38 Spam Finn Brunton THE COUNTERHISTORY OF THE WEB what the rules are, and who’s in charge. And the first conversation, over and over again: This chapter builds on a larger argument what exactly is ‘spam?’. Briefly looking at about the history of the Internet, and makes how this question got answered will bring us the case that this argument has something to the Web and what made it different. useful to say about the Web; and, likewise, Before the Web, before the formalization that the Web has something useful to say of the Internet, before Minitel and Prestel about the argument, expressing an aspect of and America Online, there were graduate stu- what is distinctive about the Web as a tech- dents in basements, typing on terminals that nology. The larger argument is this: spam connected to remote machines somewhere provides another history of the Internet, a out in the night (the night because comput- shadow history. In fact, following the history ers, of course, were for big, expensive, labor- of ‘spam’, in all its different meanings and intensive projects during the day – if you, a across different networks and platforms student, could get an account for access at all (ARPANET and Usenet, the Internet, email, it was probably for the 3 a.m. slot). Students the Web, user-generated content, comments, wrote programs, created games, traded mes- search engines, texting, and so on), lets us sages, and played pranks and tricks on each tell the history of the Internet itself entirely other. Being nerds of the sort that would stay through what its architects and inhabitants up overnight to get a few hours of computer sought to exclude. Identifying and describing access, they shared a love of things like sci- spam, from the terminals of time-shared ence fiction and the absurd comedy of Monty mainframes in the 1970s to the elaborate Python’s Flying Circus. Alone at the termi- automated filtering systems of Gmail, meant nals, together on the network, they would vol- having to talk about what the network is for, ley lines from Python sketches back and forth SPAM 565 – the dead parrot sketch, the dirty fork sketch, – for instance (Larson, 1994).) The lottery the spam sketch. This last was particularly was an initiative to simplify and speed up the popular because most of the dialogue was process of getting papers to live and work in just the repetition of ‘spam’, whether sung by the United States as a foreign national: a sub- Vikings or shouted by the waitress, and it was ject of obviously narrow interest, which they therefore trivial to generate. You could write had broadcast to computers from Singapore a simple program that, at the right spot in the to Australia to the Netherlands – and, of dialogue, would post ‘SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! course, throughout the United States, where SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM!’ over the vast majority of recipients were citizens and over, relentlessly and without pause, fill- already. To enter the lottery, furthermore, ing the screen, killing the discussion, and only required sending in a postcard, but often overloading the chat platform com- the message suggested that paid legal help pletely, kicking people offline. Jussi Parikka would be needed – a sleazy commercial and Tony Sampson (2009), in the context of misrepresentation. Abuse of the network’s their larger analysis of spam, have shown that many-to-many tools and global reach the sketch itself is built around a communi- had been combined with a moneymaking cations breakdown: the point where noise on scheme. the line overwhelms any particular signal. It In the process of trying to describe this was annoying, but playful and mischievous event, the global community on Usenet set- rather than malign, like unexpectedly blow- tled on spam as the term of art for their mes- ing a vuvuzela in the middle of a conversa- sage and their action: the American lawyers tion. This kind of noisy, frustrating behavior had spammed the network. The word had was dubbed ‘spamming’. jumped into the domain in which we identify The term came in useful in the ensuing today … or rather, it had come closer to our decade-plus – though not with reference to current understanding, in a way that is inti- advertising or commercial messages, which mately intertwined with the development of were their own category of etiquette viola- the Web. tion. ‘Spamming’ remained the domain of After assembling the whole history of noise and the indiscriminate, wasting time, spam, from an anti-Vietnam War message dis- attention, and bandwidth on redundant copies tributed on MIT’s early time-sharing system of messages, on overly verbose and off-topic in 1971, to a Digital Equipment Corporation postings, on tedious rants and cut-and-pasted ad on ARPANET in 1977, to present-day slabs of text. Dave Hayes, prominent on the phishing, comment spam, ‘spammy’ posts discussion system Usenet, wrote a mani- and social network activity, clickbait and festo