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[wired.com...]
[edited by: tedster at 7:35 pm (utc) on July 2, 2004]
I've got a couple of those in my Yahoo! Mailbox - some of the same names mentioned in that article are in there - wonder if there is relation.
Sid
As the article mentions, often the best educated people keep it alive by taking the attitude "it just might work and there's no downside".
Tracking down the "author" of the first one reminded me of a weird sci-fi story I read. It was all about trying to find the person who began a particular joke. Early on the CIA started following the investigator. As he neared the truth, it was space aliens who began interfering with him.
Turned out that jokes were a key factor in social engineering - consciously manipulating human culture to go in desired directions. Maybe chain letters are, too.
Turned out that jokes were a key factor in social engineering - consciously manipulating human culture to go in desired directions. Maybe chain letters are, too.
As an idea, though, it isn't as momumental as that if Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, in which the whole of human evolution and human history was manipulated in order to manufacture and deliver a replacement part to an alien whose flying saucer had crashed on Titan.
In the novel, large structures such as the Great wall of China and Stonehenge were messages to let the alien know the progress of the project.
Of course, if the alien had a suficiently powerful wifi connection, then spam could be used for the same purpose. An email message could not therefore be sent directly to the alien, since the alien's email address would be unknown. But messages sent to a suffiently large number of random addresses could be guaranteed to reach its target in time. Likewise, of course, with email chain letters.
The spam and chain letters would, naturaly, not have to reveal what they were really about, as that would make humans conscious of the true puprose of their history and thereby enable them to prevent it unfolding as planned. hence the Bill Gates hoax, or the mass Viagra mailings.
I remember reading that story (back in the 1960s?), although I don't recall who wrote it.
We're probably reminiscing about Jokester by Issac Asimov.
For a recent Fortean Times spoof theory that spam is alien communication:
[iconoplex.co.uk...]
Weird
People who think "it might just work" obviously never heard the story about the man who asked for compensation from the Sultan in the form of 1 rice grain on the first chessboard square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third and so on, doubling on every square up until the 64th. (The Sultan chuckled that the man wished for such a meagre amount, though, obviously, there wasn't enough rice in the kingdom to satisfy the man's request...)
