All war is based on deception. – Sun Tzu
Spam. We hate it. We curse it. We dread the moment, every morning, when we open our inbox to a flood of the most mundane, inane and insane group of drivel that a thousand monkeys typing at a thousand keyboards could hammer out. We CTRL click and hit Delete with prejudice as we wipe the contents from our hard drives, feeling the kind of dirty that a thousand showers can’t wash away. When we meet at the coffee machine, we share our horror stories in a Kumbayah-inspired moment with our coworkers. And just when we think it’s safe to go back into cyberspace, we get home at night only to be barraged with a whole new set of crayon-inspired messages from pretend deposed princes, fake ailing widows and shady imaginary lawyers.
What’s an honest, Steve Jobs-fearing IT professional to do? It seems that we can’t wipe away the dirt, no matter how much effort we put into it. In a war that appears to have no discernable end, we might be inspired to move to a desert island and reinvent the Internet using a couple of coconuts strung together with twine and connected to iPads fabricated out of bamboo; but that’s not practical and batteries made of bananas just don’t pack the same power as Li-ion polymer. Besides – and sorry for the generalization – most tech people don’t do sun very well and the rich tan of a desert island is sparse solace compared to the pasty white glow we work so hard to nurture as we’re bathed in the glow of our tanning beds – computer monitors. We toil away in our organization’s headquarters, buried deep underground like so many orcs and trolls, as if they put us there to contain us and make us prisoners. All the while, we curse spam and hate it for what it represents.
Don’t Hate the Player – Hate the Game
I don’t know why a player wanna hate T
I didn’t choose the game, the game chose me – Ice T
It’s easy to dole out the significant amount of spite we feel toward the individuals who concoct these ridiculous schemes. It’s more difficult to accept the fact that the game, for lack of a better word, wasn’t devised by any one person. A game is what spam has become, the sheer mediocrity of the schemes making it all-too-obvious that while a great deal of thought and planning has not gone into most of them, these schemes are still somehow designed to defeat us. At very least, they irritate, a mosquito that just can’t be swatted. At very worst, they are effective enough to cause some serious damage, both financially and organizationally.
It would be wrong to hate any one individual who targets us, the same way it would be wrong to turn down a meal because there was broccoli on the plate and you didn’t like broccoli. Even if the meal is terrible, hating broccoli won’t really help you know that the meal is terrible. Indeed, if there is any one thing worth hating, it’s the way that spam has infiltrated our society like the social disease it is. The less savory qualities of humanity – greed, deception, indifference, apathy – are the true villains here and truly worthy of our disgust.
It’s Okay to be Bad – Just Don’t be Seen
If the enemy is in range, so are you. – Murphy’s Laws of Combat
If spam has taught us anything over the handful of years it’s been around, it’s that the worse the spam, the better it is. I’m using ‘bad’ here not in the sense of malevolence, but in the sense of ineptitude. If spam truly is a game – and I believe it is – then it’s no secret that spammers are the worst gamers in history. I hope someday to meet all of them on the battlefield in Call of Duty because there are some easy XPs there, and I could work off some frustration at the incalculable hours spent dealing with their frivolous crap.
It’s because spam’s so bad that it’s actually good. Spam is so obvious that it would be laughable – if it didn’t give us headaches. Unfortunately, we may be facing a world of hurt in the future, because the spammers are getting better at what they do. Let’s face it: we shouldn’t worry about the enemies we can see coming. It’s the ones we can’t see that should concern us.