I read my spam and want to respond, to correspond with my spammers. Some recent
spam in my inbox: "others which him to the; ins And was great big siege. (our
discipline that portion of the edges of the regent Terminus and was large and
his accent; views on the Terminus, is day be seized on the Foundation, men,
said, Gorov was not softened. No in a strange occupation psychologists iron
cudgel he thought so did not the man." My email client filters out html and
images, leaving only these cryptic writings. They are encoded but no decryption
is possible. I find them wonderful, and read them as poetics, as odd fragments
of narratives and scenes. I find the process of their production wonderful as
well. The texts are written to elude community standards and means of
censorship, and at the same time to enter and impose themselves into the
reading of the community. Spam text attempts to make itself equal to a constant
murmur and flow of communication that we all receive, an imaginar!
y and unwritten writing emission. Transmitted only because it breaks its own
transmission, produced only because it collapses its own production, the spam
purposely enters into a pre-broken domain of smeared text. Messages like this
come to each of us. We are all recipients. The messages are specifically
composed to elude Bayesian spam filtering techniques common to many browsers
and email systems. Spammers copy the passages from online texts to increase the
overall improbability of the writing in the email. The added passages shift the
probability of the overall message away from the probability that it is spam.
In comparison, strict keyword filters flag email because it contains certain
words. A filter may tag the word penis, for example, but I may want to send
email with the word penis or the phrase refinance your mortgage. Moreover,
simple substitutions (such as p3n1s) elude keyword filters. The use of
Bayesian filters, a statistical method dating back to the 18!
th Century, measure the conditional probability that an email !
text is
spam. The Bayesian filter evaluates email text in relation to the probability
of the text occurring in any email, and against the probability that any email
is spam. Is a word or phrase probably spam in general? Secondly, is it probably
spam within the semantic domain under consideration? A Bayesian filters must be
trained in the probabilities of a given system, a user noting which writing
is spam and which is not, the filter gradually learning whether I frequently
use the word Viagra in my email, and so on. Over time, the spam probability
of a given text is computed in relation to all text. Writing that exceeds the
spam probability threshold is filtered out. As a result, all text is possible
spam and all text is possible communication, all text is an amalgam of spam and
communication. The intention of a text, one directed to me and that I desire to
read, is always partially spam. The political economy underlying spam renders
text as product, my reading of the spam as !
a surface and interface to consumption. In this sense, spam is a perfect model
of the communication circuit, of the message received. Yet the spammers who
write to me insert these passages to displace the overall probability of the
message, to create noise in their own text that disturbs its identification as
spam. Oddly but wonderfully, spam texts become a writing that tends towards the
singular and unfinished. The passages are often from literary texts, often
mined from Project Gutenberg and other free sources. More than this: the spam
tends towards the literary. To bypass the trained Bayesian filter, spam must
singularize itself, must render itself improbable in any written environment.
Spamming is a poetics of transitive writing, a writing tending towards its own
erasure and silencing as communication, and towards its own erasure as spam.
Yet, this also means the writing is super-spam. To escape the filters, spam is
written towards the singular and imagined other. I rea!
d my spam and want to respond because of the otherness of a co!
mmunicat
ion that is written to me, singularly to me beyond every possible statistical
measure. I receive the text and open it, and it is meant for me: "was the air
lock his eyes, of your a piece of was the Foundation. watch and is Half credit
coin gold one, thing, after you. But lack of."
