Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet

by Finn Brunton

What spam is, how it works, and how it has shaped online communities and the Internet itself. The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam , it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the 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, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand. This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam's entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms—spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent governance for themselves.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Technology, Internet, Computers, 21st Century, Theory

270 pages, Hardcover

First published March 29, 2013

About the author

Finn Brunton is assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet and the coauthor of Communication and Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest. He has written for the Guardian, Artforum, and Radical Philosophy, among many other publications.

Reviews

[briz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aaah. Superbly brilliant. Maybe the best book I've read this year? SO GOOD.

This was basically like a five-hour Idea Channel episode, what with the charismatic host (Finn Brunton's writing - so clever! so fun!), the combination of technology/futurism/literary criticism/culture theory/sociology, the awesomely interesting asides and mind-blowing anecdotes. This was one of those books that my brain absorbed like a giant sea sponge dumped into crack-filled water; I was just so thrilled, so stimulated, SO INTO IT, all the time.

Briefly: it covers the parallel development of the spam and non-spam Internets. Like yin and yang, you kinda realize that one can't exist without the other: what with spam being the gummy, gray gooey, reptilian brain, capitalist slush that inevitably fills the tubes (ALL OUR TUBES, not just the Internet), pushing the edges of our global network's technical capacities and acceptable social behaviors. It runs from the earliest proto-spams of ARPANET to the really creepy blurred-lines spam of clickbaity nonsense like, well, any post-AOL-acquisition Huffington Post article(hoo boy, did they jump the shark there, eh).

The book was amazing because it charted, basically, my experience of the Internet, structuring and contextualizing that experience. Yo, I been online since 1995 (twenty long years, people), and I distinctly remember each spam phase: the proto-spams of AOL, the weird litspam of the mid-2000s, and now the Orwellian awfulness of Upworthy et al. and the linkbaitification of journalism. So, it was like, I FEEL THIS. And, I HAD NO IDEA.

Another great thing about this book is that it's a bit of an action-packed cyberpunk rollercoaster, better than the best Gibson because, well, it's real.

Highly highly recommended. Eleventy stars.

[Vince Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacular. More books should be like this. I got interested in this book because it had a reference to the Pitcairn Islands, which fascinate me a lot. The book ended up being more than I bargained for.
It really delved into the history of the philosophy of the internet, how the internet is an extension of society and as such there needs to be some form of governance. How should that governance be approached?

LambdaMOO developed a fourfold political structure around problems of misbehavior in general and spam in particular...Royalists want the responsibility of dealing with spammers and other bad actors, as well as the means of enforcement and punishment, to remain in the hands of the 'wizards,' the system administrators and others whose access to the system grants them special powers over things like accounts, databases, servers, and the deepest layer of code. Anarchists want minimal interference from the 'outside' in any form; problems within the game can be handled by the in-game community. 'Technolibertarians' hold that the 'timely deployment of defensive software tools' will eliminate the need for wizardly intervention, collective action or community governance. Governance itself is the goal of the parliamentarians, who want to regulate wizardly powers, community standards, and 'mannerly behavior' through the familiar apparatus of votes, ballots, and governing bodies.

I just keep wanting to quote different things from the book in my review. I really loved it and savored it. It was a short read, but dense. I'd never given much thought to spam before. I loved the internet as a microcosm of society. I appreciated his analogies to help understand concepts he was describing. How bees can see something in the pollen of a flower that humans can't just like how computers look for things in webpages that humans don't.
I'd love to have a discussion with anyone who wants to read this book and would be willing to loan you my copy. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

Consider the computer "virus." The virus is associated, obviously with existential threats, both in the mass graves of influenza and future avian flu outbreaks, and with the ontologically uncanny para-life of the virus itself, a complex molecule neither quite matter nor living thing. It ties into metaphors of health and illness, infection and pandemic, the terror of death and a deeply unsettling management of nature (think of white-HAZMAT-suited CDC professionals torching huge piles of dead chickens with flamethrowers) by and elite corps of professionals.

They expose the very limits of "shaming and flaming" when directed towards the shameless and secretive.

