Abstract

Spam, the economy of desire

Alessandro Ludovico

Spam, as one of the inescapable communication phenomena of our times, is a lively part of our everyday infoscape. Spam is extremely pervasive and effective for billions of persons whose (easy to spot and trade) personal and open communication door is constituted by few letters/numbers, a @ and some dots. With various final aims, from the fascinating advertisement of miraculous products to the so-called 'phishing', or tricking people into disclosing personal information for nefarious purposes, the spam entrepreneur knows almost perfectly how to verbally titillate his target. So spam it's not only about abusing a common (the smtp and pop3 protocols), and not only about technically survive the frequent providers' cuts of services, but mainly about continually reinventing the concise language of good's charm. And the endless literary war between software spam-filters and spammers will probably never have a winner. It'll be played using different code/sign combinations to trick new filters and go through the verbal protection/censorship. With a constant retina overload, few strategic (key)words can make the difference.