Procrast-Nation

A picture say it all:

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If you are a regular reader, you know by now that I am obsessed with starting these seemingly insane and pointless projects.  Well its time for another one, but this one I think has real potential.  As many of you may remember, project inbox overload was originally an attempt to see if it was actually feasible to fill a gmail account.  Sure enough, with the help of friends, I was able to reach the 7 gigabyte or so limit gmail provided.  I then found out that Yahoo offered “unlimited space”, so I immediately started a yahoo account and began signing it up for news letters and email updates and giving the email address out to sketchy websites that would spam it.  With some work, I was getting a couple thousand emails a day, over half of which for some odd reason were advertisements for Indian and plus sized breast porn.  Anyway, it didn’t take long for Yahoo to screw me out of my unlimited space.  Essentially the account broke.  It started accepting less and less emails and locking up more and more frequently until eventually, whenever I tried to log into the email I’d just recieve an error message.  The error message indicates that I should contact support, who were of course, non responsive.  The account had reached around 70,000 emails when this happened, which were, based on some calculations and estimating, under 2 gigabytes worth of space total.  As I predicted, yahoo’s unlimited space was a scam and their email was far inferior to gmail.  Anyway, the whole point of this past project was to test the limits of the free service, and also to see how easy it was to get signed up for a bombardment of emails.

Now, what does this have to do with Neil Ludd you may ask?  I will explain.  Recently people have used email less and less and have been spending more time and energy on facebook and other social networking sites. The amount of data transferred over these sites is ridiculous. People make hundreds, in some case thousands of “friends” to whom they send messages, post pictures, invite to events, play games with, and in essence, spam. For some crazy statistics, follow this link:

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Facebook-Statistics-2010.jpg

To highlight a few, there are over 400 million active users, 60 million status updates each day, 3 billion photos uploaded each month, and 5,000,000,000 pieces of content are shared EACH WEEK!

I feel that facebook, more than anything else, epitomizes the information glut that Neil Postman talked about in modern society. I figured, why not do a little experiment. I wanted to see how much facebook does to prevent people from over-using and distributing information, so I made an account under the alias Neil Ludd.

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To describe this project I will begin with a little story. Back when Google’s web-based email, gmail came out, I was pretty excited about getting 1000mb of space even though I had absolutely no need for so much email space. Later, they doubled the capacity of the email and then proceeded to continually increase it (right now it is around 7304 megabytes of space). It was at this point I decided to see if it was even feasible to fill up a gmail account with spam. I enlisted the help of some friends and immediately began submitting my email account, archbishopspam@gmail.com to any shady looking website trying to get spam. Pretty soon I started getting some spam, but not nearly enough. I then signed up for hundreds of news letters, web alerts, web groups, and other consistent sources of email that would send an email at least once a day. At this point it started filling, but it was really when I signed up for news alerts under the most generic keywords possible (stock, war, food, music, business, bush, religion, sports ect.) that I started getting flooded since now I got a link to virtually every news article out there. It took a long time and a lot of effort, but I did finally fill up a gmail account. At this point I considered the project a success, wiped the account and watched it start to fill up again, checking it more and more infrequently.

Now lets fast forward a few years.

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