Number Three - January 2004

Spam!

Don't you just love it? The whole world seems to be talking about Spam at the moment. That's probably because the whole world seems to be getting flooded with the stuff. There's probably not a great deal we can do about most of the spam we get. Advertising for debt management (yeah right!), how to quit your day job, cheap Viagra, body part enlargement, or even septic tank services (yes I ended up on that mailing list somehow); we just have to put up with them. At least until international laws and treaties manage to catch these idiots. But there is one sort of spam that does piss me off!

We all get spam from friends. You know, the sort of stuff where people send you jokes or cute little messages. Occasionally we get images with interesting or funny captions and all sorts of relatively harmless content. Sometimes we get the same ones two or three times because different people in the same circle of friends are in the habit of forwarding them on. This sort of spam can sometimes get annoying if it becomes too frequent so I try my best not to send them on so as to avoid adding to the general annoyance of life. Occasionally I will send a particular mail to one or two people who I believe might be interested because of the subject matter, but that's it.

However, hidden amidst these benign friendly messages are some that really piss me off! You know the sort that tell you what it is to have a friend and go on to tell you that you are loved. That in itself is a great thing, except that some such friends only demonstrate their friendship by sending such mails and don't seem to do anything else for the sake of maintaining the relationship. Some of these mails even have a positive life affirming message which, as an occultist, I can understand would have some benefit if people only acted on them. Be nice to people, try to have a positive attitude, think twice before carrying a gun, you get the picture. These messages in themselves are not too bad but they can be a bit condescending.

A bit more annoying are the ones that give you some patronising or cute lesson, and tell you to pass it on to 1, 5, 10 or 20 people. They then go on to tell you that the more people you send them onto the better luck you will have. And this really works they say! SOD OFF! I'm sorry but we all know how to operate a computer so we must, surely, be bright enough to know this is utter crap! I know we, as pagans and occultists, have some weird perspectives on life but even we know that some idiot made this up while he was bored at work and that circulating a few more electrons around the world isn't going to change our lives. Furthermore, such a trite lesson isn't going to change someone's character and it's often people's character or personality that is the problem when people are generally shitty with each other. Even those who believe in Karma (and I'm sure Karma is a more complicated idea than this) know that just forwarding an email is not going to generate enough good will to have any beneficial effect. In fact if Karma has any value as a philosophy, then I'm sure that forwarding these pathetic patronising messages is, on balance, more annoying to people that it is helpful to them. So watch out Buddhists, forwarding naff philosophical spam could be bad for your spiritual health!

However, there is one type of spam in this category that pisses me off the most. I hate it so because it is vindictive and I feel so strongly about this that anybody who sends one to me, knowing how I feel, deserves all the bad Karma that the universe can throw at them.

You know the ones I am talking about. Again there is a life message of some sort. They then go on to say the same old tired thing about the more you send it on the more good luck you will receive. But here comes the crunch. Next they have the bloody cheek to say that if you don't send them on you will have bad luck or some disaster befall you! This is inexcusable!

Now I don't suffer fools gladly, but fools normally can't help being fools. So if there are people out there who are likely to believe in the negative implications of not sending this stuff on, they do not deserve to be told that they will have bad luck. At the very least impressionable people could suffer negative psychological reactions just because of doubts or unconscious suggestions planted by these mails. These negative emails are positively harmful even if only to a small number of people. Let's decide here and now to kill them off!

This whole subject is close to my heart because, back in the late eighties, I wrote an essay that covered this subject in some detail. Back then the Internet was merely a twinkling in the eye of a few techies and academics across the world but the chain letter was a well known phenomena. Where chain letters left off spam took up the cause. The essay was called 'Satanic Viruses - The fall of the Roman Empire and how to bring it about'. After the advent of the Internet I updated the relevant bits to include the idea of email and spam.

The book itself, the current edition standing at about 30,000 words, was really a cobbling together of my ideas on magical philosophy, my perspective on the way the world might develop towards the end of the millennia, plus my thoughts on what I called the information virus. The infovirus is the concept of the benevolent chain letter or now benevolent spam.

The idea of the infovirus is just like these trite 'be nice to people' emails. However, I imagined that they would have more interesting content, perhaps use humour to motivate people to send them on and never use threats or negativity to motivate people. Occasionally I receive a mail that I think qualifies as an infovirus, in that it is genuinely interesting or meaningful. Occasionally I get one that is both funny and meaningful at the same time, which was the original idea. So I suppose email has allowed the information virus to really come into being. But the quality of most of them leaves a great deal to be desired. On the other hand we can't all be great philosophers or masters of comedy, and the idea was that anybody should have the opportunity to have their say so I shouldn't be over critical. But the moderating factor on the quality of ideas was that only the best would get forwarded, a bit like natural selection in evolution.

So I suppose my point, after this lengthy rant, is that we should start exercising some control over what we send on in the way of philosophical spam or information viruses. If it has a good message that isn't patronising and you haven't heard it before, then send it on. If it has a good original message and it makes you laugh, then send it on with glee. But if it is trite, boring, preaching to the converted, patronising, or you disagree with the suggestion that good luck will come from circulating junk mail, then delete it. In fact deleting such poor quality infoviruses may just act like an evolutionary process and promote the survival of better strains that are fitter to survive in the email gene pool.

On the other hand, if you receive spam (I won't credit them with the honour of calling them information viruses) that is any of the above, no matter how valid the message, but it threatens any negative outcome, then send it back to the person who sent it to you telling them that you do not approve of this sort of threatening behaviour and a true friend would not do such such a thing. Perhaps take care to explain to them the difference between good and bad information viruses. (Feel free to direct them to this article or to the web site listed at the bottom of the page.)

And finally, if you do find a threatening email that has a good original message, that you think could have a positive impact on the world, then feel free to evolve it. Edit the negative part out. Delete the threatening lines before sending it on.

Now I don't believe in God or gods, but this is a good metaphor so bear with me. Perhaps your conscious decision to improve an information virus could be a bit like God interfering in the development of a species, having created the evolutionary process and set if off to run on its own. However, God becomes disappointed in the progress of a particular species, so he just tweaks the DNA a little. Go on be God today!

Finally here's a web site that looks like it has some usefull information on the subject: www.breakthechain.org

Get it here

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