A pair of troubling propositions

Postal regulators have accepted a scheme designed in part by lobbyists for the Time Warner media conglomerate. In short, mailing costs for mega-magazines like Time Warner's own Time, People and Sports Illustrated will go up only slightly or decrease. But smaller publications like The Nation will be hit by an enormous rate increase of half a million dollars a year.

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It's a pain in the neck and elsewhere to get hundreds of emails each day urging us to buy some new product that will cause us to instantantly lose weight, enlarge our penis, receive a free computer, find the perfect date, or provide sexual fulfillment by watching other people's sex acts.

So, it seemed to make sense when some people decided to label the above as "spam" and to find ways to eliminate it. We have a spam filter on some of our email addresses, and we are glad it works.

Unfortunately, the definition of "spam" has now extended to all email that is unsolicited and sent out to a large list of people. The problem here is that this kind of email includes political communications from non-profits that are perfectly legitimate and ought to be protected.

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Not All Spam Is Spam by Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun Magazine and national chair, The Network of Spiritual Progressives

It's a pain in the neck and elsewhere to get hundreds of emails each day urging us to buy some new product that will cause us to instantantly lose weight, enlarge our penis, receive a free computer, find the perfect date, or provide sexual fulfillment by watching other people's sex acts.

So, it seemed to make sense when some people decided to label the above as "spam" and to find ways to eliminate it. We have a spam filter on some of our email addresses, and we are glad it works.

Unfortunately, the definition of "spam" has now extended to all email that is unsolicited and sent out to a large list of people. The problem here is that this kind of email includes political communications from non-profits that are perfectly legitimate and ought to be protected.

Take, for example, the attempts on the part of organizations opposed to the war in Iraq or to the destruction of the environment to communicate with you. Some people know more about these issues than the rest of us?and often they have special information that the establishment media does not want to print. For many of these ethical trailblazers, there is no way to get that information out unless they can get hold of people's email addresses and send it to them. Why should this attempt to reach out to their fellow citizens be given the same "spam" label as the attempt to sell them some for-profit products?

"I have a right to privacy," some people answer. "I don't want some political cause to invade my private space unless I choose to let that happen. If some friend of mine knows about that cause and sends me information, I won't call it 'spam', but some organization that I don't know has no right to fill up my inbox with their materials."

This kind of argument would be more persuasive if it had been raised as an argument for a constitutional amendment that would ban all forms of unsolicited advertising in public space. Take billboards first. I go out for a walk down my street and am suddenly confronted with a billboard with a scantily dressed woman inviting me to consume some product. I didn't invite that into my consciousness, but there it is. Why wasn't this banned as spam? Or advertising on television when I want to hear the evening news to find out what is happening in my local area, or in the newspapers? I didn't ask for these either, yet they assault me no less than the unsolicited notes in my in-box.

Unfortunately, the answer is that the spam that is under assault when it comes to social change organizations is the spam of those without the resources to buy the media ads and street or highway billboards. The wealthy and the corporations have a way to force their message into your "private space" and most people have accepted that and don't fight it.

If the "spam" of social change organizations is regulated or made illegal (as in some states it already is), who benefits? Those who have the means to get their message out through the mass media.

"But still, these spammers don't have a 'right' to invade my space!"

The real question here is: do we have a right "not to know?" What if our government is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq with our tax money, or the corporations from whom we buy products are destroying the environment so that our community's rate of cancer is rising dramatically?

Why do we have a "right" to not know about all this? And, conversely, if some organization finds a way to get our email addresses, why do we have a right to not receive their communications? Is this kind of information really "spam" that should be prevented, made illegal, or stopped by having the service provider sued for allowing non-profits to send this kind of information to people who didn't request it? How could they have requested it when they never even heard about the issues until the social movements started raising them? As more and more of the media gets bought up by the right-wing extremists like Murdoch and more and more people give up on news altogether (because the liberal news is so bland and boring--they think that the only way to be "balanced" is to have no thoughts about anyting and no real controversy--while the right wing media gets more appealing because it at least has a willingness to stand for something and not pretend to be robots reading a detached script to which they have no human connection whatsoever, and while newspapers and magazines assault us with pages and pages of advertising that are no more solicited or asked for by us than anything we might get in our email box (or the subtler form that appears on NPR and PBS), the only place we are likely to learn about the burning issues of the day with anything like a serious pespective is precisely by receiving informatin on the internet from people whose worldview we never heard before and hence would have never asked for. That is what used to happen in the publc squares of the towns that put together the American republic, but the power of the corporations in the past hundred years has been to destroy or trivialize public space so that new ideas are almost inaccessible there.

We all have a desire to not have our inboxes filled up, even with valuable information that we "should" know. Many of us feel quite annoyed and overloaded with all the materials that get past our spam filters. But no government, and no corporation with control over what you or any political group can send out on their cyberspace networks, should have the right to censor or control which communications get delivered to you.Powerful corporate interests, on the other
hand, are working hard to find a way to restrict or undermine the internet and every other vehicle that can be used by dissenters to expose the lies, the distortions and the violations of our rights, the destructiveness of their products to the environment, the evil of our wars, the injustice of our global economic arrangements. They've just a few weeks ago succeeded in a major victory: raising the cost of mail for magazines so that the little guys like Tikkun can barely afford to stay publishing and they are now at work trying to devise ways to charge people for using the internet (a
rate that will be very small for personal use, but for those who want to communicate to larger groups, say the 100,000 people who receive communications from me, or the millions who get info from MoveOn, the costs would be prohibitive. And when these non-profits include in their message an appeal for funds, that doesn't make it any less legitimate or turn it into "spam"--it's not for commercial purposes, but only to keep alive the organization that has to pay its employees (and not very much) to do the work of healing and transforming our planet that many of us would like to do, but can't because we are already overly busy just supporting ourselves and our families. So keep that in mind, and challenge people when they describe the messages they get from social change groups as "spam." The label itself is part of the attempt to discredit those of us who are trying to put forward alternative messages to those that dominate the media and the lies put forward daily by our government.

Not all spam is spam. Or, at least, political spam is kosher.