Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On spammers being a part of the main

Spare a moment for the Turing test — you remember: the one where the wily computer is supposed to get the best of human interlocutors by convincing them that it’s a person. The sci-fi romance version might have human interrogator falling in love with machine, then experiencing an existential crisis upon her discovery that the cultured, witty, romantic would-be paramour is not in the South Pasadena condo he gushed about but actually housed in a standard 19-inch rack in a chilly third floor lockbox of the new server farm in The Dalles, Oregon.

Reality may be a bit of a letdown, as usual, but it is here nonetheless and deserves a welcome.

Introducing (at least to BJS — I’d never gotten these before last week): pretty-damned-smart spam comments.

Let’s say you write a post on your blog, an obituary, as a matter of fact, one of the only serious pieces you’ve written in your life. You get some thoughtful comments and approve them as a matter of course. Then all of a sudden, you get this comment, a couple of weeks after the post:

You start to read it, thinking, “Great, it’s Klortho (long-time commenter on BJS). Let’s see what he has to say — whoa, that’s kind of weirdly empty, and what’s up with the misspelling? Not that I’d ever hold a misspelling against anyone, but he seems like the fastidious type and — huh?! why is Wordpress asking me to approve this in the first place? It’s only supposed to ask for approval on someone’s first comment, and — hey did he start a new blog? Oh, what the– ‘mining stock’?!”

Well, yeah, so you probably got the joke faster than I did. Clearly the miners are looking for gold among the famously well-off patrons of BJS.

It wouldn’t be worth a mention except that there was a similar one a few days later — also tied to the obituary. Come to think of it, it’s still not worth blogging off topic. But since you’ve made it this far, allow me to leave you with the five As, the progressive stages of a spam reactionary:

5. Astonishment – is this really a fake?

4. Apoplexy — yeah, admit it, they get under your skin. How dare they presume to think you would be interested in making a vast fortune off of penny stocks or in increasing her pleasure.

3. Awe – was this really done by a machine?! Oh, yeah, I see — they can program to look for keywords that would indicate obituaries, then pick up the screen names of other commenters, then put in some boilerplate appropriate for an obituary…

2. Adaptation – you know, this is really not a bad idea. If they would just do A, B, and C it would be almost impossible for people to tell that this was really spam…

1. Acceptance – not just acceptance that spam is a part of life. This means acceptance that we have met the spammers, and the spammers are us. Spammers and the recipients of spam, after all, are just two instantiations of the same thing: desire run amok. Sure, we may be smart enough to realize that we won’t end up slim and sexy by buying our diet pills for six cents on the RMB from a Russian pharmacy. We may be savvy enough to avoid sure-to-win stock tips found in blog comments. But are we wise enough to let go of the desires that fuel this grotesque parody? Collectively, apparently not.

Thus: thoughtful spam. Be calm. Enjoy it in moderation. And thank the Internets for all those other smart people working on better spam filters.