Through most of last week, the world took a vacation. My email, normally a torrent, slowed to a trickle. Aside from messages about the blog, and checkins from friends in NYC reporting in, there was hardly incoming mail.
Except spam.
Tons and tons of spam.
I'm convinced that most spammers were — like most people in general — glued to CNN, watching the Current Situation unfold. I think that the spam I received all through last week was the result of automated, timed tasks, cron jobs running in the background on thousands of servers and desktops around the world.
My mood's a little apocalyptic these days, so I got to thinking about what would happen to the Internet if humans vanished, and I imagined a world of Flying Dutchmen, automated processes that sent spam, deleted spam, spawned bots on IRC channels, infected each other with worms and fetched down antivirus medecine… It's an eerie image.
If the world ended with a whimper — say, a fast, world-killing bug — and our power apparatus held out, visiting aliens would discover a richly populated Internet of spiders, bots, mobile code, spam and cockroaches, nattering away at one another while humanity lay in its grave. Creepy, huh? Discuss
