by Karen Heuler
Spam calls and emails remain an unfortunate feature of modern life. But what opportunities, ideas, experiences could be lost as we defend ourselves from the constant deluge of spam? Karen Heuler reflects on this question as well as her experience dealing with spam. Read Heuler’s latest story, “Potential Spam,” in our [March/April issue, on sale now!]
When I was a kid, there were no personal computers, and the only phones were landlines. We got marketing calls occasionally, usually during dinner hours—though even that was rare. There were only human marketers then.
Then lo! Technology advanced.
Now we’re all deluged with spam in emails, texts, and phone calls. Those unknown numbers and addresses salute us by name and ask us personal things or advise us about our illnesses and connections. Has your car warranty expired? Do you have enough health insurance?
Half of life is now spam. I rely on the metrics that prompt my phone to identify Potential Spam items, and I can only hope that I am not identified as such in any of my own calls and emails.
But because of all the scams, I have possibly hung up or deleted some legitimate calls. Maybe they just sounded bogus. Perhaps I did actually win some award and I lost out. How much can I trust my phone’s ability to accurately identify what is spam and what is just Unknown? And in fact, don’t I prefer Unknown to Spam? Don’t I find it less offensive?
I have concluded that underlying all of this back and forth on spam is an assumption about intelligence. If someone spams me, I assume they’re trying to outwit me. If I refuse, then I outwit them. It’s a clash of minds as well as principles. But if it’s a legitimate call and I treat it as a scam, then my intelligence falters. And if the call is essentially real but the person reached is a mistake, then intelligence all around has failed.
And by the same token, if some of our transactions are errors in judgement, errors in details (that’s the wrong phone number/email address), then it’s entirely plausible that interstellar transactions might end up the same way.
This is one example of how writing prompts are all around you. My phone says Potential Spam a lot. My email service delivers lots of things to my Spam folder (very often mistakenly, but I check that folder constantly, so okay). It wasn’t too much of a leap to go from my individual experience all the way up to galactic experiences. I’ve tried to shame actual, real humans making these calls by asking if they liked their job (no) or whether their mother was proud of them for taking this job. Which, in retrospect, wasn’t nice of me. I won’t do it again. Jobs are tough.
If someone spams me, I assume they’re trying to outwit me. If I refuse, then I outwit them. It’s a clash of minds as well as principles. But if it’s a legitimate call and I treat it as a scam, then my intelligence falters. And if the call is essentially real but the person reached is a mistake, then intelligence all around has failed.
But again—there presumably are job seekers all over the universe and they probably face similar job requirements. Salespeople need to do some old-calling to get new clients. I’ve even known writers to cold-call editors with pitches—though this was long ago, in the time of landlines, when phone calls connected to real, live people and not phone trees. I worked with someone who spent most of her work day calling editors and publishers (there was lots of down time at that job). I was amazed, appalled, and envious.
Life is more or less a contest about cleverness and superiority. Jobs are of course judged on how clever you have to be to succeed in them, since jobs have their hierarchies, their value systems. If you call me to solicit my money, then of course you’re the con and I am the dupe. You may not see it that way since jobs are mundane to the worker. But if you offer me something I want, then you’re in charge.
As William Wordsworth says:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
I fear too many people have simply concentrated on the “getting and spending” rather than his warning about it. In the case of this story, of course, “lay waste” has developed technologically rather than spiritually. And it’s devastating. It’s war.
Who would the octopuses wage war with? They are incredibly intelligent problem-solvers, but we eat them or we completely ruin their habitat. They’re too far beneath our notice to consider how they feel about us. That’s always a mistake.
We don’t know how alien life forms might look, or how they would react to the way our life forms look. We’re pretty attached to the bipedal configuration. Everything else is apparently edible.
But an alien form might find octopuses essentially top-tier. Our concept of communication is pretty arrogant, as is our concept of intelligence. When I was a kid, I was told that intelligence was aligned with tool-making and the only animal that could make tools was man. (Right. Sexist.)
But we know of course that monkeys make tools, crows make tools—many animals make tools. Even ants do.
So what I suspect is that alien life forms—even technologically superior ones—make mistakes. And we make mistakes. Their mistake might be in trying to reach the most intelligent/most interesting earth organism. Ours might be in believing that means us.
Is all this really in the story?
Yes. It is. Writers lean into their own associations when they write. Everything in their heads and all around them propel not only the plot and character that interests them, but the presuppositions and morals that lie in the background of any writer’s fictive world.
Even the spam gets in.
The Astounding Analog Companion 