The Ghost in the Machine: Monkeys, Spam, and My Small Jang
It’s been said that, given enough time, infinite monkeys hammering away at infinite typewriters could produce the entirety of the works of William Shakespeare. This has nothing to do with the intelligence of the monkeys, but was originally meant as a statement of probability: eventually, crammed into that garbled mess of random letters and punctuation, you would undoubtedly find a sonnet, or an iambic pentameter, or whatever-the-fuck. No one’s saying Shakespeare didn’t mean what he wrote, just that he’s about as brilliant as a monkey with a lot of time on its hands.
While the accuracy behind this thought experiment was probably bold and mind-blowing when it was first uttered, we of the digital age are less than impressed. With the vast and impenetrable weirdness of the internet at our hands, it’s hard to get worked up about some fancy probabilistic posturing. We’ve all seen “two girls, one cup,” and if two people can do that to each other then why couldn’t a bunch of monkeys mash out a masterpiece or two? I mean, in many ways, the internet really is just a cavernous airplane hangar full of riled-up chimpanzees, endlessly throwing meaningless strings of text-feces at us. Sure, there’s a façade of logic to the whole thing: a global, all-encompassing network of individuals sharing their most private emotions and exchanging hardcore pornography. But peel back the thick layer of voyeurism and five person orgies bombarding you at every cyber-turn and you’ll see that all kinds of absurd stuff is actually going on in the underbelly of the purportedly ‘life-altering’ inter-world. And if you want proof, just go ahead and crack open your spam folder.
Before I continue, I have to make a brief disclosure. My original plan for this article was to half-assedly (but lovingly) skim through my spam folder for whatever goofy shit I could find, put the most ridiculous e-mails into a list, and then pat myself on the back for my immense creativity. However, one piece of correspondence caught my eye. Sent by one “Chiara Caron”, it contained nothing more than six words - Phallus Bulky Beverley Martin Fuckstick Monster – and a link to fugyest. com, whatever that may be. Now, I’m not in advertising, but if there’s something here that I’m supposed to be buying, I have no idea what it is. When I get an e-mail from “Pablo T. Lambert,”* for example, telling me that “She will always be hungry for your big new sausage!,” or “Luziandro Lerman” demanding that I “Turn (my) trouser mouse into a one-eyed snake!,” I at least know that there’s a discernible intent to this nonsense – I pay Pablo and Luziandro some amount of money, they give me sugar pills, and I pretend that I have a big penis. But with Chiara, there seemed to be something else afoot, something mysterious and almost a little disturbing. I immediately set out to try and understand the phenomenon of spam a little better.
The majority of spam, as far as I could tell, falls into one of three categories:
1. Logically consistent, but probably not written by an English speaker. These tend to be about penis size, Russian mail-order brides, or getting a Master’s degree in “undertwo weeks.”
EXAMPLE: From “Bartolomei Noam”: “What can I say? I LOVE your product! My wife observes my penis, she cannot believe her eyes “It looks huge and hard” she said, and it looks longer too. After taking ManSter for two months, I can say that I’m so happy that I can satisfy my wife anytime she wants, and no more premature ejaculation. Now, after three months of taking the ManSter pills, I feel even stronger and more masculine. Th anks HerbalKing!” Obta1n Ur M@sters 1n 2 Wkz or LESS No Test Exam or class Require!
2. Logically consistent, but tricked out like a pre-teen’s chat log. I find that these tend to want me to buy Viagra, “legal” marijuana, a membership to a poker site, or “R0L3)(“watches.
EXAMPLE: From “Dr. Christina Byers”: “N3\/\/35T 2008 R3pL1(@ \/\//-\TcI-I3s c0113cT13n! 15% 0ff 1N F3bruary /-\nd 4Ug3 Ch()053 0f R3pl1ca5!”
3. Logically and grammatically inconsistent. This includes emails that lack any discernable purpose, as well as ones that contain strings of random words and bits of sentences, which are inserted in the email to help them bypass your spam filter.
EXAMPLE: From “Rahmi Meilleur”: “Th e better s. ex you have the better you feel get ur Uiagpa. work drought or … temperature extremes. Survival of important food source. the North Korean problem and the Iran nuclear issue. after 19 years in the House, of the consequences of what Th e Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo Pius Ncube Th e remains of a fossilized “burrowing” dinosaur have of Mogadishu.”
Now, the first and second groups are actually fairly understandable: it costs such an infinitesimally small amount of money to send out spam that there’s no real downside to throwing this rubbish indiscriminately across the internet like a big bucket of chum. If even one poor sap opens up his inbox and is somehow lured in by an e-mail titled “Hey.i s big pebnils better ? 7xld”, well, then, the spammer has won. As a result, it pays to make the contents of the spam as absurd and over-the-top as possible, in order to stand out from the rest of the crowd. Frankly, if I were in the market for penis enhancement, I’d be much more inclined to listen to “Desiree Sheehan” (“Change your garden tool into a POWER DRILL!”) or a “Dr. Audra Darling” (“At present small jang is a problem?”) than anyone else. It may seem strange to say, but you can at least see the logic behind this stuff .
That third group, though. That’s the one that gets to me. Who (or what) are the people who write these things? Even weirder, who responds? Part of me feels that they’re designed to cruelly ensnare non-English speakers and the technologically uninclined, like much of the rest of the internet. But think about this: if that’s true, then there is actually someone alive today who is either writing these e-mails or has programmed a computer to do it for them.
Why? Why voluntarily take upon yourself the mantle of monkey-with-a-typewriter? Maybe it’s the lazy in me, but I can’t see someone putting the time and effort into this, just to confuse the occasional grandmother into downloading some trojans. They’re just too random. They feel like the work of some eerie simulacrum of a real person, trying desperately to convince you of its humanity (or in this case, desire to give me a giant “jang”). Now all I think of whenever I read this junk is a typing chimpanzee in a suit smiling one of those crazy chimp smiles and just staring at me. Staring directly into my soul. To make things even worse, I just got an e-mail from “Fannie Mulliken”, titled “aiglaira to to beee or not to beeee vvvvvvvidshfsfaaaaakfhdsfdsgggraa”. Like, what the fuck? The internet knows that I know, and now it’s coming for me. Pray for me, dear reader, |>r@Y 4 /\/\3.
*As much as I’d like to take credit, these names and e-mails are unaltered and consistent with my spam folder.
- [)@\/1{) Gr0\/35
The Red Herring
vol. XIX no. 4
- Digg It!
- Posted on May 14th, 2008
- Articles, David Groves
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