Spam ─ A Shadow History of the Internet

The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncraticallyspelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, andpleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Wheredoes it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped bymany 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, weparticipate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of whichwe may not understand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Bruntonprovides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to theconstruction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadowhistory of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities ittargets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercialcomputer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam'sentrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war ofalgorithms -- spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from emailto search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how onlinecommunities develop and invent governance for themselves.

Finn Brunton is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.