Last time I promised to tell you all about LIDA, the Korean War-era radio-frequency mind-control device. Sorry, but you're going to have to wait. I've been on a caper and haven't had the time to do LIDA justice. So this week I'm going to recycle some material that originally appeared on GettingIt.com. Then I'm going to just philosophize off the top of my head for a while. Play along. It'll be fun. You might learn something.
Besides, it's good to recycle. There's no point in having perfectly good code taking up space in a landfill somewhere. And it's not just trash I'm recycling. It's something you really should know about. But I can no longer simply post a pointer to it because GettingIt.com is, alas, now defunct. This is a great loss to cyberspace, as well as to the Bay Area freelance community, for whom GettingIt.com was a huge, virtual WPA. And what fun it was! Imagine a place where you could find both me and Lydia Lunch. Ah, those were the days. Actually, I can imagine several such places, but that's another story, perhaps best told by one of our other columnists.
So anyway, I moved the article so you can still read it. Here it is. Check it out. Then read the rest of this.
People are constantly telling me, Lighten up sometimes, dude; all that paranoia is an energy drain. And they're right. It is a drain. But it's worth it. No matter how much your paranoia costs, you only have to be right once and it all pays off. My recent perimeter alarm upgrade, for example, has already bagged a couple raccoons. Yum. Privacy, though, is quite another matter.
As I already demonstrated a few weeks ago, privacy is dead. Say kaddish, hail Mary, and get on with life. If you're doing anything in there that you're ashamed of, especially with your computer, either stop doing it or stop being ashamed, because you are no longer alone, and that's the way it is.
But to hear most people talk, the real problem online isn't surveillance, it's spam. Not to worry. I have the cure. The cheapest and easiest way to deal with a spam problem is simply to find it amusing. Face it: spam ain't going away, not soon and probably not ever, at least not as long as we're still prisoners of capitalism – i.e., hopefully not for long, but let's be realistic.
Sooner or later we will learn to share and cooperate of our own free wills. Then capitalism will starve to death in agonizing poetic justice. Or else it will kill us all off in a hideous war, or worse, in a planet-wide eco-catastrophe. In the meantime, the best we can hope for is bigger cages and longer chains. But advertising is not going away. That is too much to hope for.
So I've resolved to just lie back and enjoy it. You have to admit, some of the stuff is pretty amusing. It's sort of like reading the Weekly World News in the Safeway checkout line. It's there, you're bored, what the hell. "Statue of Elvis Found on Mars," or "$50,000 in six weeks sending e-mail," it's all the same stuff. You may as well have a good laugh.
My current favorites are the computer privacy software ads that started showing up after I wrote that thing about evil cookies. For only $29.95, you can have a nifty piece of software that will set your browser to either reject all cookies out of hand or ask you about each one individually. Of course, you can do this yourself with a very few clicks, right from your menu bar. Or you can buy this little app that does it for you, doesn't tell you how it's doing it, and costs $29.95. It probably spies on you, too, probably with a built-in DIRT or BO clone. Weeks after the first one showed up in my in box, I still have to laugh. They keep giving it new names, like that's gonna change my mind or something.
I also get at least one, often three, ad a week for "Internet spy" software that promises to automatically ascertain my credit rating, find my FBI file, and help me stalk my ex or my neighbors. But it won't stalk me? Yeah, right. Sure. And that lump under my pillow was left by the Tooth Fairy.
Another way I amuse myself with spam is to count it. Like most mammals, I'm fairly obsessed with pattern recognition. It feels ever so good to spot one. It must be genetic. We're hard wired to enjoy spotting patterns. Were it not so, we'd never have made it down out of the trees. All the arboreal protohumans lived their lives in a weltering daze of flickering dapple. Sunlight through leaves, that's pretty much all you see up there except for fruit, limbs, and one another. Oh yeah, and the occasional leopard. Don't forget him. The ancestors who didn't like noticing that one particular batch of moving spots wasn't moving at random but was headed their way with lunch on its mind soon left the gene pool and entered the food chain. You see, the reason we're so smart is that none of our dumb ancestors had any children.
So it feels good to spot patterns, really good. We're born that way. We may as well enjoy it. But I don't live in a tree. I live in a bunker. There are no leopards down here, not even little ones. So I watch spam. It comes in waves. Is it migrating across cyberspace the way ungulates and their predators migrate across the Serengeti? Similarities certainly exist.
A wave of wildebeests drifts over the plain. Right behind them comes a wave of zebras. Next a wave of antelope, packed not quite so densely, drifts by. Then come a few lions. And so forth. Spam passes through cyberspace grazing and hunting, depending on the species. It eats, or not, and moves on. The grass is always greener. These are the rhythms of nature. Spam exhibits many of these patterns. Its migrations aren't seasonal, exactly, but they're something.
Maybe they correlate with some celestial event, cycles of the moon perhaps, or sun spots. Months with an r in them? Hey, I dunno. But sooner or later, I will. You see, I'm keeping track of them the way some biologist out on the veldt would keep track of dik-diks and gnus. I count 'em as they go by. It's much better than counting sheep. When I count sheep, I get sleepy. I don't want to sleep now. I'll sleep enough when I'm dead. Besides, I love nature. It's the best thing on TV. Oh, I suppose I could go outside and count birds like the bird-watchers I saw in the park that time I went out. People actually do things like that, you know. It even furthers science. But I don't like going out. The sun will give you cancer, the air stinks, and cars keep trying to run me over. Besides, there might be snipers.
So I'm in here charting spam on a graph, on a bunch of graphs, actually. They're plotted on butcher paper, held up all over the walls with masking tape. Not only does it give me something to do with the butcher paper, which had been just taking up space before, but it also helps cover up the aluminum foil. The foil is ugly, but it does block the microwaves, most of them, anyway. I hope.
The butcher paper and the aluminum foil make aesthetic, artlike patterns, and the graphs themselves are fascinating, not least in what they reveal. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays spam tends to peak. Tuesdays and Thursdays spam tends to trough. Yet some species of spam seem to like Tuesdays best of all. Other species spike the graph only on weekends. There are patterns here just as surely as there are patterns in the Serengeti. It's the Magnificent Circle of Life, played out before our very eyes. Ah, the ecology of cyberspace! What a never-ending source of delight.
Besides entertainment it gives us knowledge, both arcane and obvious. And you want the stuff to go away!?! What's wrong with you, anyway? Have you no appreciation for nature? And what about the secret, hidden messages embedded in the content? What if an important message is somehow encrypted in the text, a warning perhaps, the Meaning of Life, or maybe even a treasure map? You wouldn't want to miss something like that now would you?
(long pause)
OK, I'm done now. Next time, LIDA for sure. This time I mean it. Stay tuned.
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