Communications are Down

To interact with one another, people have to be aware of needs. Needs are communicated by sharing and listening. If you don't know what someone needs, you cannot respond to those needs. This is the basis of communities, free markets and open society. There is no point in building open source software that nobody needs, no point in selling services that nobody wants.

The opening of the Internet has degraded electronic communications. When I first subscribed to Usenet, the Internet newsgroup system, I could read sci.archeology and see postings from the University of Cairo. Then, in April 1994, my computer had crashed. Running diagnostics, I discovered that two Phoenix lawyers named Canter and Siegel had blanket posted a message about a Green Card lottery to every single newsgroup, and readers in every newsgroup posted replies that said that the posting was off-topic. My file system ran out of inodes and the operating system crashed.

Communications had broken down.

At that time, the term spam hadn't been invented yet. Now we're all too familiar with the electronic equivalent of junk mail, unsolicited blanket ads delivered to a computer with no way to reply, reject or block them. The difference between spam and junk mail is anonyminity: spam is sent for products or services that would never be sent on paper because the sender would get caught. Spam has done worse than tie up network resources...it is choking communication between people, preventing needs from being met. It damages the economy, society and human lives.

The onslaught of spam had pushed serious conversations and accurate information off of Usenset. As computer power increased and the Internet became more popular, even modest setups could send millions of messages to people's personal email accounts. When I rolled out my System Manager in a Box Linux project in 2000, I emailed local Linux user groups to try it out and give me feedback on any problems. When I later talked to Matt Rice of the Toronto Linux Users Group, he said, "Oh, I think I received some spam about that. I deleted it without reading it." Clearly spam is adversely affects even Linux collaboration.

In computers, everybody says they are a hacker. (In my Big Online Book of Linux Startups, I discuss how to identify false hackers and why it is important to do so.) Fighting spam has become a proof of manliness to some programmers, demonstrating their pride in being able to setup procmail. It's proof of how much time they have on their hands in this depressed Canadian economy rather than proof of their skills.

The Canadian government recently decided to allow voice spam to be delivered to private homes. Telemarketing is already a plague of damaged communications, but this decision ups the ante. By ruling that voice mail (that's "answering machines" for people over 35) is a public space, the government allows ad companies to do away with all those human telemarketers and just have computers dial random numbers and dump prerecorded messages on people. The results are the same as spam: "in boxes" flooded with ads for stuff that is not needed. Individuals have to sift through this cruft to find legitimate communications. This makes the national Do Not Call list obsolete before it's up and running.

I don't have a good answer to this problem. As long as communications continue to break down, it's going to be hard to find work, collaborate on projects or start businesses.

The other day I received a call from a telemarketer for Wheelchair Basketball. When I said I was having a bad week, she surprised me by saying, "Tell me about it" and gave me some words of encouragement. There was communication. It frightens me that within two years I may think that telemarketers were the good ol' days.

Talk back on the Linux Cafe.

May 16, 2005