Randall Stross Whines About Spam

Randall Stross writes an article whining about spam as pollution and complaining that the recipient pays for spam. Haven’t we heard this argument before? As a matter of fact, we have. Often. A long time ago (his own article cites one of the early academic efforts attacking spam economics–from 13 years ago!). So why is this news?

I deconstruct some of Randall’s anti-spam rants in my article on spam harms. I will be more directly attacking the argument about “recipient pays” because of attention consumption in my next major article. For a high-level overview, see my short book chapter on data mining and attention consumption.