Someone you don't know
Summary: Spam in the Twilight Zone: how the agents of junk email want pushbutton simplicity like the commodities markets.
There's an episode of the Twilight Zone (during its late 80s color resurrection) that has a couple open their door one morning to find a small wooden box waiting for them, and mounted on top of the box was a big red button covered by a removable transparent dome. A little while later they get a call from a gentleman who informs them that upon pressing the button they will get 1 million dollars instantly, and someone they don't know will die. The couple are struck with a horrible dilemma (not to mention a fiendish experiment in user interface design).
In my line of business I'm occasionally asked by a weathered customer “why do I keep getting all this spam?” and I've borrowed a metaphor from this Twilight Zone episode to explain: imagine you had a box with a button embedded in it, and every time you pressed that button you pissed-off ten thousand people who you don't know, but you were guaranteed at least one paying customer. Some ethical businessmen would get rid of that box, or lock it up and throw away the key, or put it in a safe and hold themselves never to touch it unless they were desperate.
But some people, for whatever reasons they have, will sit with the box in their lap and press the damn button again and again and again and again. That's spam. You press the button to send a mass mailing, and for every 10,000 people who mutter under their breath and delete it—and perhaps even swear never to do business with you—you'll get at least one paying customer.
The people who build tools for spamming want to make the distance between cause and effect as short and as seamless as they can. It should be possible to mount a button next to their computer, open up a view of their Accounts Receivable ledger, and see the bottom line jump up every time they press the button. So you can:
- Press the button and it
- issues 10,000 spam, so that
- one of those attracts a customer who goes to the web site and
- places an order which
- shows up on the ledger.
But why? In short, they want to be like commodity brokers.
If you're no longer competing on features, then a commodity market is the place to go, because your income is easily predictable. If Green Goo is trading at a dollar a pound when you sell, then you know how much you have to sell to make a thousand dollars. You can also calculate to the dollar how much your maximum risk is going to be, and you can spread out your risk across dozens or hundreds of different products, and you can take advantage of upswings in the market within seconds of them starting.
But traditionally commodities have been things other than Viagara, income opportunities and pornography. They're more like corn, gold, pork bellies, silver, and frozen concentrated orange juice. These items are in perpetual, if fluctuating supply and demand, and since the demand is widespread enough it makes sense to build exchanges for buyers and sellers to come together—mediated by brokers. For the brokers, this is good business.
Pfizer does not use spam to sell Viagara, but a multitude of self-appointed brokers do, and they're trying to reach the point where they can manage their business and their transactions the same way stock and commodity brokers do. Just like the men with Bloomberg terminals and offices wallpapered with flat-panel monitors, they want to sell arbitrary quantities of product by simply pushing a button.
They're almost there. If you consider that the only factor which makes a commodity a commodity is that it has a consistent quality and a market exists for it, then using spam to sell your goods is like discovering an instant commodity market on-the-fly.
When we say there's a “market” for something, we're saying that somewhere there's somebody who will buy it provided you give them the opportunity and the right price. At a traditional commodity or stock exchange all of those people come to one place, and in doing so they reduce the marginal costs of acquiring each customer to almost zero. If you chose to sell 1,000 pounds of Green Goo you can do so at the press of a button, simply because at any given moment there are enough people who want to buy Green Goo right then. The price you sell your Goo at will be decided according to how many unfulfilled buyers of Goo there are at the moment that you push the button, and that in turn is a factor of how many buyers there were originally and how many sellers have already fulfilled their demand.
In the world of spam, the issue is highly similar. The demand for Viagara and pornography is never high enough to warrant building an exchange for it, but who needs an exchange if you can discover the market for a product simply by carpet bombing every possible place they could be hiding in? And who needs an electronic scoreboard for the market to discover an acceptable price at, if you can just send out multiple waves of spam that advertise ever decreasing prices until you hit one that wins customers?
Let's look at it from the middleman's perspective. First of all, you don't make the product. If you're selling the product directly then you buy it from a supplier and it's his problem to run a factory and pay workers. If you're earning commissions on referrals then your supply is also virtual, unlimited, and incurs no shipping fee. This is just like the way stock and commodity brokers work today. But what about that other feature of commodity markets? Oh yes...
Sending a single piece of email has such an infinitesimal cost, that even if it takes 10,000 little messages to rope one customer, the marginal cost of acquiring that customer is almost zero. It means that while it could cost you $10,000 in software and equipment just to get started with the spam business, you don't have to worry about transaction costs scaling with your sales, and that is one of the hallmarks of a commodity market.
Over time, almost all of the broker's job can be automated. You can automate the harvesting of email addresses by running a web crawler. By sticking tracking numbers in each email you can automate the task of finding out which version of your message draws the most responses, and by obtaining versions of your marketing message by stealing them from other spammers you can even substantially reduce the costs of hiring a copywriter. Automate all that and there's nothing left for the broker to do than... just press a button.
But of course, each time you press the button, there are side effects.
At the end of the Twilight Zone episode (sorry, here comes a spoiler for those folks who haven't seen it), the couple lose their willpower and push the button on the mystery box. Sure enough, the man shows up at their door the next day and hands over a briefcase with a million dollars in it. And as he takes the mystery box away from the couple they ask him what will happen to it next. He puts on a wry smile and says with a knowing wink, "it'll go to another couple. And when they push the button they will receive a million dollars, and someone they don't know will die."
Every time the spammer pushes a button the substance from which the market is discovered (us poor bastards) build up another layer of tolerance the way you would to a drug. And for each successive press of the button the payback gets smaller and smaller and smaller, which means he has to press the button more often just to make the same daily quota.
According to statistics compiled by all of the spam blocking bureaus, such as Brightmail, spam jumped 28% in this last year alone. Your correspondant is personally deluged with over 250 per day, up from ten-a-day only five years ago. And to cope with this volume the world has turned to better and better spam filters, which means that in addition to natural tolerance there's also artificial tolerance, which means that it's necessary to push the button even more. Today, estimates are that spam constitutes 40% of all Internet traffic. That must mean an awful lot of sore button fingers.
So things are not turning out to be just like the stock exchange to these brokers of penis enlargers, cheap home-loans and smutty teen pictures. In some ways it is, but the inverse relationship between its frequency and its effectiveness means that it will never be a reliable way to convert risk into profit, the way real commodity markets are.
Right now you can accuse a spammer of the following: that he is a man who pisses off ten thousand people as a means of discovering one who will buy his product. That's bad enough, but in the future when more than 50% of all Internet traffic is spam, you'll be able to accuse everybody else of subsidizing their trade. In other words, CEOs will go to their CTOs and demand to know why the company is providing an infrastructure for wannabe brokers of junk to peddle their wares. The CTOs will splutter and claim that's not really what the Internet connection is for, but at a greater-than-50% ratio that's what the reality will be. And that's the day when, for the spammer, somebody they don't know will lose their job.
Last 20 responses and inbound links
(These are discovered in real-time and sorted by newest first. See how to get listed.)
- couple gets million dollars button - Bing
- 4. June, 2003 - Socially acceptable bigotry
- Not DisenchantedChris Wenham's LiveJournal
- Pjammer Chronicles
- http://www.livejournal.com/users/pjammer
- http://pjammer.livejournal.com/
- http://www.livejournal.com/users/pjammer/
- pjammer: SpamJammer - Fighting UCE through DDOS?
- Dave's Picks
- Discordian Research Technology
