THE SPAMMER

Maybe one time in a million, some victim would fall for some corny advance-fee fraud ad, or various fake medical pills. So, he made money. But it wasn’t the money that motivated him. He was a Spammer: he had to touch billions of people with spam.

The Spammer felt an obsession with other people’s computers. He was raging with need to abuse the network itself. He had to defile and saturate the inboxes of billions of people. For the Spammer, spam was an aspect of his personality; he was a glorious, unkillable crab-grass in the sidewalks of the new world order.

For the Spammer, data was not “the new oil” — data was the new snake-oil, a black ocean of ruinous quack medicine that flowed like ooze through every crevice of the network. The Spammer was an addict of spam. He couldn’t bear the thought that any innocent anywhere on earth could ever be free of his spam.

Then the Spammer discovered the Cyberdeck: the greatest network ever built.

Bruce Sterling