Mission Statement

Recently I opened a gmail account. Its "spam" folder immediately began to fill with ads for generic Viagra, Filipino mail-order brides and the like (even before I had given out the email address... thanks, Google!). However, bored at work one day I started reading these "spam" emails and found their randomized knotting together of the components of our language strangely beautiful, and meaningful. In this blog I treat (with some minor editing) these emails as a new kind of poetry, "iambic penSPAMeter," if you will.

Emails written in iambic penspameter do not attempt to sell us things. So why are they sent? My theory is that these are attempts to imitate human speech. We have programmed our computers to talk like us humans, and to send us emails without human prompting. These automatically generated and sent emails can therefore be seen as attempts by our machines to communicate with us in our own language. Iambic penspameter is an attempt to communicate with and understand the human world.

I'm frightened that I am able to find more relevance and emotion in the haphazard agglomerations of words in my "Spam" folder than in many poems considered to be the best written in our language. To me it shows that our machines may have a better grasp on our society than we, their creators, and in an age when computing power is rapidly approaching (and may soon overtake) that of the human brain, I think it's essential to understand what these machines think of us, and how they think, deep inside their silicon brains.