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Finn Brunton

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Infrastructures)

by Finn Brunton (Author)

13 ratings

3.9 on Goodreads

107 ratings

Part of: Infrastructures (22 books)

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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 world: 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 epochs: 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.

ISBN-10

026201887X
ISBN-13

978-0262018876
Publisher

The MIT Press
Publication date

March 29, 2013
Part of series

Infrastructures
Language

English
Dimensions

6 x 1 x 9 inches
Print length

296 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Finn Brunton's excellent cultural history of spam offers a readable, witty account of the battle between the spammers and the spammed―a battle of often surprising complexity and astonishing technological escalation, in an arms race that is still being fought.

―John Gilbey, Times Higher Education

Spam will fascinate readers who aren't experts in the subject matter by shedding new light on the culture and function of their Internet experience. But it has plenty to offer computer scientists and online-community researchers as well… This masterful telling of the history illustrates just how much has changed and how we fit into the larger story.

―Jennifer Golbeck, Science Magazine

This book is a gem. The goings-on of the twisted personages who populate cyberpunk lit have nothing on the ingenious scheming of the spammers and the scientists dedicated to shutting them down. Read here and in days to come about this fascinatingly bizarre subterranean cyberworld.

―Scientific American

A colorful assortment of international tradespeople, drug-pushers, swindlers, and fraudsters, spammers have become a familiar feature of our digital landscape. Finn Brunton's investigation of the question of spam, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet―the problems of defining it, understanding it, and tackling it―takes us to the front of an ongoing and highly sophisticated technological war, a keenly contested territorial struggle for control of the information superhighway.

―Houman Barekat, The Millions

The book, a beautifully written and entertaining one, adopts an historical approach to the discussion of spam and the 'technological drama' that it manifests...The real value of the book however, does not lie in this historical reconstruction, but in its ability to use spam, as a tool through to reveal by negative reflection the positive values and beliefs that lay at the foundation of internet communities, and the importance of attention and trust in their working.

―Information, Communication & Society

Review

Spam promises to be widely read and widely taught. Finn Brunton's punchy, journalistic prose brings the topic very much to life. The material is new and important, and the writing is simply a joy to read.

―Fred Turner, Stanford University; author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press (March 29, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 296 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 026201887X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262018876
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,106,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #261 in Computing Industry History
- #654 in Privacy & Online Safety
- #2,072 in Internet & Telecommunications

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Finn Brunton

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I’m an Assistant Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at NYU Steinhardt. Along with my books (working on the next two now!) I write for Radical Philosophy, Artforum, and other scholarly and popular venues.

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Top reviews from the United States

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Jon Lee

some gold but a lot of boring

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 9, 2022

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Not gonna lie there is some great stuff in this book like the wizard paradigm and the Nigeria 419 scam stuff but the rest of the book is so dreadfully boring I almost gave up 3-4 times.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 30, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book derived from the author's doctoral thesis is a good history of spam from early file transfer mail messages to the present day botnets. The history is complete and well laid out. As is appropriate for a thesis there are lengthy philosophical considerations, semantic discussions and generally broad theoretical points explained. While this is appropriate for a thesis it bogs down the flow of the book.

4 people found this helpful

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SInohey

Spam and the Green Midget Cafe.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 17, 2013

Spam, the bane of the Web, has polluted the email of anyone and everyone who uses the Internet. No one is immune from the constant deluge of sales pitches intermingled with sex enhancing drugs, salacious come-ons and even outright pornography. Internet service providers are constantly updating their filters but increasingly sophisticated spammers continue to overcome them; nowadays it is a high-tech struggle of computer-generated algorithms combating equally complex algorithms and Spambots.

How did the plague of the information age become synonymous with a popular brand of lunchmeat? According to Hormel, the Minnesota company that produces canned-meat Spam, it all started with a spoof by the British Comedy group of Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the skit a group of Vikings loudly shout ...Spam.Spam Spam.. to drown out other conversation. This story is accepted by the Internet Society and also repeated in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which defines spam as "unsolicited e-email sent to a large number of addresses." In the 1980s some malicious users of BBSs (Bulletin Board System) and early chat rooms would flood the system with repeated ..Spam, Spam.. in huge numbers to overwhelm the user's screen and push out any other text.

Initially, Hormel tried to mount a campaign against infringement on its trademark, including an attempt, in 1997, to stop junk-mail king Sanford Wallace from using the word "Spam"; the endeavor backfired when Wallace spammed Hormel's letter all over the Internet. Spam is now universally recognized as meaning junk mail.

Spam is longer just confined to emails, but like fungus, it is spreading; it is now found in Instant Messaging, in Usenet Newsgroups, Blogs (Blam), Video sharing sites, Social networks, Mobile phones (as SpaSMS) and on search engines, where with a blend of spamming and indexing (Spamdexing) attempt to manipulate search engine optimization (SEO) for ranking.

