Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet by Finn Brunton (review)

The history of the Internet (and of computing more generally) tends to be presented in a highly positive manner, as a technological success story. From the late 1960s to the 1990s, during the Cold War, the Internet grew quickly from a small network—connecting a dozen academic and military sites and their cumbersome mainframes in the United States—into a global system linking millions of personal computers and digital devices.¹ Not only has the number of computers connected to a global computing network grown exponentially, but the number of users has grown as well. In addition, the ease of movement along the Internet highways has improved tremendously, and the graphics have dramatically changed for the better. During this period, computers themselves were transformed from Cold War super machines supporting the military-industrial complex to tools that an influential group of counterculturalists imagined as aiding personal liberation and the building of alternative communities.² This success story has been told in many forms both academic and popular.

Finn Brunton’s new book, based on his doctoral dissertation, suggests an alternative to this oft-told tale of computing by analyzing new historical data and reflecting on the (negative) success of spammers, a dynamic and changing group of wrongdoers. By focusing on spam—“the use of information technology infrastructure to exploit existing aggregations of human attention” (p. 199)—or what might be metaphorically described as e-pollution, Brunton contributes to a better understanding of the history of the Internet and network computing in terms of their multiple social, political, and cultural contexts. Brunton’s Spam will take its place alongside the earlier must-read masterpieces by Janet Abbate¹ and Fred Turner.²

The book has three main chapters, reflecting a periodization of spam history. The first covers the early 1970s to 1995, during which the rules and norms of proper usage of the Internet and other computer networks were discussed by online users and were frequently violated by proto-spammers. In this period, spam was defined simply as undesirable text, whether it was repetitive, excessive, or interfering. An iconic example of this period is a 1971 anti-Vietnam war electronic message sent to members of the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) for remote computer access, a separate network from Arpanet, by its system administrator in a way that was seen as abusing his privilege and position. Another iconic example of this period is the Green Card Lottery message sent in 1994 to members of about 6,000 Usenet newsgroups by an Arizona couple, not only distributing commercial speech and irrelevant content but also over-consuming the pool of common resources (p. 55).

The second phase lasted from 1995 to 2003, between the commercialization of the network and the passage of the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States.³ These years saw the diversification of spam into a range of methods and markets, when spam became entangled with laws, national boundaries, and the evolution of online culture. This phase also corresponds to a period of increasing complexity of algorithmic mediation (p. 66) and antispam initiatives. A typical form of spam in this period was the advance-fee fraud message, sent via email, asking recipients to help a high-ranked aristocratic prince or family in a remote corner of the world to get out of a miserable situation in return for a share of their hidden assets. With the spread of digital search engines during this period and the emergence of search spammers, spam as a verb also came to mean “an action taken with a networked computing protocol to capture the attention of the largest possible number of people” using search engines. Spam as a noun in this context meant “a repetitive mass of words generated as part of machine processes” (p. 117).

The most recent phase, from 2003 to the present, is characterized by the enforcement of laws, the widespread adoption of powerful spam filters, and the creation of user-produced content tools. This period saw the birth of litspam...