Have you noticed... As soon as someone invents a new means of communication, someone else finds a way to abuse it?

In the beginning, the only mass communications involved personally talking to people. You stood on a street corner or went house to house.

Then someone invented the postal service. And someone else invented junk mail. Junk mail isn't all bad. At least it costs real money to produce and send. Still, I get far more junk than real mail. Having a low signal to noise ratio when I open my mail contributes to my willingness to be sloppy about reading my mail. Heck, my bank sends me more junk mail than real mail. I wish they would stop.

Then Mr. Bell invented the telephone. And someone else invented telephone solicitors. Great. Just great. No one likes junk calls, so we all demand a stop. The phone company eventually responds with ways (at a cost) to cut back the junk calls. And then Congress even has to spend their time implementing laws and national do not call lists. Which of course, require money to run, money to enforce, etc. Sigh. What a waste.

But even telephone soliciting is expensive. Auto-dialers can do a lot of the work, but ultimately you have one person trying to talk one other person into spending money. There's a cost there. Clearly, it works, or the solicitors wouldn't continue trying, but still, you don't do it on a whim.

Then Al Gore invented the internet and along with it, email. (That's a joke, for the humor disadvantaged.) And 10 seconds later, someone invented spam. The amount of spam on the internet dwarfs the real email. Furthermore, a huge percentage of the spam consists of attempted fraud to boot. We spend hours reviewing it so we can delete it. Then people invent spam filters (not an easy thing to actually get right) but we spend hours reviewing what's been filtered to see whether it's deleting real mail. And of course, it does, so we lose real mail that we should have kept. Sending email is free, so the cost to spammers is nothing beyond a computer and an internet connection (which any 12-year-old in America has). The cost to American business? Enormous.

Someone invented text messaging. And the phone companies, having been burnt badly already, put in some pretty draconian rules to avoid spam. The rules actually work! But those of us with legitimate use of text messaging (speaking from a business perspective -- remember what I do for a living!) have to jump through extremely complex hoops to use a feature our customers want us to use.

Today, I received more spam. 3 copies of the same email. Someone joined a bunch of meetup groups and used their mailing list to send spam. The end result? I turned off the mailing list in my group. A perfectly good feature can't be used because there's always some selfish asshole who is willing to abuse any good tool.

Rot in hell.