Finn Brunton's book is a fascinating history of junk mail from the pre-Internet era of the early days of the telegraph to the present world of spambots. The author's comprehension of the Internet is clearly demonstrated from his description of nascent online communities, chat rooms and the blogosphere to the present supremacy of Google and Microsoft.
Finn explains the genesis of the spam scourge and its major transmittal sources (#1 is Pitcairn Island), he names the first known deliberate commercial spam, in 1994, by a lawyer advertising his skill to enter aliens into the Green Card Lottery.
Finn says that, "Spam e-mail is about 85 to 90% of all email sent on a given day....we don't see most of it because our filters are pretty good." He also describes how the system works and cautions about malware and identity theft. He uses a password manager to protect himself.

The book touches on almost anything relating to spam, from the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 and the escalating cost of junk mail; to the latest iteration of filter busters, such as Litspam, and the pervasive intrusion of our digital privacy by automated bots. Brunton also describes how the system works and cautions about malware and identity theft. He uses a password manager system to protect himself.

Brunton has managed to present a ubiquitous nuisance in people's daily life in an interesting historical narrative, kept lively with anecdotes... "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way" the first message (opposing the Vietnam war) sent, in 1971, by Peter Bos from MIT, simultaneously to a thousand fellow engineers.
Finn sees spammers not a villains but visionary trendsetters, "From a certain perverse perspective, spam can be presented as the Internet's infrastructure used maximally and most efficiently."

Brunton has succeeded in crafting a very readable book, about a limited subject, into a captivating historical document of the digital culture. It should be "de rigueur" reading for anyone who uses the Internet.

8 people found this helpful

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Barbara N. Kuehner

Spammed

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 21, 2013

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After hearing an interview with the author on PBS, I was eager to read this book. However, it is written for computer geeks. I had the feeling the author was still communicating with members of his dissertation committee. One member must have been a linguist, encouraging him to explore all the nuances of the word spam using esoteric approaches that further obscured what he was trying to convey. The book is very well documented, with about 13 of the pages devoted to footnotes and bibliographic references. But I had hoped for a more understandable presentation.

8 people found this helpful

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Jon Corelis

Good, but mostly for specialists

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 21, 2013

The main problem with this book is the way it's been marketed. The description on Amazon's product page, for example, while not strictly inaccurate, doesn't convey the extent to which this book is a technical and academic study the focus of which goes far beyond what the averge person primarily thinks of as "spam" -- unsolicited commercial email and texts.

The book basically traces the social, legal, and technical development of unethical and illegal, unscrupulous commercial exploitation of internet communications that began with the first massive email and Usenet group spamming of the 1990s, but also explores in great technical detail associated and subsequent related developments like botnets, lit spam (the nonsensical texts you keep getting among your Google results), and worms.

I'm frankly not qualified to judge this book as a technical and academic study: I suspect that as such it will be an important one, and if you are yourself an academic studying these issues, you may well want to consider this a four or five star book. But the average internet user will find it only intermittently interesting, with long sections of it being impenetrably technical. Hence my three star rating. The publishers should have resisted the temptation to downplay in their promotional material the specialist nature of this book: many general readers are going to be disappointed to find out what it's like once they start reading it.

One final footnote to the above: despite the technical nature of the book, if you were around the internet during the old Usenet days, you may find the sections of this book on Usenet very interesting, and that they bring back memories.

13 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Jon A. Crowcroft

made it through my filters....won against my best algos.....

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 14, 2013

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Firstly, this is a lot of fun to read, especially if you where "there, then", which mostly I was...The lessons to be gleaned from the Shadow History of the Internet are many - some can be read between the lines

Primarily, the three chapters chart the evolution of the community and later, communities, that make up the net. Chapter 1 covers pre-internet (BBSes, and Usenet) and the pre-commercial (DiY or government freebie or beg, borrowed, etc and the ethos of the types of people that made up the various groupings between 1981 and 1994- the dates are well picke (based on various watershed points - some of the extreme reactions to early bboard/list abuse are captured through a section on Charivari, ritual shaming and vigilantism and so on...Chapter 2 covers the core period when spam-classic was best defined - the business of grey area marketing, and the regulation of the business, and the sad, sad truth behind the ancient scam that is a 419er...up to and including the emergence of "Search Optimisation" as a new form. Chapter 3 bring up to date with the post-modern linguistic algorithmic wars between bayesian inferencers, and the David Bowie (Hunky Dory era) cut&paste creative botnet agents that try to sneak by our AI defenses.

Full of rich detail of history, pre-historical anecdote, social science depth and the tragi-comedy of the whole waste of human time and ingenuity for a passing buck, this is a really good piece of work - while some readers may find the style a little dense (long sections read like early discussions between technorati on various lists with cut and past excerpts from scripts and auto-generated messages, diagnostic output, technology shorthands, and the rest), I found this spot on - for a semi-popular technical book about a subject that has been part of my every day life since 1976 (I have all emails to me, from me and cc:d me since then still), I was really pleased to note almost zero technical errors in any of the history, or technology - I am not qualified to comment on the underlying social science (some of the discussion of metaphors was fascinating - e.g. malware as weeds rather than viruses) -- but I found it all highly informative and it made me think a lot about other domains where we risk unintended consequences and emergent behaviours - for example the looming Internet of Things while be full of abominable virtual snowmen, no doubt!

2 people found this helpful