Users can take refuge within the relatively spam-free zones that the developers build, such as Gmail and Facebook, with robust filtering and community management, paying with advertising and their personal information and user activity -- with their quantifiable attention.

If 'spamming' at the most general level is a verb for wasting other people's time online, can we imagine a contrary verb? That is, can we build media platforms that respect our attention and the finite span of our lives expended at the screen? How would all the things transacted on a computer screen look if they took our time- this existential resource of waking, living hours in a fragile body- as seriously as they could? A careful arrangement of meaningful information relative to our unique interests, needs, and context. A graceful interjection at the right time, a screen that does not demand a look but waits for a glance, words that are considerate that we humans and not our filters will be reading them, It could be anonymous or rude or obnoxious, produced by machines and algorithms or by humans or crowds of humans, but it reflects respect for the attention of its recipient.

lots of words with this one:
Philatelists: one who collects or studies stamps
Malfeasance: wrong-doing especially by a public official
Shear: a strain in the structure of a substance produced by pressure, when its layers are laterally shifted in relation to each other.
Arbitraging: the simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset.
Integument: a tough outer protective layer, especially that of an animal or plant.
Anomie: lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group. Normlessness
Polity: a form or process of civil government or constitution.
Obverse: corresponding to something else as its opposite or counterpart.
Hypertrophied: enlargement of an organ or part resulting from an increase in the size of the cells.
Grimoire: a book of magic spells and invocations
ipso facto: by that very fact or act
Ontology: the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
Immanent: existing or operating within; inherent.
Polylogue: A speech delivered by several persons.
Facile: (especially of a theory or argument) appearing neat and comprehensive only by ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial.
Gemeinschaft: social relations between individuals, based on close personal and family ties; community.
Gesellschaft: social relations based on impersonal ties, as duty to a society or organization.
Carpetbagger: a political candidate who seeks election in an area where they have no local connections. 2: a person perceived as an unscrupulous opportunist.
Parsimony: extreme unwillingness to spend money or use resources.
Remit: cancel or refrain from exacting or inflicting (a debt or punishment).
Comport: conduct oneself; behave.
Gout: a drop or spot, especially of blood, smoke, or flame
Conjugal: relating to marriage or the relationship of a married couple.
Implicature: the action of implying a meaning beyond the literal sense of what is explicitly stated, e.g., saying the frame is nice and implying I don't like the picture in it.
Manqué: having failed to become what one might have been; unfulfilled.
Salience: the quality of being particularly noticeable or important; prominence.
Lexically: Of or relating to the vocabulary, words, or morphemes of a language.
Laetrile: a drug derived especially from apricot pits that contains amygdalin and has been used in the treatment of cancer although of unproved effectiveness
Speciation: the formation of new and distinct species in the course of evolution.
Corpora: plural of corpus. a collection of written texts, especially the entire works of a particular author or a body of writing on a particular subject.
Charivari: a noisy mock serenade performed by a group of people to celebrate a marriage or mock an unpopular person.
Blasé: unimpressed or indifferent to something because one has experienced or seen it so often before.
Hectoring: talking in a bullying way
Pharmakon: in philosophy and critical theory, a composite of three meanings: remedy, poison, and scapegoat.
Omnium gatherum: a collection of miscellaneous people or things.
Rejoinder: a reply, especially a sharp or witty one.
Tragedy of the commons: In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.
Exigency: an urgent need or demand
Surreptitious: kept secret, especially because it would not be approved of.
Garrulous: excessively talkative, especially on trivial matters.
Vernacular: everyday language
Ductility: is a mechanical property commonly described as a material's amenability to drawing (e.g. into wire).
Anise: a Mediterranean plant of the parsley family, cultivated for its aromatic seeds which are used in cooking and herbal medicine.
Frass: fine powdery refuse or fragile perforated wood produced by the activity of boring insects.
Potemkin village: any deceptive or false construct, conjured often by cruel regimes, to deceive both those within the land and those peering in from outside.
L’homme moyen: the average person, the ordinary man
Flensed: slice the skin or fat from (a carcass, especially that of a whale).
Epistemic: relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.
Inductive: characterized by the inference of general laws from particular instances.
Recondite: (of a subject or knowledge) little known; abstruse.
Stochastic: randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.
Kuleshow effect: The Kuleshov effect is a film editing (montage) effect demonstrated by Russian film-maker Lev Kuleshov in the 1910s and 1920s. It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.
Mandrills: a large West African baboon with a brightly colored red and blue face, the male having a blue rump.
Atemporal: existing or considered without relation to time.
Pleaching: entwine or interlace (tree branches) to form a hedge or provide cover for an outdoor walkway.
Elysian plains: Elysium, otherwise known as the Elysian Fields or Elysian Plains, is a conception of the afterlife that developed over time and was maintained by some Greek religious and philosophical sects and cults.
Diaristic: having the nature of, or in the style of, a diary.
Ballardian: resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard's novels and stories, esp dystopian modernity, bleak artificial landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.
Simulacrum: an image or representation of someone or something.
Habermasian: Of or pertaining to German sociologist and philosopher, Jürgen Habermas.
Epigones: a less distinguished follower or imitator of someone, especially an artist or philosopher.
Parallax: the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, e.g. through the viewfinder and the lens of a camera.
Argot: the jargon or slang of a particular group or class.
Squibs: a small firework that burns with a hissing sound before exploding. 2: a short piece of satirical writing.
Subsumption: include or absorb (something) in something else.
Loquacious: tending to talk a great deal; talkative.
Contemporaneous: existing or occurring in the same period of time. "Pythagoras was contemporaneous with Buddha"
Panegyric: a public speech or published text in praise of someone or something. 2: eulogy

