7 THE DEATH ALGORITHM

The survival of digital technologies has always largely depended on their killer instinct. Email communication, for instance, would never have been successful had it not solved the problem of spam. The famous algorithm that remedied the situation was called “SpamAssassin”—a martial name for a filter designed to reduce the white noise in this new medium of communication by separating desirable messages from junk mail. Regardless of what it was called, the elimination of spam was an indispensable prerequisite for digital communication and the popularization of social media.