Happy Slapping Spambots

Anyone with an email address, or social networking account, has very probably been hit with spam at some point or another. Being somewhat active on the twitters, I often get noticed by the spambots, and so I tend to get spammed a fair bit. All very well; it doesn’t hurt, and I get quite a sad little thrill when I block and report them. When I was a child though spam was a very different thing:

Basically there were two types of spam, and neither of them was electronic. There was of course the processed pork based product in a can, much lauded by Monty Python. The other type of spam involved the youthful practice of slapping each other on the forehead, accompanied by an exclamation of “SPAM”. School classrooms at break times would be a rattling chorus of this word, as pre teenage palms met pre teenage foreheads. The least popular kid of the moment would be easily distinguishable by the deep redness of his brow. You could probably work out the hierarchy of the entire school by what shade of red each pupil’s forehead was.

I have no idea what started this very tactile social craze, or how long it went on for. Maybe I had the knowledge “spammed” out of me. Spamming pre dated the vile fad of happy slapping – where gangs of kids would randomly beat up a complete stranger while one of them filmed it on his mobile – by about a decade, but it could be that happy slapping evolved from spamming. Unlike happy slapping though, spamming was never particularly malicious. It was only ever done amongst people who knew each other; you wouldn’t dare randomly spam a total stranger. And in the days of spamming, the closest thing to a mobile phone was a suitcase sized box that had to be carted around in a car (hence the Carphone Warehouse’s name kids). So, unless you had access to a television centre’s outside broadcasting unit, the chance of recording a “spam” was zero.

Now though, as well as spam STILL being a processed pork based product in a can (probably the same can I mentioned earlier, who actually eats the stuff?), it’s also unsolicited electronic junk mail. Or in the case of twitter, it’s the equivalent of standing in the street having a mad conversation with yourself about... shoes (just an example), and a complete stranger interrupting you with “Shoes? Did you say shoes? I know about shoes. Take a look at this shop, they have shoes. Ooh shoes. SHOES!” and then giving you a map that leads you to a sleazy peep show for people with a skanky flip flop fetish.

Of course, nobody wants to sit scanning t’internet all day looking for people to send unwanted dodgy porn links to. So the world’s spam requirements are taken care of by, appropriately named, spambots. The “bots” in this case are nothing more than digital programs sitting on a computer somewhere scanning websites. They’re not physical, electro-mechanical robots of the ilk that harass Harrison Ford/Sarah Conner/Will Smith et al. Or indeed tell people to “bite my shiny metal ass”. This, in my opinion, is a very good thing. Because as much as I look forward to the day when my robot monkey butler brings me chilled beers while I watch my Cameron Diaz fembot gyrating in her underpants, I also have a terrifying vision of the future. A vision that contains spambots. Actual, not quite living, not quite breathing, shiny metal arsed, spambots.

I’d be sitting around, minding my own business, maybe catching up on George Lucas’ gazillionth reworking of Star Wars – this time in all new four dimensional stink-o-vision. Then all of a sudden I’d hear “bidi-bidi-bidi, SPAM!” as a metallic hand slams into my forehead and shatters my frontal lobe. When I eventually come to the first thing I’d see, dangling in front of my eyes, would be a holographic flier telling me to “Augment your penis, and get a free sample of synthesized herbal Viagra”.

This dystopian world full of happy slapping spambots wandering around, terrorizing the good citizens of futureville must not be allowed to happen. We, as a species of meat bags, must rise up against the spamdroids before it’s too late, before we’re all robo-spammed into a gibbering stupor. For my part I have begun the fight back by designing special titanium, robo-palm proof, anti spam helmets, available for a mere £$19.99 credits, which I shall be selling from my hastily set up website.

Now, I just need to find a way of letting large amounts of random strangers know about this unmissable opportunity...