Spam

The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of
idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to
spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is
caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn
Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many
different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their
botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers
and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and
hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with
choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand.
This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides
a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the
construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows
us, is a shadow history of the Internet 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 computer networks that
became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's
entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present,
with the war of algorithms -- spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows
us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended
consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent
governance for themselves.