Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Existentialist Spam

Comment spam to blogs is approaching crazy scales. I have a good few friends who are despairing of their MoveableType installs; having to spend hours daily strimming out crude adverts for get rich quick or pharmaceutical schemes.

Any open system is eventually going to get gamed, sadly; and the web's free-for-all nature makes it especially prone to exploitation.

It's not all bad though. The comment spam on
Kevin Wen's blog has reached a Beckett like nadir of lonliness - a thousand spambots telling the world that they did nothing, and their lives are empty.

Imagine a web made up of automated scripts, singing their boredom to each other quietly in the dark of thousand server farms. Poetic, n'est-ce-pas?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Do you think they'd start getting some sort of "Life"-like cellular automata intelligence after a while? Is blog spam already sentient?