49.

Spamming for Victory

Of all their bequests to popular culture, perhaps the most enduring gift of British comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus may prove to be a digital one: the term spam, a catch-all description for the more than one hundred billion items of nuisance email sent every day.

The Monty Python episode in question was first broadcast in 1970, and featured a sketch known simply as SPAM: the brand name used since 1937 by the Hormel Foods Corporation to describe its canned, precooked pork product, either as a contraction of the phrase “spiced ham” or simply because it sounded good (the company themselves won’t confirm which is the case).

Set in a British cafe with almost every single item on the menu featuring spam—often several times over—the sketch culminated in a chorus of mysterious Viking warriors drowning everyone else’s voices out by ceaselessly chanting the word spam.

This satirical indictment of British culinary monotony began to take on its second life during the early 1980s, when—before the advent of the world wide web—the early internet was dominated by message boards and bulletin board systems. A delight in mischief was always a prominent a feature of digital culture, and those who wished to derail discussions developed a habit of copying out the same words repeatedly in order to clog up a debate.

Inspired by Monty Python, the word spam itself and other lines from the sketch proved a popular way of doing this—an effective tactic when some internet connections were so slow that loading hundreds of letters could take a considerable amount of time. In online discussions and early text-based games, the term spamming soon came to describe any process of drowning out “real” content with repeated, low-quality words or other interference.

It was the global growth of electronic mail, however, that provided opportunities for spamming on a hitherto unimaginable scale. Instant, free and unlimited in scope, email was the perfect vehicle for speculative mass communications: a trend usually thought to have begun in 1978, when one of the first recorded junk emails was sent. It came from a Digital Entertainment Corporation marketing representative, and was aimed at almost every single person with an email address attached to the early internet on the west coast of America (around 600 people at the time).64

The term spamming had yet to be used in 1978, but the pattern was a more-than-familiar one. Receiving unsolicited communications via the postal service was already a long-established practice by the time the phrase “junk mail” appeared in 1954. In America, unsolicited commercial messages were being sent over the telegraph system from the mid-1860s, while a number of disgruntled British members of parliament received such messages at their doors in 1864 as an advertisement for the opening of “Messrs. Gabriel, dentists, Harley-street, Cavendish-square.”

And so the inundation has grown alongside communications technologies to biblical proportions, extending today not only to emails, but to everything from “spam blogs” (populated automatically with commercial links) to “spam bots,” which join chat rooms and online games, automatically generating links and enticements. So useful is the term as a descriptor that its meaning continues to widen, encompassing everything from unsolicited marketing calls (“spam marketing”) to printed literature.

With pleasing symmetry, it’s also now common practice to refer to desirable emails as “ham”—and even to ask email senders to use a “ham password” to confirm that they are, in fact, a real person rather than a computer. More inventive means for fighting the spam hordes (both technologically and linguistically) include digital “honeypots,” which simulate email systems ripe for hijacking by spammers but are in fact intended simply to waste their time; and “tarpits,” which are email systems designed to slow the rate of spam arrival to a crawl. Finally, I’m grateful to Lauren Gawne at the Superlinguo blog for highlighting another delightful term: bacn, a “term used for mailing-list emails that you opt into that then flood your inbox—a self-inflicted spam, if you like.” Sounds delicious.