Douglas Phillips, “Can Desire Go On Without a Body?” in The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomolies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, eds. Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson (Creskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2009), 199f.
The number of spam emails sent per day is at roughly 250 billion (as per 2010). The total amount of image-spam has varied considerably over the years, but in 2007, image spam accounted for 35 percent of all spam messages and took up 70 percent of bandwidth bulge. “Image spam could bring the internet to a standstill,” London Evening Standard, October 1, 2007, see →. All the pictures of image spam accompanying this text have been borrowed from the invaluable source “Image Spam”, by Mathew Nisbet, see →. To avoid misunderstandings, most image spam shows text, not pictures.
This is similar to the golden plaques on the Pioneer space capsules launched in 1972 and 1973, which depicted a white woman and a white man, with the woman’s genitals omitted. Because of the criticism directed at the relative nudity of the human figures, subsequent plaques showed only the human silhouettes. It will be at least forty thousand years until the capsule could potentially deliver this message.
This is a sloppy, fast-forward rehash of a classical Gramscian perspective, from early Cultural Studies.
Or it may more likely be analyzed as partially self-defeating and contradictory.
I have discussed the failed promise of cultural representation in “The Institution of Critique,” in Institutional Critique: an Anthology of Artists’ Writings, eds. Alex Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 486f.
This applies unevenly around the world.
In the 1990s, people from former Yugoslavia would say that the former anti-fascist slogan of the Second World War had be turned upside down: “Death to fascism, freedom to the people” had been transformed by nationalists from all sides into, “Death to the people, freedom to fascism.”
See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
I remember my former teacher Wim Wenders elaborating on the photographing of things that will disappear. It is more likely, though, that things will disappear if (or even because) they are photographed.
I cannot expand on this appropriately here. It might be necessary to think through recent facebook riots from the perspective of breaking intolerable social contracts, and not from entering or sustaining them.
The era of the digital revolution corresponds to that of enforced mass disappearance and murder in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Algeria, Iraq, Turkey, and parts of Guatemala, to list just a few. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which saw roughly 2.5 million war casualties between 1998 and 2008, it is agreed on by researchers that demand for raw materials for the IT industries (such as coltane) played a direct role in the country’s conflict. The number of migrants who died while trying to reach Europe since 1990 is estimated to be eighteen thousand.
This derives from a pirated DVD cover of the movie In the Line of Fire (Wolfgang Peterson, 1993), which states, in no uncertain terms, that pubic performance of the disc is strictly prohibited.
This text originated as a presentation at the “The Human Snapshot” conference, organized by Tirdad Zolghadr and Tom Keenan at the Luma Foundation in Arles, July 2–4, 2011. It is the third part of a trilogy about spam, the first two of which are published in October, no. 138 (fall 2011), guest-edited by David Joselit. Part one is titled “Spam and the Angel of History,” and part two “Letter to an Unknown Woman: Romance Scams and Epistolary Affect.” The writer would like to thank Ariella Azoulay, George Baker, Phil Collins, David Joselit, Imri Kahn, Rabih Mroué, and the many others who sparked or catalyzed various ideas within the series. Thank you also to Brian, as ever.