in 1997 itemizing the forms of social 419 (‘Nigerian price’) emails, I arrived at a misbehavior online – with ‘commercial self- working definition. What is ‘spam’? Spam is promotion’ as a separate entry from ‘SPAM’, the manipulation of information technology which meant precisely being a high-noise infrastructure to exploit existing aggrega- low-signal attention hog over a precious tions of human attention. That is the meaning and expensive medium (Hayes, 1996). This of ‘spam’ once all the technological particu- definition shifted irrevocably in the spring of lars of search engine spamming or phishing 1994, when two lawyers from Arizona posted campaigns have been worn away: follow- a message across Usenet – that is, to com- ing the term’s broad application across the puters around the world, to many thousands decades – both in English and as a loanword of users, indiscriminately – offering their in other languages on the Internet – includes services with the process of entering the US commercial and noncommercial activities, Green Card lottery. (We know this event best criminal and legitimate, with many different through the responses that quote it at the time technologies and platforms, from email to 566 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF WEB HISTORY Twitter to content production. What remains with their lame message, treating the whole consistent, I argue, is the model: spam- network as a passive audience whose time mers identify already existing collections of was theirs to spend. (Some of the complex human attention, and imitate and manipulate distinctions inherent in spam, ‘trash’, ‘junk’, their particular properties to extract value. I and ‘waste’ are considered in the analysis want to say a few more words explaining this collected in Parikka and Sampson (2009), before focusing on the Web in particular. especially Galloway and Thacker’s ‘On Spam is an information technology phe- Narcolepsy’ (2008), and Gansing (2011).) nomenon. Across their many modes and Two consequences follow from studying domains, spammers push the properties of spam in this light. First, we can see the his- information technology to their extremes: tory of networked computing as a thread in the capacity for automation, algorithmic the history of the management and distri- manipulation, and scripting; the leveraging of bution of attention – Alessandro Ludovico network effects and vast economies of scale; (2005) has argued that spam is best seen as distributed connectivity and free or very one instance in a long history, from traveling low-cost participation. So many neglected salesmen to personalized bulk postal mail to blogs and wikis and other social spaces are eye-catching billboards, of trying to interfere out there on the Web: automatic bot-posted with our thoughts and provoke us into some spam comments, one after another, will fill form of consumer desire. Second, we can see the limits of their server space. What this in concrete terms how the nebulous shape of means – beyond characterizing spam as an community online used spam to define itself. activity – is that spammers take advantage The intersection of these two topics brings us of existing infrastructure in ways that make back to the distinctive history of the Web, the it difficult to extirpate them without making ways it gathered attention and formed com- changes for which we would pay a high price. munities, shown to us anew through spam’s Indeed, in Geert Lovink’s argument (2005), crass, hustling, inventive counterhistory. I spam is akin to other network failures like will break this counterhistory up into four identity theft in being inherent in the design – sections, which describe from spam’s side constitutional elements of yesterday’s net- how the Web became searchable, central, and work architecture. Spammers partially sur- social. vive by finding places where the potential value lost and effort expended in locking- down could exceed the harm they do – which reveals those places, and their value, to us. JUNK RESULTS More exactly, spammers find places where the open and exploratory infrastructure of the How, though, could spam have come to play network hosts gatherings of humans, how- a role in the Web? My brief sketch of spam’s ever indirectly, and where their attention is origins, above, is all social spaces: conversa- pooled. The use they make of this attention tion threads on Usenet, chat on time-sharing is exploitative not because they extract some computer networks, and of course email, value from it but because in doing so they where ‘spam’ as a concept and a business devalue it for everyone else – that is, in plain scaled up. The Web, though, was a kind of language, they waste our time for their ben- document navigation system at first – a efit. Recall the objections against the Green markup language and set of protocols for Card spam campaign on Usenet: it wasn’t authoring and exploring knowledge through simply that the lawyers were acting com- hypertext.