How sad that today, rather than encouraging people to do the same today for issues that Commoncause supports, they have lost faith in their supporters willingness to support causes from their own initiative. Instead, they have chosen to become a large scale spammer.

THey must consider their supporters untrustable drones. Why else provide form letters for them to send rather than letting the supporters provide their own perspective on issues ? They must not trust their drones to take action either. Why else create an automated spamming system rather than providing emails or snail mail addresses for their supporters to use on their own ?

Which leads to the reason for this post.

Last month i wrote a post saying why I thought there could be value to tiered levels of service on the internet. Some people agreed. Some disagreed. The beauty was in the discussion that resulted.

Discussion, its a beautiful thing. The exchange of ideas. It leads to better ideas.

Well the spammers at commoncause.org decided that they should spam me with the following form letter.

I agree with the principle that just because the technology lets you make it easy for some to "get involved"... that is not necessarily the right thing to do. This form letter shows exactly why; the user got to click a message to show their support. But it has no effect, because the user is not informed.

Perhaps this is useful for congressional issues -- you know that the Congressman is not and will not be reading your letter. If you are going to be summarized into a histogram, you might as well not spend the effort to craft something. I know, because every time I have written to a Congress member, the response back has been a form letter -- and generally not even one based on the opinion I expressed (ie, TOPIC_FORM rather than PRO_TOPIC_FORM / CON_TOPIC_FORM). The form letter responses have no impact.

In this case, as a responsive host but not a civil servant, Cuban is open to a discussion. But the form letter was not particularly well researched. All that it tells him is that there is rabble being roused on a website, and people are willing to be roused to the point of filling in their email address. Woo!

I get a number of petitions from activist-types like my sister. This multiple tiered Internet is pretty high activity (and not particularly well understood). My sister forwarded me a petition from MoveOn.org about it. You can see a sample on snopes.com. The premise is that because companies will have the option to pay to be excluded from spam traps, non-profits will no longer be able to send email. Which isn't true unless you don't understand the reason for the proposal (adding a money trail adds an accountability trail). I won't click an auto-petition, now, because this is an example where the petition is not formulated by the better informed. If I care, I'll become informed and figure out my own response.