Beset
I am not breaking any news when I share the following trenchant insight: spam is back, and it's worse than ever. I'm seeing it across pretty much every front of my digital life right now, and it's one of the reasons I've pulled back from public fora like social media. The noise is simply too overwhelming.
I remain optimistic that this is cyclical — that it will get solved in due time, in much the same way email spam was solved, until the phishing email was relegated to a punchline in outdated jokes.
But until that happens, I find myself beset. Lazily lofted job applications fired to my personal email; barely disguised cold outreach sent not just to my work email but to my personal email, Buttondown's support inbox, and even my public calendar links. Our KYC tools are filled to the brim with people using an LLM to answer the question what is your newsletter about?
It is all simply too much, and it has the unfortunate side effect of devaluing all cold outreach — a thing I used to love, when done with nuance and care — to zero.To be explicit, as much of a bummer as this is to say: if you ever send me an email asking for a job with your resume attached, I will pointedly not respond. If you then follow up — as some people have — by sending it to my personal address, I will make a point of actively anti-recommending you to anyone who comes calling.
I'm tempted to hook up something like Pangram to analyze every incoming email from an unrecognized sender, or to find one of the many tools I'm sure already do exactly that. This to me, like the cybersecurity chaos of last week, feels like environmental toxicity. "Selling the poison and then selling the cure", et cetera.