What does one do with farts? One option is to let them announce their arrival and then let them disappear into nothingness. This could be disconcertingly dizzying when your fart makes a lot of noise during a meeting in office… or if that fart is determined to destroy expensive perfumes that people spray to impress when at a social gathering. Whatever the nature of a fart, it is best to let it go. It is the same with spam calls and WhatsApp groups. They are farts that upset your moments. Block them all.
What about those WhatsApp groups where vital information is also shared? Well, if it is not the entire group that is bent upon being charged with culpable homicide of decency, some of its members certainly qualify. There are the veterans of ‘good morning’, good night’, and ‘happy this or happy that’ messages that go on with their numbed existence despite entreaties and warnings. Block them all. They are possibly the smelliest farts around who often go beyond those inane messages and keep sharing toxic stuff as well. They simply ‘forward’ updates of others even without bothering to read what they are sending to even a large group where most people are not even known.
It is true that blocking phone numbers and people on the social media platforms can have its downside too. We transform ourselves into suspicious souls. Every time the phone rings, my impulse is to neither accept the call nor to call back. This is a serious concern as everyone I talked to has had a similar response. Why must these unscrupulous callers with their cold calls turn us into people who never answer calls? I have people telling me that they have sometimes included even friends and relatives while they were in the epicenter of their blocking frenzy. For those few minutes they had the blocking-fiend inside them rule their sense of judgement.
Another vital element in this vicious trend of spamming is that messages on the phone now have links that pretend to be what they are not. For instance, if a link pretends to be from some bank, it might simply be a phishing link that is a tactic used by cybercriminals to trick people into taking actions that lead them to malicious websites or steal their personal information.
What is really happening is that processes, devices, and technology that came into being to improve communication has speedily turned into a villainy. Yes, one can report them all and block them, but they are like that monster Hydra with a large number of heads that regrew even if they were cut off. This monster, as things stand today, is seemingly invincible and is only increasing its range and depth of devastating operations. Bill Gates also agrees that ‘spam is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool, and exploiting the idea that it’s very inexpensive to send mail’… well, spam has a wider network and has infected nearly every major communication tool today. This means abuse of technology. It is as if we are standing at a roadside food vendor and being forced to eat spam fritters. Or spam momos, if that please you. It is obviously time for the technology experts to get together and find an effective counter to this seemingly unbeatable tendency. Human tendency, I’d say, because all this would not have even existed without human greed stepping in.
The monsters that surround us these days are not the Goliaths, Ravanas, or Gruffalos from epics and tales, but are real-time troublemakers who need to be dealt a firm and killing blow. A pharmacologist would want technology to be bactericidal and not have an attenuated effect on spam. Let us not bother about weakening spam. Let us raise our voice to kill it.
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Arvind Passey
Written on 19 February 2025
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