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A monthly rant by The Ocelot’s resident Grumpy Gruff The Goat - This month he’s a bit peeved with ‘spam’.

When Dante sat down and wrote the Inferno segment of The Divine Comedy in 1314 he would have had a field day filling his eighth circle of hell with the people behind online ‘spam’.

For those of you who don’t know, and it’s not exactly an everyday subject that gets brought up in this world of selfies and celebrity that we live in, the eighth circle of hell is the part given over to fraudsters. At the time, good ol’ Dante was writing about ancient myths and philosphers and men of lofty ideals who gave false counsel.

He was not talking about people selling you false hope that you might be able to increase your penis girth.

Nor was he talking about Nigerian princes who can only access their millions if you send them money now. Right this second. Go on.

Every time we turn on the internet, and this depends on your spam filters, you have to wade through an infinite amount of manure and bullshit before you actually reach any email that might actually be real - and not a fake one disguised as your bank needing you to fill in your account details right this second or the whole internet will explode.

The countless amounts of micro-misery each piece of spam causes in humanity is impossible to measure. Every piece of this filth that clogs up your computer is another bit of rotting detritus making your life that much greyer and full of despair.

And no-one knows who they are. They are spambots. Robots that are trained to throw rubbish and Viagra adverts non-stop at you because one person in every thousand might say yes making their ‘con’ a real thing. It is crime going on right in front of us every day that none of us can do anything about.

We just press delete. And move onto the next thing. Not even thinking of the little old lady down the road who has just sent her pension money out to someone claiming to have become stranded in the Far East with no access to money unless you send them some right now.

And then there’s the ‚‘spam’ that carries viruses. You press one button and suddenly your whole system is flashing on and off like a police car.

Who does this? Why? Why does it even exist?

Spammers would have filled the Eighth Circle in no time. In fact they would have over-populated hell so much that it would have ended up getting a virus and shutting down.