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| | | | --- | --- | | Red Rock Eater Digest | Most Recent Article: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 |

spam

``` That was fun. I greatly appreciate the numerous people who wrote with facts or comments in response to the various drafts of "How to Complain About Spam". Let's have a great big round of Internet applause for Putnam Barber, Charles Bell, Logan Bentley, Tom Blinn, Keith Bostic, Bonnie Britt, Lee Campbell, Ralph Chaney, Laura Cooper, Andrew Crump, Paula Davidson, Jim Davis, Jim DeWitt, Brian Dolan, Ian Douglas, Jim Dustin, Peter Eckersley, Roger Fajman, Jeff Fellows, Charlie Franz, Ken Friedman, Barbara Garten, Les Gasser, Dawnne Gee, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Stephen Gilbert, Peter Gorny, Roger Goun, Norman Gray, Darrell Greenwood, Dan Haskovec, Eric Hedstrom, Timothy Hill, Harry Hochheiser, Paul Hoffman, Bill Innanen, Stephen Intille, Drew Ivan, Matthew Januewicz, R. J. Jonker, Mich Kabay, David Kennedy, John Kilmarx, Art Kleiner, Jennifer Kyrnin, Walt Lamia, Michael Lean, Jerry Leichter, Will Leland, Ted Lemon, Ted Logan, Chris Maeda, Skip Malette, Joshua Masur, Stanton McCandlish, Alan Miller, Harry Miller, Jim Miller, Skip Montanaro, Ben Moretti, Scott Morizot, Adam Morris, John Morse, Mike O'Brien, Patrick O'Donnell, Michael Papadopoulos, Bret Pettichord, Ronald Pike, Pekka Pirinen, Matthew Platte, Joe Pollock, Todd M. La Porte, Mike Reizman, Frank Ritter, George Rogers, Tim Ruddick, Shabbir Safdar, Daniel Salber, Maureen Saringer, Bob Schmitt, Winn Schwartau, Tanya Schwartz, Udhay Shankar, Dan Shapiro, Daniel Simms, Craig Simon, Rob Slade, Phil Smith, Richard Smith, Marc Sobel, Peyton Stafford, Jon Stahl, Glenn Stauffer, Sidner Steve, Richard Turner, Ted Wall, Dan Watts, Barry Wellman, Tim Wicinski, Alan Winston, Larry Yates, and Omer Zak. Far out.

Given this throng of contributors, it was embarrassing putting my name on the article as its sole author. It's notorious that copyright law embodies a primitive conception of authorship; this is a good example.

Another thing that struck me while writing and revising the article is that the Internet does not provide good mechanisms by which the community can display its solidarity to itself. Spam is a community problem -- your basic invasion of barbarians -- and it requires a community solution. Yet people get demoralized when they feel alone with the problem. Maybe they've written a few letters to ISPs and gotten a few form-letter responses. But that doesn't seem like much in the face of the flood of spam, and one easily gets burned out. One purpose of this collective writing exercise, it seemed to me as I was reading the hundred-plus useful contributions I received, is as a demonstration of the Internet's power to organize for good as opposed to evil, and for community values as opposed to individual irresponsibility. The Internet needs its own equivalent of big demonstrations in Washington. Those demonstrations display a movement's power to the official powers, but they also display the movement's power to itself, meaning to its own members individually and in their smaller groupings. Some of the really successful collective mobilizations on the Internet, such as CPSR's MarketPlace and Clipper campaigns, worked because CPSR took the effort to count the responses and keep telling the community how big a crowd it had gathered. That's pretty good, but it lacks the symbolic punch of straining amidst the hundreds of thousands to hear Martin Luther King's speech through the PA system after having driven all night to get there and seen the streets thronged with people who share your values, and with whom you fall immediately into conversation as a result. We've got a lot of virtual malls on the Internet, so now maybe we need a virtual Mall. And many other things of that sort.

I'll have an HTML version of "How to Complain About Spam" soon. I'll send out the URL when it's ready.

Phil ```

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