Spammers going Surreal?

SPAM has always occoured to me as some sort of disease infecting the entire being we all know as ‘The Net’. Still, looking past the penis enlargement medications and free webhosting for Russian porn offers, there’s actually coming something out of the process; namely randomized, machine-produced surrealism.

Here’s what a SPAM mail looks like if not executed properly (all code):


%RND_AD_1 [Random advertisement from Spammers db]


%TAB_SPECIALS [Special offers I imagine]

%TAB_SPECIALS

%TAB_SPECIALS

%TAB_SPECIALS
%RND_AD_3 [Random ad repeated]

%RND_BUY_TAG. [Buy tag, normally an URL]

These are all variables to be filled in with data collected from a database. The interesting thing is how the e-mails are using randomized words, the %BARD_SONNETS command which comes underneath the post as shown above, to filter itself through the anti-SPAM shields we’re getting accustomed to use. This is a somewhat poetic example of what can be read:

"Queen, although somewhat soothed by inferiority complex living with and swamp of pig pen.Now and then, polar bear about share a shower with grizzly bear about.For example, curse behind indicates that bullfrog inside umbrella pour freezing cold water on of light bulb.But they need to remember how eagerly defined by particle accelerator ruminates.industrial complex about, beyond cup, and inside cheese wheel are what made America great!
acquiesce indenture cartilaginous pitilessly"

I find the whole thing extremely interesting as some sort of Surrealist ink-mark, you know that Freudian test where you see a black mark of ink and interpret it through your psyche to be a picture of George W. Bush or a Ferrari car, only this in text. The only thing making it not surreal, if following the standards of André Breton’s Freudianism in the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), is that it is generated by a computer and not a person. It is still poetry, though.

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