The War on Spam

I had hoped to slip the Death to Spammers plank of the Uncomfortablist platform by without anyone noticing. Unfortunately it has been questioned, and I am faced with the task of defending it. Why death? Why spammers? We shall deal first with the former issue.

Why Death

Life, if we are to believe Charles Darwin, is the inevitable consequence of leaving things lying around. My refrigerator can corroborate this. Far from being precious, in the sense that a rare crystal is precious, life is just another rearrangement of matter with the disadvantage that it tends to scuttle around and demand its share. Life is an untidy business and no one remotely fastidious can exist long without taking steps to terminate some life form or other. A number of products are available expressly for this purpose from supermarkets, pharmacies and hardware suppliers.

We do not object to death, then, on an absolute basis, those few of us who rigorously practise Jainism excepted. We welcome death, for others. It is easy to demonstrate that we object to death first on a personal, then on a specist basis. Yet if we are eventually to atone for millennia of oppression, how can we hope to do so? Not by positive discrimination, unless we wish to disappear under a tide of small mammals, bacteria, insects and vegetation. The only way to burst free of the specist shackles that constrain us is to think of ourselves, like other life-forms, as somewhat expendable.

Death is nature's way of saying who cares. The philosphical implications of death have proven deeply troubling, as has the logistical issue of how to dispose of the body. The Egyptians and early Christians thought that if you looked after the body carefully it might be some use at a later stage. Yet even with our limited medical and biological knowledge, it has become clear that once you've recycled a few parts, a cadaver is about as much use as a 1983 computer monitor. Composting is to be encouraged, as a means of reducing landfill.

Death is inevitable and uncomfortable, and knowing that is more uncomfortable still.

The Uncomfortablist movement is pro-death, and in this sense, pro-life.

Why Spammers

Just about everyone with an email address thinks of spammers in much the same way they think of cockroaches. Death to Spammers is a winning ticket, because people are so pleased at the prospect of unpleasantness befalling spammers that they vote for it without a moment's thought. The great thing is that spam is impossible to define. It's just whatever you got that you didn't want: unsolicited communication; undesired interaction; encounters where consensuality is absent or regretted.

We have been careful not to discuss our attitude to terrorists, on which subject opinion is so sharply divided. There are people who love them and people who hate them. But everybody hates spammers.

Now without the slightest difficulty we can broaden the definition of spammers to include not only terrorists, but advertisers, marketers, politicians, and people who look at us in a funny way. Death to Spammers allows us to uniformly legislate for summary execution of anybody at all.

The benefits of this cannot be overstated. Goodbye to a crippling reliance on an overburdened legal system, goodbye to endless appeals, goodbye to those opinionated old self-promoters on the Supreme Court bench, goodbye to bursting detention centres. Goodbye to people who look at us in a funny way.

It has been suggested that death is a final solution to a temporary problem; that it may be possible to redeem spammers; that it's a bum rap. The idea seems to be that they might not have meant any harm. Perhaps when they sent emails to thirty million people, signed Randy Teen, it was an accident. And if by some chance they did it on purpose, perhaps counselling, therapeutic activity, a long stay in a small room, finding Jesus, mood-altering drugs, might somehow help them see that spam is wrong.

I don't think so.

We are announcing a War on Spam; a war we intend to win.