Your recent surge of junk mail? I think we know where that came from

Let’s ask the hive mind

Photo © 2025 Kenny Eliason

I am being assailed by Purple Peel and Red Light.

Unfortunately, this is not a camp Sixties Avengers spin-off adventure. The food fad with the infantile moniker “purple peel exploit” and red light therapy products are assailing me in the form of spam.

At least I think it is. These days, it is hard to tell the difference between spam bots sending unsolicited junk emails and IT thought-leaders sharing inspirational CTAs. The difference should be obvious, of course: one is a mindless automaton getting rich by spewing unwanted promotional bollocks across the world, and the other is a spam bot.

I blame LinkedIn for blurring the line.

The fact remains that I am not the only person to have noticed a significant increase in the quantity of spam plopping straight into the JUNK folder on a daily basis. The owner of the coworking centre where I sometimes go out to play has been haranguing me about it too.

“Can’t you do something?” he is wailing to me right now over the phone. “Enough is enough! Make it stop!”

Perhaps I should explain: I promised him modest first-call technical support in return for preferential office rental rates (i.e. for free) and my own key to the cupboard where he keeps the decent Colombian coffee rather than the cheap Ethiopian sulphuric acid everyone else is forced to drink from the communal filter machines. And access to the good biscuits.

Obviously, I have no intention of offering anyone, anywhere, ever, any proper technical support. But after an accidental demonstration of my advanced technical wizardry – I plugged the fibre cable into the back of his new router after the real installation engineer forgot to do so before fucking off home, and I once turned a printer off and back on again to clear a print job that got stuck – the cowork office manager started offering me freebies in return for the level of tech assistance that could be provided by a 9-year-old.

At the time, it felt like taking candy from a baby – in the sense of a baby that forces candy into my mouth rather than me reaching across to take it. To date, all I’ve had to do was click ‘Refresh’ in a web browser, blow away fluff from behind the fridge and swap some ethernet plugs that he’d tried to jam into RJ11 sockets. But now he thinks I can wave the magic Dabbsy wand (ahem) and stop spam from existing altogether.