The spam filters here seem to shield us from most of the inane, mechanically generated drivel that clogs the comment sections of blogs without antispam software. But a few items occasionally filter through the filter.
I loved the awkward earnestness of this one:
“Wow, you might say that the technology is very good! Photo, so beautiful, very clear, wish you good luck, create the future together! And I share my blog http://www.shirts-sneakers.com…”
That comment has been spammed onto more than 12,000 blogs, so its clearly the product of malicious spamware.
But the garbled translation and the attempt at flattery at least point to the involvement of a human brain at some point in the process of creating and disseminating that spam.
That’s not the case with this bit of mechanically generated spam that also appeared here overnight:
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS AGAINST THE LAW
Unlike the desperate ad for “shirts-sneakers.com,” there’s no trace here of any application of human intelligence. The inappropriate CAPITALIZATION comes across even less human-seeming than the inappropriate exclamation points of the other spam. And at least “create the future together!” was kind of upbeat rather than just hateful, cramped, stunted and bigoted.
Yet the soulless machines spewing this nastiness across the Internet have spread their filth even wider than the shirts-sneakers marketeers. More than 18,000 mindless repetitions of the same stimulus-response, knee-jerk jerkery — the identical pointlessly aggressive slogan repeated and recited over and over and over.
Soulless, yet still angry. That anger and vehement unhappiness are the only clues that those comments are the product of humans and not spamware.
But these humans are not well. They’re suffering from end-stage terminal indignation.* What we’re seeing is the death rattle of the umbrage-addict, the fatal condition brought on by years of abusing offense. Take offense every day, all day, for years and that’s how you’ll end up. Years of invalid reasons to feign indignation will ultimately leave you an invalid: Soulless and angry and miserable and waiting to die.
* (spelling fixed)
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