Spam, Wonderful Spam
Stop #&$@ing calling me!
Close your eyes. Imagine your dream life. Picture it in as much detail as you can. Where are you? What are you doing? What are you wearing? Who are you with? Can you hear anything? Smell anything? I’m doing that right now, too, dear reader. A nd eim imaging a wonfuful life. (Sorry about the typos. My eyes were closed imagining a wonderful life.)
In my fantasy, I live in London. I wake up at noon. I stroll around, complaining about the weather, chatting at strangers, tweeting 600 times a day. Once a week, I drink ten stout pints and sit down to write my column for The Guardian Opinion section. Across the Kingdom and the world, people read my articles. They have titles like “Everyone should know the spectacular pleasure of English bespoke footwear” and “If Labour wins, say ta-ta to eel pies on Christmas and hello to pornography in our schools” and “The Drug Crisis: My wife tried MDMA on a hens’ trip to Magaluf and refuses to come back”. I am paid £8000 per week.
Every great journey begins with one small step. Chazzy’s World is that small step towards a career as one of the whiniest, kvetchiest, and crankiest crybabies in print. The great columnist is able to find things that everyone hates, complain about them, and offer no solutions whatsoever. So what does everyone hate? Is there one thing that every American feels has gotten worse? Something that tangibly proves our quality of life has declined?
Yes. Spam phone calls.
Think about it. Has it ever been this bad? Can you recall a time when your phone rang this frequently with unwanted calls? Increasingly, spammers are targeting our cell phones, which makes the incessant barrage of robocalling practically unavoidable. Neighbor spoofing, which allows calls to appear with local area codes no matter where they came from, makes it difficult to spot fakes. Nowadays, when you get a call from your neighborhood, it’s impossible to tell if it’s a telemarketer, a scammer, or if there really are singles in your area looking for casual sex.
This is a national problem. The FCC reports that 60 percent of complaints they receive concern unwanted calls. (The other 40 percent concern HBO’s monopoly on toplessness.) In 2018, Americans received some 4 billion robocalls. In 2019, the FCC authorized phone companies to begin aggressively blocking spam calls and applied anti-spoofing rules to text messages. But more needs to be done. It is infuriating to constantly pick up my phone thinking it’s Emily Ratajkowski getting back to me about my designs for the Chazzy’s World x Inamorata swimwear collection and hearing a robot.
It might seem trivial, but the surge in spam calling reflects serious negative trends in American life. This is yet another issue in which technology has outpaced regulation. The Federal Do Not Call Registry was designed to combat telemarketing. The user portal looks like it was last updated during the Dot Com Bubble. It requires users to manually enter calls they receive and telemarketers must update their call lists themselves by checking the database. The system is wholly unequipped for mobile phones, neighbor mirroring, and outright fraudsters which make the situation so unpleasant today.
The Federal Trade Commission, which runs the Do Not Call list, seems to have hot potatoed the issue over to the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC website touts that $240 million in fines have been levied against telemarketers for spoofing. How many companies did that stop? A whopping three. Bragging that one North Carolina-based health insurance company has been fined feels like when a local police department posts a cop standing with a dimebag of mids and an apple bong, captioned, “Thank you to our brave officers for getting this off the streets!”
The deluge is particularly unbearable right now because election calls are exempt from the Do Not Call List. While political robocalls or robotexts are technically prohibited without consent, if you’ve ever given your number to a political group, you probably gave them permission to hit you up. I don’t know about you, but I personally love getting several texts per day that say, “Everything you love is at stake. Are you too chickenshit to do anything about it? Send us $25.”
It has gotten so bad this election season that I now consider living in Philadelphia to have been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Sure, it was wonderful to spend four years in a city which combines the rich history of Boston, the puritanical alcohol rules of Boston, and the deeply ingrained racism of Boston. It was fun to argue about which family of brusque Italians made the better wet sandwich. And of course, I loved watching groups of guys in plaid shirts celebrate an Eagles win by fellating a police horse. But my phone number is now associated with the country’s most important swing state. Every day, I am pestered to commit election fraud by voting in a state I no longer live in. The calls and texts are unceasing. It is a weight I can no longer shoulder.
The spam calling issue illustrates the degree to which the government has punted on issues of technology regulation. The FCC Guide to Robocalls just encourages users to block calls and seek out tools available from their cell service provider. It’s hardly a surprise that the government does not have a better approach. On seemingly every issue in technology, the FCC under Ajit Pai has thrown up their hands and told companies to figure it out. The FCC even angered the Navy and NASA by letting telecom companies pick their own frequency for 5G, ruining the accuracy of weather forecasting. (Click over to that article. Crazy story.) Whether it’s hate speech, misinformation, or robocalls, the government has deemed it too difficult to keep up with the pace of change.
In all these cases, corporations are left to implement half-assed controls. The issues worsen. The consumer suffers. Spam calling isn’t just annoying; it has serious consequences. Scammers use it to prey on vulnerable people, like the elderly and less educated. What does the FCC do to protect them? Post an article about how to block numbers and ask telecom companies to fix it, pretty please with a cherry on top.
And isn’t that the story of our age? Big tech is tasked with protecting elections and in turn become the arbiters of truth. The health insurance industry is asked to fix healthcare, so costs go up and quality of care stays dismal. Schoolchildren are slaughtered in mass shootings and gun manufacturers are protected by law from being held responsible. Perdue Pharma knowingly floods the country with so many opioids that it causes our life expectancy to drop, and the DOJ gives them a fine that lets the Sacklers stay billionaires. That’s just the way it goes in America. Companies cause massive problems and the government says that someone should do something about that. Nothing gets fixed and our lives get incrementally worse. Spam calling, however trivial it may seem, is just the latest chip to fall.
But, oh well. Someday, I’ll be in London, fat and happy in a pub, puzzling over my next column: “My wife’s still in Magaluf and she’s up the duff with a lifeguard. Why is a Cadbury Creme Egg the only thing that soothes me?”