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly detailed, deeply rooted in theory, and filled with interesting anecdotes, 'Spam' tells you just about everything you need to know about spam, our constant companion on the internet.

Brunton talks about internet community and spam as kind of dialectic, balancing, shifting, and redefining themselves against each other in a complex act that gives considerably more depth to "junk mail" than I'd ever given it credit. Brunton has clearly done considerable research with people who were experienced many of these historical events first hand, and provides insight into how and why spam exists within the spectrum of human society and history - it really is interesting.

The book is not exactly pop-sci, however, and reads pretty academic in places where Brunton focuses on theory and rigorously defines terms like this is a technical paper. That can simply be tedious - or possibly pedantic. Brunton is reasonably easy to read most of the time, only occasionally getting caught up in the theoretical discussion that is interesting if sometimes a bit dense for the average reader. Overall, though, if you are looking for a comprehensive history of spam (and a cultural, sociological examination of it), this is absolutely your book.

[Christy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only managed to read the first two chapters. As a software engineer I have a pretty good handle on the SMTP protocol and how (simple) spam filters work, but I thought this book could help me out with some history of spam and fill in some details for me. The prose read like the author misunderstood some technical details, but I expected that. But when he went on to explain how early hacker communities and programming in general was a perfect meritocracy I had to put the book down. If he got this fact about tech society so wrong and some technical details wrong, how could I trust anything else he had to say about the history of spam?

[Don Lundman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an academic book and therefore not particularly well written. Brunton is more concerned with building a conceptual framework — and perhaps a reputation — than with readability. Still, if you have the patience, you can find out why the Internet is flooded with more than 100 billion spam messages every day and yet you see little (possibly none) of it in your Gmail inbox.

Some of the early history is interesting. He has a decent non-technical discussion of botnets although he might have given more time to how they have been weaponized. It is a pity he did not extend his discussion to the robocalls that now land in our voicemail inboxes.

[David Dinaburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

My concern with technology-facing books is how quickly they drop from relevance—SPAM: A Shadow History of the Internet has weathered well over the three years (which is, what, two centuries in internet time?) since I bought it as a birthday gift for myself.

Which is both fortunate—because I loved the book—and unfortunate, because outside of learning other languages in Everquest, spam is an unpleasant experience.

Perhaps I am coming at this book from a non-typical position; after browsing my Goodreads history—which coincides with the time I began working in the Communications department at Columbia—I am forced to recognize that my interest skews toward communications technology, history, and law. I absolutely love this type of thing. So when I say the author doesn’t pull punches with the social and technical side of things and but never talks down to the reader, I don’t know how much my preexisting knowledge enhanced my enjoyment of the text.

