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Date of publication (more or less): February 4, 1996
Copyright © by Michael Finley; all rights reserved.

Usenet journal: Forgive me for I have spammed

Just as Gregor Samsa awoke in Kafkas's short story to find himself transformed into a louse, I awoke today to learn I was a giant slice of spam.

Spam, for the non-Interneterati, is what Usenet junkies call any post that is nonsensically cross-posted to irrelevant newsgroups. It is not unusual to see a post labeled say, "Re: Is Win95 Any Good?" in newsgroups as diverse as biz.misc, alt. abuse.recovery, rec.music.dylan and alt.stupidity.

The proliferation of spam (not to be confused with the fine pressed pork product from Hormel, which is currently suing Sesame Street for using a character named Spam) is a matter of intense outrage to Internet old-timers. Perpetrators of spam are besieged with e-mail messages by the hundreds or even thousands, and these messages can be unspeakably negative.

Of course, spam practitioners are predictably not the most sensitive people, so all that hateful e-mail goes unread, or worse, laughed at.

But today the spam dial pointed to me, and I got all that mail, and man, it is unpleasant.

What happened was, I wanted to post a recent column of mine, of a humorous nature, about phones and stairs and a third-floor office, to several Usenet newsgroups. I had done this before. It is a fun way to get a message out to a lot of people.

Now, I have a list in a file of about 25 newsgroups that I might send messages to. The topics include computer life, home offices, humor, and business philosophy. I took this list and edited it down to six groups, four relating to humor, plus alt.support telecommute and rec.office.management.

But I forgot to re-issue the copy-to-clipboard command. So when I dropped the short list onto the newsgroup line, the long list appeared there instead. Since it was long it went off the margin and I did not see just how long it went.

So the story went out to 25 newsgroups, as different as alt.newbies alt. lou.reed and rec.humor.funny. In the morning, I was greeted by over 40 messages, each one denouncing me as bitterly as I can ever recall being denounced.

The nicest ones were short boilerplate messages saying "I strenuously object to your spamming. Please cease at once."

The masterpieces were lengthy tirades that sought to revenge years of pain, aggravation, and cheesiness at the hands of spamsters. I was a proxy for every quick-buck artist that had ever abused the Internet, and they let me have it good. Picture all those sorties over Bagdad at night, and me being Bagdad.

I have to be honest. They upset me. I like to be liked as much as the next person. It's a drag to be hated wholesale! And doggone it, it rankled that a piece of gentle humor was the launchpad for such a geyser of blue vitriol.

I drafted a few defensive notes, but no one believed me. Then it struck me that people were just having fun being mean. It was fun for them if I deserved it, and just as fun if I didn't.

My problem was, I was just vain enough to obsess about the event for an entire day. I reminded myself of a character in a Chekhov story who spent twenty years denying the rumor that he was caught kissing the cook at a holiday feast. "I wasn't, I was only smacking my lips over the succulent fish," he babbled to anyone who would listen to him, till the day he died. Sad; real sad.

No one cared but him, of course. Usenet is a machine. It can only do what it is programmed to do. And as such will never be good at making exceptions, seeing beyond the obvious, distinguishing good intentions from bad. I was like the factory worker who stands too close to the line and winds up being baled, bolted or bottled by his own machine.

People of all stripes take their turn on the Usenet machine, hungry for something -- a bit of acknowledgment, the spark of debate, the pleasure of bashing in the next person's brains.

But every so often something human happens. My 46th e-mail message was from a man in Germany named Bernhard Muenzer. He spotted my meltdown from across the globe, and reached out with some friendly, or at least non-condemning words:

"One of the perils of Usenet is that if you make a mistake, there's a huge audience witnessing it. Rec.humor.funny has an enormous audience, but not everyone there has a sense of humour."

The 40 responses I received, he said, were nothing compared to the hammer that falls on real abusers. Big time violators jeopardize the systems they are posting from -- 20,000 complaints to a system administrator would get the Pope bounced off the net.

"Real net abuse gets responses from people who know what they are doing and who know how to do it effectively. Be grateful you can still tell the tale. Cheers, Bernhard."

I think I will recover from this event. One morning I will awaken and I will no longer be pink, gelatinous, and porky. But I have learned my lesson, and have put my spam forever behind me.

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