The Junk Mail Economy

Given Your Past Interests, I Think You Might Enjoy This Revolutionary Article

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At least a dozen times a day, I receive an email that reads like this:

“Hi Luke!

Tom from Livewire Communications here.

Given your past reporting on developments in the tech space, I’m reaching out to see if you might be interested in an interview with entrepreneur and VibeTech CEO Marcus Crawford on how companies can create social value by opening the doors to new innovators? Marcus is currently available to speak about:

1) Why synergies are the future🔗🔗

2) How the platform approach can create pathways for global collaborative problem-solving ecosystems🌍🔓

3) Why the next industrial revolution must be a revolution of values🏭🤝.

If you would be interested in a guest post or interview with Marcus or have any other ideas for him, please contact me at Tom[at]Livewire…etc etc”

I guess you might call this promotional slop. And though there’s plenty of variation in the things actually being promoted — often, as in the above, it’s some incorrigible tech bullshit, but it can just as easily be music, books, or any number of consumer products — there’s an uncanny homogeneity when it comes to the messages themselves.

Stylistically, they tend to be formulaic to the point of absurdity. There’s usually an overly casual and familiar greeting from [insert highly generic first name here] followed by a blandly chirpy description of the product/service/person in question and then some kind of offer or pitch that barely even pretends to be non-transactional. Because I work in media, I’ve been getting these kinds of emails for at least a decade. But, as recently as a few years ago, it at least usually seemed like there might be an actual human being on the other end. The content might still have been hack, but it was reasonable to assume that the proverbial Tom or Sara on the other end still had a pulse. These days, it’s safe to say that even the ersatz pitches companies now use in their marketing have been thoroughly ensloppified.

The mind boggles to think how many emails like this are now being sent out every day; hell, every hour, every minute, every nanosecond — the majority presumably generated with only the most passive involvement of actual human beings.¹ I mean, just stop and consider the sheer volume of worthless verbiage this slop economy must now be producing. If you printed out even a day’s worth on a single piece of paper, it would probably reach past the Moon and require the clearcutting of every forest on Earth. (And that’s not even accounting for all the other kinds of spam we’ve seen proliferate in the form of junk text messages, voicemails, and the like.)

If the goal of marketing and advertising is to promote things with a view to getting people’s attention or making some kind of profit, the mind similarly boggles at how ineffective this stuff must be. Most of it no doubt goes straight to people’s junk folders, though I’d wager that even whatever sliver does sneak through probably has a lower response rate than your average Nigerian Prince phishing scam. Why even bother?

The obvious, technologically-deterministic answer is that AI has made it possible to generate lots of words and images very quickly at relatively low cost. Since the beginning of mass culture, marketing and advertising have formed the ambient din of social life; the humdrum muzak of capitalist society that serenades us through radios and TV screens and blares down from gaudy billboards mounted in public spaces. Understood this way, promotional slop and spam emails are just a continuation of something all-too familiar. It’s noise that’s always been there and these days it’s simply louder.

That’s no doubt the case but I think there’s a bigger story here about how the imperatives of the attention economy don’t just necessitate slop but require its constant scaling up. The most interesting thing to me about the promotional slop I get isn’t that companies are trying to get eyeballs on their products or plant interviews with their CEOs in media, because of course they are.

No, what’s more remarkable is how homogeneous and low-rent this style of promotion really is. With the exception of the emails I receive from flesh and blood publicists (usually on behalf of publishing houses, who I genuinely do want to hear from) most of this stuff has literally nothing to do with things I write about. Much of it is tough to distinguish from garden variety spam and it’s sometimes hard to discern what the thing or product is even supposed to be. Does this person or company actually exist? Is what I’m reading just an AI-generated press release, or something that renders the distinction between media promotion and sales pitch — that is, between commerce and everything else — effectively moot?

Can anyone seriously believe this is a viable way of doing promotion? The same might be asked about automated spam calls, Facebook ads, online pop-ups and countless other things in the same vein. As best as I can tell, this ever-expanding churn of virtual junk exists less because it’s successful at promoting or selling things than because it’s what the attention economy demands.

Which is to say: there are now more apps, ads, and websites competing for our attention than ever before and, since that attention is finite, there is a constantly escalating battle among those who are looking to convert in it into revenue or clicks. The result is a kind of perpetual inflation wherein every competitor tries to compensate by flooding the market even more, a self-defeating arms race that creates a corollary drop in quality because the overall output must be constantly increased. Since mass production necessitates sameness — if you’re trying to produce a large volume of something quickly, whether it’s junk emails or Volkswagens, standardization is generally the best guarantor of efficiency — the upshot is, well, the enslopification of everything.

The halcyon days of Web 1.0 gave rise to many utopian predictions about what the internet would do for humanity. With the global integration of communications, it was said, authoritarian regimes would collapse and instant access to the sum of human knowledge would foster a new enlightenment. Twenty-five years later, digital modernity has instead yielded a virtual marketplace whose principal output is junk; a vast ecosystem of mass-produced text and images where the boundaries between discourse, commerce, and entertainment are steadily collapsing and the social internet is increasingly being replaced by a slop shadow economy that is gradually turning the entire world into one giant spam folder.

1. According to one statistic I found, just 13 percent of all global email traffic actually involves a real person typing a message and pressing send.