According to Bruce Sterling, American internetters are slowly-boiled frogs.
We have grown used to deceptive spam and popunders–we dodge them daily without much conscious effort. (How many emails with 30 kb attachments did you delete yesterday?) Bruce says:
If you could get every scam artist, phisher, and 419 scammer and surround this building, we’d see them as a terrifying army, but they have carte
blanche to go anywhere in the world and terrorize people less
sophisticated than ourselves.
Thinking about it now, he’s totally right.
As we put more and more good stuff up on the web, and democratically encourage folks around the world to get out there and find it–maybe we should take some responsibility for the risks they’ll encounter.
How? I don’t know. But just realizing the problem exists (thanks, Bruce!) I know more than I did yesterday.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for transcribing Bruce Sterling’s wonderful, rambling rant at sxsw. Damn, if I could have stayed just one day longer, I could have gone to his party.
BTW, I just finished reading Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction–loved it–buy it, if you haven’t already read it!
2 responses so far ↓
1 jr // Mar 29, 2004 at 10:40 am
Having realized that today alone I could be wider and longer than the Empire State building…
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It may be that the flaws that allow email to be so attacked by those that spam will be the death knell for email.
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Just because email has always been there doesn’t mean we gotta keep it like it is. I think we can come up with better ways.
2 Betsy Devine // Mar 29, 2004 at 1:28 pm
Longer and wider than the Empire State Building? Wow, and I thought the 419 scammers were scary!