…does it take to create a spamnado? Earlier today, what seems like the entire profession received an automated e-mail from some organization whose servers are hosted by Cal Tech. The original message was spam of some sort, I’m guessing, though I didn’t pay it any mind, so I can’t say for sure. What came next, though, caught my attention: first one person and then scores of others began sending “unsubscribe” replies, all of which, naturally, went out to the entire list (which, again, seems to consist of the entire profession). As more and more people sent out increasingly irate replies, the messages kept bouncing around cyberspace. At last count, I have well over a hundred such e-mails in my inbox, many of these messages from the profession’s most eminent scholars.

Which is to say, we seem to have been tested by Skynet earlier today. And as a profession, we failed catastrophically. The past is not in very good hands.

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