in so many words...

Yet Another Wiki Spammed to Death

When my two teenage sons crawled out of bed early one Sunday afternoon, they were initially quite alarmed to find me storming around the house, swearing, slamming doors and banging things. As soon as they realized that my fury was not due to anything they had or had not done, they relaxed and attempted to calm me down by assuring me that everything would be all right, patting me on the head and calling me "cute little mother". Far from being reassuring, their affectionate attention only slowed me down by pointing out to me the futility of my reaction. There was simply no one that I could reach with my anger.

The reason for this fit of frustration was that I had finally felt compelled that morning to take my wiki offline. Wiki spam had increasingly been a problem for several months, but as I was largely unable to work online following an eye operation and had badly strained my eyes several times as I attempted to weed out the wiki spam, the problem had reached the point where I was physically no longer able to deal with it.

Wiki spam – along with all the other forms of spam that increasingly infest all types of online communication and cooperation – is obviously a widespread and well known nuisance. Despite the assumption that there was nothing personal or specific about the spam infesting my wiki, I still found it disturbing so see a platform intended to be part of creating a space for women to share skills, exchange information and collaboratively expand their knowledge of computers and network technology overrun with links to porn sites suggesting an endless variety of mysogenist and degrading fantasies. To me, as an old feminist, this raised a whole string of associations with feminist concerns that have already been addressed for decades and are still not yet really resolved.

To begin with, I was naturally aware of the potential problem of wiki spam when I first set up my wiki nearly two years ago. I collected a number of links to sites with information about dealing with the problem¹, but as I had never actually used a wiki before, I was more concerned with learning the fundamentals of use and basic administration, hoping (in vain, as it turned out) that I would have a chance to learn about dealing with wiki spam before it became an issue. This situation is a familiar one that especially women have been keenly aware of for a long time, but which has become even more acute with the rise of ICT: How do you balance the responsibilities of everyday life with job responsibilities and keeping abreast of new developments and demands and still find time and energy to devote to (unpaid) personal interests? My technical skills were not sufficiently well developed to enable me to deal with all potential problems from the start, but initiating a framework for women to learn together and from one another was important enough to me that I was willing to embark on a process of "learning by doing". Yet the necessity of earning a living (working as a freelance translator) and demanding complications in my household affairs unexpectedly hindered me in pursuing this course as I has originally intended.

This was the first point where wiki spam started to arouse my anger: Who or what was this anonymous spam-generating entity to dictate what I had to learn and when? There are already more than enough external demands on my time and attention, and although I have been interested in computers and how people use them and what the consequences of those uses are for nearly thirty years now, this particular interest is too peripheral to the rest of my life to allow me to devote as much time and attention to it as I would like. In addition, there is such a broad range of aspects involved that I cannot concentrate on all of them at once and continuously have to make choices. But these are choices that I want to make, not to have dictated by someone else.

Thinking about all the information I have gathered and read about wiki spam, however, somehow I have the impression that this attitude is not very widespread. Instead, spam – along with other more destructive and disruptive interventions in networked communications – seems to be regarded as something like a challenge to engage in a battle of skills. And sometimes I have the impression that I can almost hear the swoosh of imaginary laser swords in the background as I read between the lines. Then try to picture a Jedi master confronted by a dark lord with his laser sword drawn and glowing saying, "Sorry, not right now. I have a sick child to attend to and three deadlines to meet."

It is certainly not my intention to belittle or ridicule the efforts of network technicians and system administrators, who devote so much time, energy and knowledge to maintaining the continuous and undisrupted flow of data across the networks. I live with one such hero, so I know quite well how much work this entails. (I also know how often I am left waiting or taking over other responsibilities, because network disruptions are invariably a matter of immediate urgency.) I am also very grateful to all the people who have made the effort to provide anti-spam and security information so that it is available to people like me. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to question now whether it is always necessary or even advantageous to view such disruptions as a battle arena, a challenge to be taken up to prove one's abilities in an endless spiral of thrusts and counter-thrusts, anti-spam measures and spamming tricks to evade them, attacks and ever new defenses.

