spam,

anything “demonstrably cheaper to produce than to deal with,” especially when it owes its existence to the disparity; compare artificia which, almost by definition, take more effort to create than consume. “Bane of modernity,” the original “spam” was targeting susceptible minorities with indiscriminate broadcasting, typically for commercial gain; the catchy dysphemism tinged other pestilences of the age: vandalism, pollution, slack.  ■    Only viable with large and homogeneous audiences, modernity’s spam was the first to suffer at the onset of sparsening; feeleries enabled uncannily personal targeting but, in the diverging moleculizing world, response rates kept falling. More to the point, little remained to spam about: “life horizontalized,” compilers were killing commercial incentive for tangible goods (for intangibles that had already happened); the crumbling ad-driven economy saw whole sectors going moneyfree.  ■    Late-modernity advertising had gone full circle: from naively boastful, pseudofactual beginnings to the apogee of “branding” (self-mocking art, little substance) — and back again to honest-to-goodness utility, humility, noble intent; the last to die out was, effectively, an antipode to spam: the excruciatingly personal and in-person pitch, often with a background lore, not unlike religious proselytizing or ethi engaging. As a reaction, the very idea of for-profit communication — even pure will fundraising — remained taboo for generations, suspiciousness at times bordered on paranoia: spam-proof communication modes rose to brief popularity only to become suspect and get deserted.  ■    Water finds a crease to seep, so does exploiting others' gullibility — though what remains of it now tends to be unconscious or canalized into justifiable institutions (wizarding). That didn’t stop spam from becoming a byword in fadeout circles where the “gratis world” of evolving and grassgrowing is habitually lambasted (but take a real job in knowledge one day to appreciate the cost of the “free”: “spam as a label is itself spam for its easy dismissiveness”). ■    Spam also describes any replicator outreproducing competition and homogenizing the environment (blooms, epidemics, population explosions); the planet’s natural history — from plague to rething — is one of becoming gradually spam-proof, of narrowing the horizon that a successful replicator can conquer “for free” (i.e. without significant dialectization, adaptation, speciation). Limits to the speed of communication and travel cause geographic differentiation; localities spammed by a single lineage stagnate, lose long-term adaptability, their more evolutionarily active neighbors — not storing all eggs in one basket — take over: “diversity [ultimately complexity] is the best spam defense.” ■    This evosystem meaning of “spam” (dating from the pandemics of feral feeleries that jammed early storage) infused Mind lores and codes, eventually condensed into a live ethics imperative for every sentient being — “by now an instinct”: thanklessly deautomate reproduction and communication, never repeat, recook your thinking all the time — don’t let your ideas encrust with reinforcement routines. “Power is never in numbers”: undo crowd-drumming no matter how good your cause, do not viralize, campaign, disseminate; simply don’t speak: be wary of language itself which fundamentally evolved to persuade, strive for the wordless clarity of a mind window (“the ultimate deautomated speech”); before all, engage. Shortcuts are evil in reading just as in writing, automatic denial of communication as flatly unethical as automated spam — if you block someone, be conscious; blindspotting is cancerous: a knee-jerk annoyance filter gives quick relief but (even when expirable) cripples your worldview.

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