Back Talk: Graham Parker

ADRIAN BELLESGUARD

Graham Parker has been making art with found data for the past decade. His latest project is Fair Use: Notes From Spam (Book Works; £14.95). The book comprises five pamphlets that explore the historical, personal and environmental aspects of spam. Parker also writes about scambaiters, people who engage with spammers in order to play elaborate pranks. They're confident of their superiority to spammers--perhaps too confident. Vanity is, Parker notes, an essential ingredient of any con. --Christine Smallwood

How much does spam resemble con games of the past?

It has a certain sense of the potential of the network. The Union Pacific going west was loaded with ideological baggage: claims by its owners and the robber barons who were driving it about the promise of freedom. Ben Marks, a small-time grifter, just observed what it did. Marks ran three-card monte games on the trains and was the first person to move his con off the trains and onto a fixed point on land in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He realized that it was better to fleece a transient population as it passed in front of you than to be part of that population. That's what spammers do as well. They develop an inadvertent map of how the network operates and create a great mass of dye in the water that can be followed to see what the machine does.

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