Perhaps it is due to the nature of my current problem with wiki spam that this notion of being constantly under siege, always on the alert and prepared to defend oneself reminds me of old assumptions relating to women's freedom of movement. How many generations of women have learned from an early age that you have to be careful how you dress, you have to be careful where you go, you have to be careful of your company ... If you find yourself the object of unwanted attention – or worse – it is your own fault for not being on your guard. That the world at large is a dangerous place for female human beings was long taken for granted as a natural fact of life. In fact, the world at large is still often a dangerous place especially for female human beings, but the relentless efforts of generations of feminists have at least achieved a wider spread recognition that this is not a fact to be taken for granted, but a problem that needs to be rectified. This has to start with changing everyday conventional assumptions and behavior in so many ways and so many contexts. It involves recognizing that a woman by herself does not necessarily need or want male attention and respecting people's need for personal space. It requires an insight that interests and abilities vary from person to person regardless of whether any given person is male or female or anything else.

If you set up a wiki without taking all the proper precautions to defend it, and your wiki is suffocated by endless links to porn sites, you have only yourself to blame? Spam is a natural fact of life on the Internet?

If the Internet operates in a state of siege, where tech heroes engage in battle with assailants of all types while damsels in distress (albeit of diverse temperaments) wait to be rescued by said heroes, other stock characters that might be expected are politicians and money-makers. And indeed these characters also abound on and around the Internet, all propagating attitudes like "every man for himself", "take what you can get", "it's a dog-eat-dog world", "only the fittest, fastest, cleverest, most unscrupulous can survive"... If this is the accepted story, the consensual version of online life, what are the consequences in terms of our expectations, conventions and behavior? Which constraining stereotypes are reinforced? And which kinds of alternatives to this scenario might be imaginable and what could their consequences be?

One starting point for trying to imagine alternative scenarios might be to consider that spam generally seems to appeal to fantasies about money/cheap consumption and fantasies about sex. What would make these kinds of appeals so uninteresting that they would no longer be worth the effort? The question of what human beings truly desire and need for a sense of happiness and fulfillment is obviously not a question relating solely to online exchanges, but perhaps it is not a coincidence that appeals for attention that exploit a palpably felt lack have become so overwhelmingly virulent online.

Given that so much spam appeals to fantasies about sex, is it a coincidence that a wiki specifically designated as part of a space for women was overrun with porn links? Probably. The wiki and the spam were not even in the same language. Nevertheless, the effect was to make the participating women – specifically with the shared goal of overcoming a sense of insecurity in dealing with technology – feel even more insecure and uncomfortable about posting to the wiki. Who wants to see her name at the top of a page filled with links telling stories of sexual violence and humiliation? It also had a disempowering effect on me as the woman responsible for this wiki, as it seemed to highlight my inadequacy as the wiki sysop, veritably taunting my dependency on (male) system administrators and spam experts.

Straining my eyes to weed out this disgusting rubbish, checking page after page to delete it, I was also reminded of something else. As I was working on a translation of the script of a short video by "Die Königin" (Claudia Dworschak, Marion Geyer-Grois) entitled "Wilder Westen/Wild West"², the revolting words seemed almost eerily familiar. As I read through the text again in the end, I suddenly felt a wave of nausea as it hit me that this was not just spam, but in fact the transcript of a police wiretap that led to the conviction of people charged with trafficking in young women from Eastern Europe in Vienna. These were the words of actual human beings talking about real people – in terms that might be taken straight from the most disgusting spam circulating anywhere on the Internet. Is this a coincidence too?

Clearly, spam – whether it is mail spam, wiki spam, blog spam or any other kind – is not a "women's issue". It irritates everyone in the world who attempts to communicate in any way online, and it is an incredible waste of all kinds of resources. Faced with the onslaught of spam and the danger of more destructive attacks, small networks and alternative servers such as art servers have to struggle to survive. Is it worth that much effort? Another alternative is for users to retreat to the shelter of such fortresses as Google, Yahoo and other big players with a host of laser sword-wielding tech heroes to protect them. What consequences this could have in the long run are not yet really clear, but experience suggests that it would be wiser to ensure that smaller, relatively independent and decentralized alternatives are able to survive long enough to offer a choice if (when?) large-scale data storage proves to be problematic.

In this situation of siege and the seemingly inevitable and inescapable constraints that arise from it, perhaps it could be useful to revisit old and ongoing feminist struggles such as women's freedom of movement to re-examine the expectations, assumptions and attitudes underlying these constraints in search of possibilities for changing them.

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