Your great throbbing Farage

reflections on spam

If you speak English on the internet you’re going to get spam like this: “I want to feel your great throbbing Farage inside my sopping Trump! Roll me over and take me up the Hegseth!” and we’re all used to that. But lately I have been getting very different spam in German, exquisitely polite, and aimed at lonely old men.

(The Church Times isn’t really interested: this was just the way my inbox was laid out)

I’m not sure what the financial model of the American spam is – presumably some combination of credit card fraud and subscription fees – but the German one is clearly aiming for pig butchering, when the relationship is kept up for months until every last bit of the victim’s savings have been cut out and handed over.

A really bad person would turn their end of the conversation over to a suitably prompted instance of Claude and see what happened. That way you could record a conversation between a metaphorical Chinese Room and a physical room full of Chinese slave labourers in held a compound in the badlands of northern Thailand.

When I first found the German spam in my inbox I thought it was a touching testimony to the cultural superiority of Europe over America.

Then I thought properly and now it seems to me that the differing styles of spam are most simply explained by a statistic quoted in this morning’s Doctorow newsletter: the average American has retirement savings of $995. There’s no pig there to butcher.