The legacy of spam

One of the things that I can observe nowadays as a 50 year old man is how spam has changed the world, but mostly the people. You see, when the Internet started it was just a random connection between people and sites and any part of that could be abused. It was customary to enter some site or another and be bombarded with flashing ads with shrill grotesque colors. Popup ads came later to great mis-effect. Email was just as unsafe, people having to publish their emails in strange obfuscated ways so that they are not scraped into spam lists. Spam was everywhere and people were not prepared. But people learn, so even lacking any real technical or legislative support against spam, the smart kids would train their own brains to detect and ignore spam. An almost The City and the City situation, if you will, where strident portions of your online experience were just automatically scrubbed from perception through training. It's the reason why I find it so hard to see big colorful buttons…