(Un)Luckily Soft Spam Project is OVER (fucking finally)
What was that??
SSP was an artistic mailing list project. The people who agreed to receive SSP have been indexed in a database comprising name, sex, and age. For one year, once per month, an email has been sent. The content was standardized but slightly customized to seem tailored for each receiver. The content? Each mail was a fake toxic love letter, from a different anonymous made-up character that seems to know you well. The last email, on the other hand, was a true expression of personal admiration (when possible) from the writer, me.
Why all this?
Every day we receive hundreds of unrequested emails. They look harmless but they’re not. Not only they enormously pollute the planet (since 5 emails that weigh 1Mb pollute as 1Km made by car), they also pollute our perception of the world and of ourselves. Marketing has become more and more aggressive in the last years. To get noticed in the devastating chaos of visual communication on our devices, companies are forced to play with our insecurities. ASOS sending you compliments about your look, Spotify admiring your tastes in music, Linkedin sending inflated numbers of imaginary people secretly admiring your professional life... Every spam email we get is trying to harass us by flooding us with corny compliments. Even if we know that they’re programmed to automatically fit each target, in the corners of our self-esteem, they feel so real...
The reactions to Soft Spam were very different. Some people felt like answering each one of the emails would have been fun. Some, less prepared, got very angry about some of the contents, thinking that the email was written specifically for him/her. Some must have moved the emails to the spam folder, where they belonged, and never read them again. When the last email has been delivered, most people couldn’t say if it was real or not. After being teased and harassed for one year, once a real compliment arrived, the receivers did not accept it.
Who knows, maybe in my spam folder there’s that one love letter that could have changed my life.
Some numbers:
Soft Spam Project started in April 2021
After one year SSP received 42 subscriptions
At the current date, 450 Soft Spam emails have been sent
Since Soft Spam Project has been launched, 0 suicides have been reported among subscribers
Soft Spam ended in March 2022