DrawMatic

Human Spam

Posted by Gavin Doughtie Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:11:00 GMT

Recently, Jill and I were at what back in the Bubble might have been called a “networking event.”

Some very decent, successful old friends were in attendance, as were a strange mix of folks whom Jill christened “shucksters” as in an unholy mix of shyster and huckster. Or something to do with oysters. Anyway…

There was the successful purveyor of a well-known diet product, and several folks promoting email marketing, ad networks, and systems for bringing your notional Hollywood Blockbuster to Steven Spielberg’s attention.

I’ve been thinking a lot since then about human nature and the role of society. The idea that keeps bobbing up in the magic eight ball of my mind is “We’re all shucksters.”

We’re all shucksters. We would all send spam, and hawk pr0n, and phish the clueless, and Anderson our accounts, and misuse the powers of whatever office we could bribe our way into, if there weren’t any consequences.

If there weren’t any consequences.

But we’ve spend the last few millienia working out what the consequences should be, so the greatest number of us could live as well as possible with the minimum concern that we would be murdered in our sleep for our iPods.

To any reader of history, civilization is not a linear path. There are retrograde motions that make pre-Gallilean cosmology look positively mathematical. Even a vaguely open-minded search will detail our failings past and present.

Civilization is an artifact of designs that succeeded where others failed, in that fundamental objective, of providing the greatest good to the greatest number of individuals for the longest time.

You can be a major shuckster and edge out ahead of civilization for a time, exploiting fellow humans who haven’t clued into the dangers of running that free screen saver.

You can be a minor shuckster and gleefully pirate the works of living artists. You won’t get caught, probably. The artists won’t go broke because if it. Probably. But further along the path, the people who create things need to eat, and it’s a rare breed who wants three meals of fame alone each day.

Or you can realize that the moment ahead of the curve is not the little notch where a dictator builds his palace for a few decades before he’s garroted by his own starving people.

The moment ahead of the curve is in helping more people live better than they do now. It’s in joining a community that protects people rather than exploiting them.

It’s not in your nature as a solo human animal. It’s in your nature as a civilized human being.