If
you support free markets, you have to accept spam as a legit way of doing
business.
No, I don't! And I mean that in a nice way.
It depends on the meaning of "free," the trillion-dollar question. Short of violence, monopolies, fraud and insider information are the only crimes in the marketplace. The "level playing field" is a foundation of liberal democracy and capitalism.
It is not always true. Self-regulating markets depend on decreasing returns, but along comes something like an operating system, which doesn't fit. The more copies of your OS people own, the *more* valuable it becomes. Spam is much the same. Like any other kind of software, the marginal cost of manufacturing and distributing is tiny, and the wider you distribute it ("selling" it at zero cost), the more valuable it becomes. This breaks the model. Any sort of control of distribution does the same -- witness the power the recording industry has had.
As I see it, we need to end the fantasy that market authority arises from competition alone. We agree to cooperate on currency so that we can compete on price. We agree to cooperate on computer architecture so that we can compete on hardware and software. Having a common operating system allows us to cooperate by making it easier to share documents. Having common mail protocols allows us to share messages. Market authority arises from these, also. Control the network and you control the system -- that's what the spammers are doing. And yes, big business is wary of regulating it because at some level, they know that they're doing the same thing in various ways.
In order to have a network of competitors, some sort of cooperation through agreement about communications has to emerge or be invented. To the extent that anybody can control the network, they can misuse the system.
How does nature deal with this? Immune systems, which are the mechanism by which we exchange information, sometimes dramatically, and ward off the natural competitive attempts to gain control of our regulatory networks.
We have evolved an agreement to cooperate with viruses in order to acquire genetic material, but the price we pay is that when they show up, they compete with us also. Successful viri are like spammers in the biological DNA network. One in every gazillion viruses has something so valuable that it's worth it for us to let all of them try to invade, rather than evolving a total defense.
We are made up of structures that formerly were independent, competing organisms, who learned to cooperate so well that they became one... but what we call homeostasis is a competition within ourselves. Our immune systems aren't just a defense network that evolves solutions to ward off intruders. They allow us to play in the game of biological networks, to cooperate with other organisms, too. We could not exist if were not so, since we are a bunch of biological parts flying in close formation (as the DC-8 is described).
We were talking about being angry with spam. I think it's perfectly okay to be angry with spam in the same sense that I can be angry that I got the flu. It doesn't help me get better, it's not rational, but it is only human to be angry at the loss of health. And if one of these flu viruses contains information that protects me from a more deadly disease, I just might end up making it part of my own DNA.
I truly sympathize with your plight, and empathize with your anger toward Spam. But the world is not ready yet collectively battle spam. By definition in a free market, it probably creates more industrial wealth, than it costs.
By definition? That seems terribly dangerous to me, if you're saying that its ongoing existence somehow proves that it must be okay. One could justify virtually any behavior that way. Enron, anyone?
Strange as that may be. Software has to be written to combat spam, servers have to be bolstered against it, network bandwidth increased, people hired to manage mail and the illnesses they contract, and so on.
So you can mark down my vote as undecided as to whether or not its unethical. In the bigger picture it generates wealth. Then again, so does heroin sales.
Not for the addicts.
Do we only care about the sum of wealth, or does its distribution matter? Nature suggests that distribution matters very much. When one subgroup becomes very successful at the expense of the majority, the system is unhealthy and unstable. As conscious, intelligent creatures, we can figure out how to manipulate the system to benefit ourselves, but are such actions automatically ethical if we are just competing?
I'm not advocating total management of economic networks -- that's exactly what the abusers are doing and it's tempting to respond in kind. But neither do I accept the idea that zero management makes sense.
Nick
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