New, improved and very close to final version is to be found HERE.

Releasing in the wild a new essay written with Justin Katko, that is to be revised, but this is the first "final version". Next year a newer version will come out and eventually, a translation in French. This paper has been accepted for the e-poetry 2007 conference (held in Paris at the end of May) and the following publication.

It is called: <u style=“display: none”> What Spam Means to Network Situationism </u>" 

Rough abstract:

This paper contributes to opening a theoretical space for HTML as a site of poetic intervention. It proposes a new tactic of poetic detournement that claims for poetry a set of tools developed by the "exploits" of spammers and crackers: hacking websites to construct covert site-specific texts in non-curated code environments. Our proposal is preceded by the results of an extended web-search for clusters of hidden spam-data structures hacked into HTML pages on the Bureau of Public Secrets <bopsecrets.org>, a website containing English translations of all the major Situationist manifestos and communiques. We illustrate how these data structures function in a networked ecology of spamdexing and link-farming, then use them as models for a non-proprietary poetics of squatting and sensitive intrusion. In building a foundation for our proposal, we discuss the historical agency of online Situationist texts and the consensual metaphors that underlie spamming, hacking and situationism. We close with speculations as to what functions our proposed tactic might perform, situating it in respect to its closest neighbors, net.art and software art, especially in the sense that the for of writing that we advertise remains hidden, working underground and entertaining a dialogue only for the web spiders. 

DOWNLOAD THE .PDF - CURRENTLY DOWN FOR SERIOUS WORK ON THE ESSAY (march 2007)

Also, from today's spam, winking and nudging at our efforts to politicize spam: