The legacy of spam

  One of the things that I can observe nowadays as a 50 year old man is how spam has changed the world, but mostly the people. You see, when the Internet started it was just a random connection between people and sites and any part of that could be abused. It was customary to enter some site or another and be bombarded with flashing ads with shrill grotesque colors. Popup ads came later to great mis-effect. Email was just as unsafe, people having to publish their emails in strange obfuscated ways so that they are not scraped into spam lists. Spam was everywhere and people were not prepared.

  But people learn, so even lacking any real technical or legislative support against spam, the smart kids would train their own brains to detect and ignore spam. An almost The City and the City situation, if you will, where strident portions of your online experience were just automatically scrubbed from perception through training. It's the reason why I find it so hard to see big colorful buttons with icons on them, because my brain is looking for the useful link that says "Download" in text.

  Spam evolved as well, though. Today we are just as spammed as ever, but in more civilized and studied ways. The purpose, after all, is not to curb your enjoyment, but to make you spend your money or your attention. It's just that the latter are much more important for just about everybody but you than the quality of your experience. Emails send you legit subscription content that you can (maybe and with great effort) unsubscribe from. Sites pop up small joyous messages that nudge you to buy something only when you do an action like scroll the page or move to a section of the site. Legitimate looking alerts warn you about the danger you are in and how you could be helped by just spending a bit of money.

  So that leads me to today, when even the visual language of the internet has changed. Every action has to show a little reaction, a shading, a rotation, a spark, party poppers, shining stars, animated people and animals emoting to your every gesture. And it only gets worse from there.

  And I am asking myself: how do these sites survive? Surely people open them and their brain shouts SPAM!!! in panic and they close the site, right? Well, no. Apparently, people raised on this stuff got addicted to it. A "normal" site with text and images and links feels bland and uninspiring to them. They NEED the feedback and continuous stimulation. My youth spent in the wild early Internet has created imune responses that just fire up regularly today for things that younger generations feel its completely normal.

  I am not here to argue who is right and why, but just to note how this online experience - like any other experience - changes us without our conscious awareness, in directions that takes a lot of time and self reflection to even perceive. To paraphrase Trainspotting: We are colonised by spam. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy thing to be colonised by. No. What does that make us?