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November 30, 2004
The Economics of Spam and State of our Culture
I have been spending more and more of my blogging time cleaning up SPAM attacks. Even with improved software it keeps coming. Pornography, Viagra, Texas hold 'em, more pornography...the unwanted posts and trackbacks just keeps coming and coming. Why? Can there possibly be enough people out there who want access to such material to make it worth all of the trouble the spammers go through to get access to sites like this one? Clearly it must pay, as seen in this posting from Fresh Inc.
"...Virginia recently led the way in the nation's first prosecution of a spammer, a North Carolina man named Jeremy Jaynes. Bail for Jaynes was set at $1 million dollars. Why? Apparently, Jaynes' spamming business was quite lucrative. Prosecutors suspect he's been "squirreling away" parts of his $24 million fortune in foreign bank accounts, and is too great a flight risk, according to a November 9 AP story. Though Jaynes' faces up to nine years in prison, I wonder if this type of prison time will deter others. The lure of making millions by peddling junk products, pornography, and other dubious materials is probably worth the risk to many unscrupulous characters."
It is a sad reflection on the state of American culture that pornography so dominates the Internet. In a 1996 interview in Religion and Liberty, Kay Coles James liked the decline of our culture to a disease.
"America at its core has an identity, a culture that represents who we are as a nation. I see that culture as sick and dying. That is true because those institutions in our culture that historically provided a shield for us against the pathologies of our communities are breaking down. These pathologies-violence, pornography, child abuse, chemical addiction-have existed in world culture since the very beginning of time. But what has allowed us as a nation to fight off those particular pathologies is that we had a very strong immune system-things like strong families, strong faith, strong institutions, a moral base, a strong sense of virtue. As a result of our immune system now being broken down, we are susceptible to these viruses. So the way we need to address this problem is to build up those institutions that have made us be able to resist the pathologies."
Maybe the moral overtone of our recent election was a small step toward inoculating America from the pathologies that are attacking its culture. We can only hope.
Posted November 30, 2004 05:01 AM
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Comments
...I also find it amusing that an industry, such as the adult entertainment industry, that "no one" ever pays into or watches, etc can reach into the billions of dollars in profit... I guess businesses go where demand is strong? supply and demand at its finest...
Posted by: Jason at December 1, 2004 09:05 AM
You should pass this on to your fellow professors who teach in the liberal arts departments. The breakdown in our nation's support systems didn't start in corporate America. I never once heard any of my employers question the sanctity of the family or religion as I've heard it questioned in our nation's institutions of "higher education." Thank you for your courage in posting a comment such as this
Posted by: Jim Jankowski at December 1, 2004 10:18 AM
at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. He consults with a variety of businesses on start-up and growth related issues, and with larger corporations on re-establishing entrepreneurial cultures within their organizations. Dr. Cornwall's current research interests include entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial ethics. He has authored or co-authored four books.
