I’ve recently had the pleasure of adding a new step to my morning greet-the-world ritual: wake up, have coffee, take shower, brush teeth, purge trackback spam from blog. Trackbacks, for those on the periphery of the blogosphere, are links that are automatically added to a blog posting when another blogger makes a reference to it. Spammers are now using trackbacks to disseminate links to their own sites, which typically sell porn, Viagra or other tools for enhancing (or fabricating) intimacy.

Now, the hit rate for trackback spam must be incredibly low – much lower than, say, email spam or that other bane of the blogger’s existence, comment spam. I mean, how many of you dig into a posting’s trackbacks, and of those who do how many are dumb (or desperate) enough to be taken in by a blindingly obvious spam link? So the very existence of trackback spam underscores the incredibly low marginal costs of doing stuff online with software. If you can automate the distribution of spam, then the marginal costs of sending out an additional marketing message are basically zero. Economically, it’s worth it even if your hit rate is, oh, one-in-a-zillion. The cost of excising trackback spam, on the other hand, is very real. Either you turn off trackbacks, which cuts you off from their promotional value in attracting readers, or you delete the spam messages, one by one. (The spammers are always one step ahead of automated filters.) Basically, what this does is institutionalize mischief.

But the economically motivated mischief is only one of the Internet’s plagues. Another is mischief without any economic motivation – what might be called online juvenile delinquency, the virtual equivalent of draping a neighbor’s tree with toilet paper. The highest-profile recent example is the posting of dirty pictures on the Los Angeles Times’ experimental editorial-page wiki. As soon as a thread on the experiment went up on Slashdot, the mischief-makers swarmed, and the “wikitorial” was doomed. Now, admittedly, there was a certain pleasure in watching this. Wikis (God, how I hate the precious neologisms of the Webworld!) are an annoyingly overhyped and narcissistic phenomenon, and to have a major newspaper indulge in them seemed both pretentious and patronizing. But the mindless destructiveness is also tiresome. Toilet-papering a tree once is funny; making a habit of it is pathetic. Again, though, the Internet makes the costs of mischief-making so low, even if there’s no profit motive, that its proliferation becomes inevitable.

Do I have a solution? Nope. Computer networks, it’s safe to say, will have no measurable impact on human nature. Hand out free cans of spray paint beside a wall that can be seen by everyone in the world, and you’re going to get a hell of a lot of graffiti.