Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Hmm. Timing. A couple days ago I posted my little rant about how spam was destroying the usefulness of email as a tool. Just now I stumbled across a Utopia With Cheese item from yesterday, quoting an article in The Register about how "The Internet is dying" (yeah, yeah, I know, "Death of the net predicted, film at 11, old news before the Internet was the Internet, but bear with me -- they don't literally mean the whole net) because "for most people, many of whom are your friends and relatives [...] [the Internet] represents a perfect tragedy of the commons. Email is all but unusable because of spam." And: "Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the while requiring the user to close down dozens of unrequested pop-up advertisements." (There's more to the Register article...)

The point the Register article reaches is, "What's dying is the idea that the Internet would be a tool of universal liberation, and the argument that 'freedom' in itself is a justification for this information pollution. It's probably reached a tipping point: the signal to noise ratio is now too low." [Emphasis added by me.] Note that for it to be "universal", it does have to work effectively for people not sufficiently tech-savvy to install their own pop-up-stoppers (and just turning off JavaScript brings its own problems -- I'm writing more and more "you lost a reader because I can't navigate your site" letters to webmasters who rely on JavaScript for basic navigation), not just us folks who can write or download new tools in the arms race against spammers.

Personally, I'm mostly still at the bitching and whining stage more than the announcing-the-end stage, but I must say, I'm discouraged. The question is, is there anything we can do at this point?