Spam blog comments are hilarious to me because of the ridiculously predictable syntactic patterns they fall into. They pretty much all begin with a compliment on your blog so generic that it could be said about any website followed by links to porn/herbal supplement/penis enlargement/loan consolidation/mortgage sites. And when I say links, I mean lots and lots of links. That’s one of the ways it’s so easy to spot spam comments. Who else is going to put fifteen links in one comment?
Thursday, I deleted 8374 spam-comments in one fell swoop, 99.99% of which had been caught by the spam-comment filter.
Here’s a thought — spammers, write bots that post comments with no links. Get yourself approved first as a trusted commenter, then send out your linkage. I mean, come on. Your usual tactics are too obvious. Try something new. I’m not trying to help out the spammers as much as trying to keep my housecleaning interesting. Once I’ve learned to nominalize a type of spam, it’s boring reading the same syntactic pattern 1000+ times.
What I really don’t understand about spam is its prevalence as a method of advertising. I should back up and say that I don’t really understand advertising either. I just don’t get how a photograph of some new car/vacation resort/shirt/cell phone/whatever whose digital enhancements are more obvious than Cybill Shepherd’s glow in Moonlighting is supposed to convince me to part with my money. The more effective kind of advertising is the kind so subtle that you don’t even realize that’s what it is. I would say that bike magazines are an example, because you can’t tell the difference between the articles and the ads, but that’s for a different reason. The ads are clearly ads; it’s just that so are the articles.
 “Buy-cycling” magazine sinks to a new low |
No, the subtle, insidious advertising that’s most effective has to do with convincing people they need plasma TVs (well, TV in the first place), cappuccino makers, ringtones for cell phones, and Microsoft Windows. Things. Happiness has as much to do with consuming things as The Family Circus has to do with humor: people think they’re related, but they’re just not.
But about spam, what I don’t understand is how it persists as a phenomenon. I assume that it persists because its effective. But that’s what I don’t get. Who buys stuff from spammers? Who falls for the old “you won the lottery… in England… where you’ve never been nor bought a ticket” trick? Who hasn’t yet heard of the Nigerian bank account scam? And even if you haven’t, c’mon folks, you wouldn’t trust a stranger who one day knocks on your door and says they want to share 4 million dollars with you if only you’d turn over access to your bank account. Why would you believe an email saying the same thing?
On the internet we’re anonymous, or so we think. For some reason, we think anonymity protects us. So we can be anonymous in our ignorance, our gullibility. At a conference I helped organize in the fall, neuroscientist Chris Wood told the following joke:
In the brain, there is gullibility. How gullible are you? Do you think you could go to a neurosurgeon and have your gullibility removed, leaving everything else intact? If so, you’re pretty gullible and you probably ought to consider having the operation.
While your online identity may be virtual, the money in your bank account is not. At least, it’s not virtual in the same way that online identities are. More money won’t necessarily make you happy, but your happiness depends on having a baseline of material comfort. Falling for spammer’s scams can upset that baseline. Maybe we fall for it for the same reason we buy lottery tickets: we believe we’re entitled to more in life than toiling away at work.
Advertising works in the employ of the two great lies of happiness we’re told in this country. When we’re young, we’re told that everyone has an equal chance to be happy. As we get older, we learn that happiness has a specific shape — it looks like 401Ks, two cars, a spouse, 1.7 kids, and a green lawn. We also learn that some people have a more equal chance at happiness than others.
Later in life we’re told the other lie. No matter how much happiness you have, it’s not enough. But if you’ll only work a little harder, you’ll have more. It’s never OK to say, “I like my life, and I don’t need that new car, that time share at the beach, or any more insurance.”
Thus, the two lies of happiness are complementary: work hard to achieve happiness, and you’ll never work hard enough.
In August, soon after my brother returned to South Carolina from a year spent in South America, the family gathered at the beach to welcome him home. Parting ways at the end of the week, I took the train back to Durham with a one-and-a-half hour layover in Wilson, NC. At the station, I met Roscoe, a former truck driver and cold war era Army vet. He wonders what it will take for this country to turn around, to realize that there is more than enough money in the United States to make sure no sick person is without health care, no hungry person is without food, no jobless person is without a home. Seeing eye to eye, we both wonder why we’re the ones considered radicals.
After serving in the Army in the 70′s, he went to college and studied a little philosophy. We talked about Plato’s Republic, about trying to figure out what justice really is, and about whether the next generation will be any better prepared for the demands of a liberal democracy. Socrates, Plato’s voice in the Republic, didn’t live long enough to see the iPod or its advertisements. Hemlock ended his life prematurely. But even without seeing the ways that Hollywood and Wall Street distort our sense of value, Socrates knew that materialism is a poor substitute for a life of civic virtue. He died 2400 years ago.
Known since the days of ancient Greece, living simply is no more tied to poverty than happiness is tied to wealth. And yet we still have trouble disentangling both.