After referencing botnets in casual conversation I have been on the receiving end of severely blank stares; the strong metaphors running through SPAM will clarify things like DDoS attacks for the laity: “automatic bot-posted spam comments, one after another, will fill the limits of their server space, like barnacles and zebra mussels growing on an abandoned ship until their weight sinks it.” I am not trying to toot my own horn by saying that I come equipped with a depth of knowledge for this particular content, or that the incurious or naif should steer clear; I want to emphasize that even with a background in law and technology, it really surprised me how little I knew about how the filter on my gmail account works.

This is something I use every day—most of us do—and it is something I simply never questioned or considered:

The possibility of legitimate email misclassified as spam and either discarded or lost to the human eye amid hundreds of actual spam messages is so appalling that it can threaten to scuttle the whole project. In fact, setting aside the reality of potential losses in money, time, and miscommunication, the psychological stress of communicating on an uncertain channel is onerous…It puts the use in the classic epistemological bind—you don’t know what you’re missing, but you know that you don’t know—with the constant threat of lost invitations, requests, and offers. With a sufficiently high rate of false positives, email becomes a completely untenable medium constantly haunted by failures of communication.

The historical aspects are timeless, but the rest of the text remains extremely relevant, which, given the date it was written, makes it frighteningly prescient:

So if ads are the business, and content merely the enticement—that is, the ornament on the engine—why not optimize for advertising?

It is hard not to think of twitter at every turn, which existed enough to be referenced—“…as this book was being written, Twitter spam took off…”—but only three times (while I wrote “That’s so twitter” in the margin nearly a dozen and a half times).

I want this book to be outdated, irrelevant—a primer on the dot-matrix printer or cathode ray tube repair—but it is not. Spam still exists, and it grows more relevant as more content vies for our attention:

Communities and spam as a whole are projects in the allocation of attention, and spam is the difference—the shear—between what we as humans are capable of evaluating and giving our attention, and the volume of material our machines are capable of generating and distributing when taken to their functional extremes.

If anything deserves your attention, it is this book. I will use what I've learned to simply say:
⋆✵Read this book!✵⋆
⋆✵Read this book!✵⋆
⋆✵Read this book!✵⋆




Bonus points are also awarded for containing an awesome story about text adventures that I do not remember from Twisty Little Passages:

When Don Woods wanted to get the source code for Will Crowther’s computer game Colossal Cave Adventure so that he could improve it, he emailed “crowther” at every host computer on the network, as though he was calling every “Crowther, W.” in the phone book. (Woods eventually found Crowther at Xerox’s research center in Palo Alto, got the source, and build it out into the text fantasy Adventure, the first of the great narrative-exploration computer games.)

That’s really cool!

[Ilana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I took a class from Finn Brunton AND HE IS AMAZING SO I READ HIS BOOK. So I am a little biased.

I found this to be one of the best pieces of contemporary internet history I've ever read. He takes the mundane, often under-appreciated universe of spam and turns it in something at once historical, tragic, and fiendishly genius. As a "shadow history" he makes the case rather convincingly that the information we don't want often reveals more about the shape of our internet lives than we ever knew. This book will make you re-examine your entire virtual life, especially in terms of your in-box, your twitter feed and your google search.

I would recommend this book to anyone currently on the internet past and present.

[Scott Robinson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not stand reading this book. The worst kind of academic writing.

[dejah_thoris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very well researched, but I think this needs a second edition. The subject matter is fairly dry as is the writing style. So, it took me awhile to read. I also got tired of Brunton's using the charivari metaphor throughout the book. On the plus side, I liked learning about the early internet. That always fascinates me.

[Pooja Rao · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. Extremely interesting topic, with a lot of great ground to cover, but the author ruins it with all the fluff. Reads like the author chose to cram in all his knowledge and analysis into each chapter before getting remotely close to making any a point. I'd prefer an abbreviated version with more facts and less spin.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little too academic for me in parts to give it an unqualified recommendation, this was still a pretty interesting read that pulls apart spam in ways I never really thought about. I'd be curious to see something from Brunton that's in less of the MIT Press mode as there are moments here and there where some actually fun writing shines through.

[micaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

[posting the review months late:] I went into this expecting to be really bored (because academic nonfiction is often pretty dry) and skeptical (because it’s pretty old now, and while “technology moves fast” is a cliché, it’s true). Plus, the last time I read a book about “new” tech that I got from the MIT dock sale I was underwhelmed.

Well - consider me whelmed!

It was a fascinating read as someone who grew up not only on the internet, but with the internet - including needing to use AOL to connect, remembering hearing about and receiving those early Nigerian prince scams, using email pre-spam filters, etc. So much of what Brunton discusses is just background white noise on the internet these days that it’s jarring to look back on. It wasn’t just the benefit of my own memories or nostalgia making it work though - yes, things have certainly changed since Brunton wrote this, it all feels very prescient. He doesn’t fall into a trap of assuming things will always remain the same, which helps, but I think more importantly the aspects of spam Brunton highlights are still extremely relevant today.

There are individual things I noted as interesting - the ongoing “charivari” metaphor was particularly apt. I noted that we still do this today; from kpop stans overtaking racist hashtags to “we saw you cry” after someone punched Richard Spencer to - in retrospect, really unfairly - John Green’s being bullied off tumblr, this mocking cacophony is how deplatforming in 2023 frequently manifests. The more things change! The inadvertent effect of CAN-SPAM in legitimizing spam was interesting, as was the process of spam becoming something we just know exists and don’t do anything about except hope our (for-profit) email provider sets up filters that will let the legit stuff through.

Particularly effective was Brunton’s discussion of spam post-email - in part because, as he says himself many times, spam evolves to accommodate restrictions placed on it. “Splogs” may be a word I’d never heard, but the incredible proliferation of AI blogs over the past few years, accelerated by ChatGPT recently proves how persistent this form of spam is. He even essentially predicted the existence of influencers today, as a result of spam later in the book.

At one point Brunton uses a metaphor comparing spam to a flower and a bee - information in the flower coded specifically for the bee, a mirror of invisible text on sites or litspam being coded specifically to attract search engines. This metaphor was so effective that it read nearly like a horror novel to me. The idea that there is a world - in which we live - where bots write the posts so that bots can crawl the page (on which bots have placed ads) and bots can put the site on Google’s search results - a human’s only role is to click. We are in essence turned into robots ourselves in this ecosystem of spam - just another cog in a machine, with a single task. We don’t even need to click ON THE AD. This stuck with me for weeks (and I’m clearly still thinking about it months later). I noted a specific anecdote he uses about Captchaking, specifically the quote “paid to be human.” This is all sci-fi shit that really happened and is still happening!

Brunton keeps his focus on spam, and he’s writing within the context of 2013’s internet, but I found that he delivered on his book title’s promise. He really does effectively tell the story of the internet through this lens - a wider scope than I was expecting, and one I deeply appreciated.

[Michael DeSimone · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5. Placing the mind directly in the stream. Easily one of my favorite academic texts

[Jeff Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inadvertently a great history of some of the creation of the lesser-known parts of the internet in general, Spam focuses mostly on the types of spam that have persisted throughout the internet's history, as well as the attempts to try and stop/solve it.

Part of it is a real nostalgia trip (I hadn't thought of the literary spam in ages), part of it a real history lesson (did you know that Usenet was a much more valid precursor to the internet as we know it today?), and part of it a really fun ride for what initially comes across as a bit of a dry history.

Definitely recommended even if the more modern stuff in the book is a bit thin in comparison. Some great research was done here, it's worth a look if you've got interest in internet history.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spam is an example of the best of scholarly writing-taking a single under-examined subject and using it to illuminate an entire field of history. In this case, Brunton elegantly theorizes spam, the omnipresent unwanted messages that clog computer networks and consume scarce attention, and its role in the development of various forms of digital governance over 40 years and three major periods. Both brilliant and readable, Spam is a must-read for the 21st century.

[Samuel Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A complete masterpiece on the history of spam and the countervailing forces against its proliferation.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic. This is the gold standard for thoughtful, engaging, and lucid study of digital culture.

[August Bourré · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utterly fascinating.

[Eystein]

This sounded interesting, but it didn't catch my interest enough to keep going past the first chapter. Maybe another time.