Science is the Closest Thing to Magic… Not Facebook Chain Posts
Magic is something that has appealed to people for centuries, simply because it has the potential to give us something for nothing. Want to make money? Buy this stupid bag of rocks. Want to fall in love? Here, drink this snake oil. Everything you want will come to you; all your dreams will come true, as long as you’re willing to pay the low, low price of $9.95 to buy these magic rocks on Etsy.
I bring this up because I woke up to a Facebook stream FULL of images from people forwarding chain posts. I checked my email and found a few more forwarded emails telling me if I sent them to all my friends, I’d be a millionaire by nightfall.
To all my chain mail forwarding friends, I’m going to explain the evolution of a chain email one more time. Hopefully, if I do it in children’s story form, someone will catch on.
Once upon a time in the land of Nigeria,
A scam artist wanted to spread his scam like bacteria
The problem he had, which he had to resolve
Was finding a way to get his email contacts to evolve
As a poor northern boy, with very few friends
He didn’t have the contacts to meet his evil ends
He needed a way to get emails enmass
Without wasting time or wasting his gas
So he came up with a plan on how to begin
His potential victims would do the gathering for him
He wrote up a letter, promising fortune and fame
And in the ‘BCC’ hid his very own name
They need not send money or do any work
They just had to press a button and act like a jerk
Sending the message to everyone they knew
And getting their friends to do it too
Each time ‘forward to all’ was clicked by a fool
The scammer had his own new email harvest tool
Soon his new contacts were filled to the brim
And he knew it was time for the real scamming to begin
As cute as this story is, I’m not making it up. That’s where chain mail really came from. It came from scammers who hid their email addresses in your BCC, so when you hit forward to all, they would get all your friends’ active emails as well. Then, they earned themselves a huge database of people they could send scam letters to…all because some idiot apparently thinks chain mail is magic.
If there is any kind of magic in the world, it comes from science. Hell, if someone mailed an iPhone to 1864, I’m pretty sure it would get burned as a witch. Science is magic, but people don’t invest half the amount of time in it because you have to work for the magic of science.
It’s not something that comes from pressing ‘forward, forward, forward’ on every piece of junk that pops up in your timeline. If those messages worked, just about every fucktard on the planet would be married to the love of their life, sitting on a giant pile of money. They’re not. They‘re broke, lonely, and sitting at home pressing ‘forward’.
And they’re giving all their friend’s emails to scammers. I’m sure there are people out there who are like ‘well, I only do it as a goof’ or ‘just in case’. Let me explain this. There is no ‘just in case.’ Scientifically, forwarding that email has a 0.000000000% chance of making you rich.
The reason I have to change my email every four years or so is because of this. It’s because through no fault of my own, I wind up on some fucking scammer’s email list… thanks to someone sending me chain mail. Then, my email gets sold to another scammer, and another, and another, until my email is so flooded with announcements that I’ve won the lottery, a free iPad or an inheritance from some relative I didn’t know I had that I need to shut it down and start all over again.
I have 5 different email addresses right now for this very reason.
But what about Facebook? That’s not forwarding chain mail, right?
Right. Instead you’re giving them Facebook friends to harvest and making the chain mail originator’s page look legitimate, thanks to all your ‘shares’ and ‘likes’. In my opinion, that’s just as bad.
People, you want magic, look to science. You want to make your life better, do something about it. Leave the house, meet people, find a better job. But don’t sit around expecting to get something for nothing. That doesn’t happen.
Unless you’re a scam artist looking to get hundreds of emails for free. That happens all the time.
