Like most of everyone in the world who is online, which I think at this point is everyone in the world who isn’t a monk, a luddite, or in some sort of cult, I receive spam from time to time. The gmail spam filter is, I think, very good. Most spammy stuff goes to my Junk mailbox, and I only occasionally have to check it to make sure it hasn’t netted something I actually want. Recently, the only things getting caught in there that aren’t technically spam are fundraising emails from Katie Porter (I gave her money once). While I do love her, and it makes me feel bad to see her emails mixed up with the ones from “AutoInsurance” (all one word) and “Classes’AndCareers” (all one word and with weird punctuation choices), or the ones with the subject lines, “If you possess what it takes to satisfy me when we are in bed, then I’ll like to be your woman” and “💪The secret "Penis Brain" Trick for 👉 getting hard🥒🔥 Better S.e.x with this🍑💋🍌-watch This Video📹__X0”, I think I’m going to let those stay there, because I get way too much political spam in my regular mailbox that I can’t bring myself to unsubscribe from. Spam fascinates me, because, while I have been told that these emails are deliberately written with spelling and punctuation errors to weed in the undiscerning, I still have a hard time believing that anyone is taken in by an email from “"""'Lawsuit Claims’””” (only one set of quotation marks mine) or the perky subject line, “Your burial insurance!” But I know that if the email sounds urgent enough, people act before thinking twice, and, in the words of everyone’s cranky great uncle from Queens, that’s how they gettcha.
I’m not entirely sure how the spam filter works and so I don’t get why some spam evades the filter when all of Katie’s emails end up in there. But recently, one did. When I clicked on it, I saw this.
Looks like your normal spam bullshit. But then I scrolled down. Wait for it…
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Didn’t see that coming, did you? I certainly didn’t.
On one level, this seems like the most effective form of spam: the kind that gets you to react right away, possibly with panic that blocks your ability to think, which is what they want you to do. On another level, this is spam whose reach is limited, because it seems to me that it could only work in a country as fucked up as ours. Where else could spammers send this email, hoping to target a person who would be thinking, “Did I order a $1200 gun — from an online seller that would send me this lovely picture and not some guy on the dark web with the handle HairTrigger206 — by mistake?” And by the way, a quick Google reveals that this is on the upper end for a handgun. According to a site called anthonyarms.com, most firearms today typically cost between $400 and $800. You can get your basic AR-15 rifle, with which you can kill way, way more people much faster, for $701 to $789. So perhaps another possible target audience for this spam is someone who would immediately email them back, thinking, “I would never pay $1200 for that! That’s highway robbery!”, perhaps of the kind they were hoping to commit with the handgun.
Which all leads me back to the question that’s been plaguing me for at least the past six and a half years, but recently seems to be smacking me in the forehead with increasing regularity: How the hell did we get here? It seems like, just a short time ago, the United States was a country that was annoying, and loud, but mostly respected. Sure, we did bad things, but at least we tried to hide them and pretend we didn’t. Now, we are the national laughing stock for idiocracy, backsliding on democratic norms and human/civil/LGBTQ/women’s rights, and the corrupt and craven opportunism that makes all that other stuff flourish. I didn’t see all of that coming, but I should have. Conditions became just right for our country’s famously-deep-rooted exceptionalism, individualism, puritanism, anti-intellectualism, capitalism, and racism to spawn, spiral, and explode all over us like that fungus in The Last of Us (which obviously I’m still having nightmares about).
In the same-but-opposite way I continued to watch season one of that series to an ending that left me thinking humanity is doomed, I continue to believe we can come back from all this. The majority of us want gun control, abortion rights, gay marriage, healthcare for all, and action on climate change. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen the people of the midwest actually living up to their reputation for being reasonable in elections in Wisconsin and Chicago, and while the south is still making me crazy, I think there is an uprising brewing there too. Maybe everyone needs to take a hard look at their junk mailboxes and recognize how gun spam is just the cherry on top of the signs-of-creeping-dystopia-flavored cake to be found there, how the ALL CAPS and ®-ed appeals to the desperate with car insurance, CVS gift cards, sex talk and LV handbags are telling us that where we’re at is the edge of a cliff from which we are clinging with broken fingers, and need to claw our way back.