Revenge is a Dish Best Served By Email: How To Get Someone Spammed to Death

By Michael Lithgow, November 23, 2007 Comments (19)

Ever wondered if villains get their inboxes filled with spam, too? Now you can play a hand in your favourite villain's e-fate. PleaseSpam.Us promises to put the emails of the most popularly unpopular people in a prominent place on their website (i.e. homepage) specifically designed to attract spambots. Here's the democratic catch. Not just any email will get posted. It must receive enough votes from the general public before the webmaster will make the email address spambot bait.

PleaseSpam.Us is yet another clever intervention by Johnah Brucker-Cohen who works out of Eyebeam Gallery in New York. The intention, according to artist Brucker-Cohen, is to critically re-examine the proliferation of electronic communications systems such as email as well as to question the advent of collaborative filtering (used by sites like DIGG and all of the "DIGG copycat sites" and "Reputation Systems" (as found on many commercial and community oriented sites). The ultimate intention with the project is to explore the tensions of utilizing spam as a cultural and social tool to encourage the debate of how these social systems often work to polarize opinions and pigeonhole debate into specified channels.

So far, George W. Bush's email – president@whitehouse.gov – has the most number of votes ...