Spam - 9780262018876

The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncraticallyspelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, andpleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Wheredoes it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many differentpopulations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceuticalmerchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, networksecurity professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in thesystem of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may notunderstand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides acultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of aglobal criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of theInternet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets.Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computernetworks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam'sentrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war ofalgorithms -- spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from emailto search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how onlinecommunities develop and invent governance for themselves.