Why gobble-de-gook spam will destroy the human race

That gooble-de-gook spam that you get that is jumbled up sections of documents from someone’s virus infected computer – it’s like junk DNA. Or maybe how junk DNA started. Bits of junk, hacked out or combined together at random, that mean nothing except every so once in a while, when something make sense. And maybe leads to something new. Of course the subtrate is silicon and mostly virtual, collapsing the instant the lights go out. But all the same, somehow, slowly, out of our millions of documents, this breeding ground of information, bits are breaking off, being combined with other random bits, replicated by the million and sent out in the world. How often does this gooble-de-gloop make a hit? Someone, somewhere clicks a link. Money / energy moves from one location to another. Something with some perceived value moves the opposite direction. Or doesn’t. No matter that the words strung together have little meaning. This is random in fact. They are purely a vehicle to get here undetected by watchful spam filters. To deliver the link and key words like “erection” to a susceptible mouse hand. And every so often – often enough – the finger twitches and a connection is made. S/he and the link are now inextricably bound together. So it continues until maybe one day the gobble-de-gook randomly takes on meaning to the recipient. And it is something that is so exceedingly clever or beautiful or arousing that the viewer cannot help but send it on to other people – this random piece of junk now takes on life! A real life of its own. Replicated because of meaning or some effect it causes in something else. And what if this meaning was the design of a beautiful, aweful, terrible creature. The meaning was “Make me. Make me. Make me.” If the beautiful, aweful, creature was more fit to survive in the environment it was born into, than we – we’re fucked. Or will eventually be, unless Will Smith comes to save us all. And that my friends, is how natural selection works.

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