems like some kind of internal cesspool overflow, where
| reason and empathy are pushed aside with force of self-
| serving actions, and social pressures associated with
| "succeed or FAIL"
| asddubs wrote:
| It was probably inevitable. It's like regular mail, except
| sending it is virtually free, so as the internet inched closer
| to the mainstream over time, this was always going to happen, I
| think.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| what may not be apparent now, with hindsight, is that we had
| not expected that the internet was inching towards the
| mainstream; much of the bushy-tailed optimism/youthful folly
| of the times was that many of us had thought the mainstream
| would approach the internet as it inched online.
|
| (did anyone celebrate 30 years of Eternal September last
| month?)
| autoexec wrote:
| It was certainly not inevitable in the sense that nobody ever
| had a choice to do anything other than send spam. It was (and
| is) always a choice, and the choice of "Don't harass
| countless others for a chance at your own personal gain" was
| always on the table.
|
| It was only inevitable in the sense that given enough time
| some percentage of parasitic assholes will exist who will be
| willing to do anything to benefit themselves no matter what
| the consequences of their actions are for others.
|
| There's a world of difference between "this was always going
| to happen" because of the natural laws of the universe and
| "this was always going to happen" because some people
| actively choose to be dicks, and I think people like Laurence
| Canter believe their actions are somewhat excused because of
| the "inevitability" of what was always just their own selfish
| choices.
| asddubs wrote:
| I agree with that, it's inevitable because of people acting
| selfishly. You could even argue that it might not have
| happened under other economic systems which do not follow
| the principle of the profit motive.
| autoexec wrote:
| Or even one where the profit motive exists, but doesn't
| supersede our responsibility to care for each other and
| the environment we share.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| psychologically and in fact, biologically.. the lowest-
| simplest-most virulent forms of life simply eat whatever,
| take whatever, shit where-ever.. To know this and
| distinguish that among other life forms, IMO is basic to
| self-reflective intelligence. Those individuals without
| critical thinking skills, on the co-dependent super-
| highway, that take kindness to mean "anything goes" ..
| are the support group for this obviously ill behavior.
| Incredibly fast computers and networks are the enabler.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'd agree that there's a strong link between the selfish
| and the lowest, simplest, forms of life. After billions
| of years of evolution we really should be better.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| All societies have an attention economy and spam is a
| "great" way of getting it. It's incorrect to assume other
| economic systems would not have this problem.
| asddubs wrote:
| It's easy to say that, but it makes me wonder to what
| extent that's just projecting our culture onto all other
| possible realities due to a failure of imagination/taking
| aspects of our culture as immutable laws of nature.
| foobarian wrote:
| > natural laws of the universe
|
| > some people actively choose to be dicks
|
| These two are a lot closer than you would like, I suspect.
| autoexec wrote:
| I am of course assuming that we have choice and aren't
| living in a deterministic universe where our actions are
| entirely dictated by natural laws.
| khazhoux wrote:
| It was inevitable in the singular meaning of the word. Spam
| would have happened even if this couple had never existed.
| There is no outcome (*) where the Internet stays free of
| spam (or other intrusive commercialization) forever.
|
| (*) I should qualify, I'm speaking only of our /present/
| universe. It's possible that in another multiverse, no
| human decides to put their personal gain above others.
| dylan604 wrote:
| the concept "if a little works, a lot will work even
| better!" is pretty much a given in everything. nobody
| ever does the "small moves, Ellie". it's "but it goes to
| 11" on everything. with the painlessness of mass sending
| of email, there was no pain to cause someone to slowdown.
| it was an immediate "take of and nuke it from orbit" from
| the word go on everything.
| who-shot-jr wrote:
| "Canter was disbarred from practicing law by the Supreme Court of
| Tennessee in 1997, partly because of his e-mail advertising
| campaign."
|
| I wonder what else he was up to :)
| autoexec wrote:
| He still has no remorse. Says he'd do again if he could, and that
| he'd have no problems sending spam right now. I'm not sure if
| he's an actual sociopath, or if his ego just demands that he
| believe that he did nothing wrong and that spam isn't a problem.
| Either way, people like him make the world we live in worse.
| cooldrcool2 wrote:
| While spam is annoying, I don't think it's at the level of
| sociopathy.
| swayvil wrote:
| Spam is definitely bad for society. So if 1 piece of spam is
| bad then a billion spams is 1B times as bad. That's a big
| factor. Probably getting near axemurderer levels of social
| damage.
|
| Think about it in terms of years-of-life removed from
| society.
|
| If the average axemurderer removes 10 middleaged (40 years
| remaining life) people then that's 400 years.
|
| If spam eats 1 second that's 31 years. (1B secs)
|
| Ok so about 3/40 axemurderer.
| autoexec wrote:
| The financial impact of spam alone is estimated to be tens of
| billions of dollars annually. There are many non-financial
| impacts that extend far beyond "annoyance"
|
| Spam is annoying the way polluting the ocean or mosquito
| bites are "annoying". I don't personally see a lot of ocean
| trash, and nobody I know has ever died from a mosquito bite,
| but there are massive harms with worldwide impacts caused by
| both.
|
| In my view, the refusal to accept responsibility and the
| willingness to repeat and continue his offenses without any
| regard for the harm it causes suggests sociopathy, or at the
| very least narcissism.
| cowsup wrote:
| Labeling him a sociopath implies that, had he never done it,
| nobody would have done it. In the article, he mentions that, if
| he wasn't the first, someone else would've done it in time. I
| agree with that belief.
|
| Directing attention to your business, even without permission,
| is older than the Internet itself. We've had generations of TV,
| radio, and newspaper advertisements, as well as stickers placed
| on lamp posts, flyers in shop windows, or menus placed on doors
| of homes or hotel rooms. Some advertisement is welcome and paid
| for, others are done without being caught. But it's all in the
| name of profit.
| autoexec wrote:
| labeling a serial killer a sociopath doesn't imply that if
| they hadn't killed someone nobody else ever would have.
|
| It's people who refuse to act responsibly in a community
| because they have zero regard for the negative impact they
| have on others that matters here, not which particular
| asshole would be first to act purely out of selfishness.
|
| "Directing attention to your business" isn't a problem
| either, any more than "setting down your butchers knife" is a
| problem. It's when, where, and how you do those things that
| can make it a problem. It's the difference between plunging
| your butchers knife into your dishwasher, and plunging it
| into someone else's chest. People can advertise, with or
| without permission, without polluting the internet and
| turning their selfish behavior into a multi-billion dollar a
| year problem for everyone else to clean up.
| [deleted]
| munchler wrote:
| Side note, but sentences like these slay me:
| "[It] qualified as an unqualified success." "[He] was
| disbarred from practicing law."
|
| Whoever wrote this article was an unintentional genius.
| constantly wrote:
| The first one is kinda interesting. I don't get the humor in
| the phrasing of the second though. Can you explain?
| thewakalix wrote:
| "He was disbarred" already means what they want to say.
| munchler wrote:
| It's an unintentional pun on the word "bar". You can be
| disbarred, which means expelled from the (legal) bar. Or you
| can be barred (prevented) from practicing law. But "disbarred
| from practicing law" is either redundant or double-negative
| nonsense, depending on how you read the pun.
| [deleted]
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