Industrialised communication
Business needs (profit) drive technology. Thus, to improve sales and marketing performance, we have improved the speed of communication, decreased its cost, and made it easier to automate. Internet, templates, and "no code" glue services create communication factories. We have successfully industrialised human interaction.
Compare email to snail mail, texting to phone calls, video calls with auto-applied make-up filters to face-to-face meetings. There are now document and email templates, online application forms, questionnaires, and social media management suites.
There used to be a penalty to every exchange in-person (in time, effort, willpower, buoyancy), which made it unprofitable to waste people's time. After the speed/cost/automation shift, the penalty no longer applies. Everyone can afford to send vastly more requests than before, which turns a shotgun approach (spam them all) and whale hunting (aiming solely for the largest pay-off opportunities) into the best-performing strategies.
High-prestige recipients receive a deluge of bids for attention. In order to defend themselves against the automated requests (spam), they deploy automated responses (spam filters). As a result, the majority of internet activity consists of robots evaluating and rejecting other robots.
To make it through automated filters, senders:
- shout louder (the progression of content from cute to divisive)
- shout more often, when content is transient (post scheduling, reposting)
- decrease the cost of each shout (automatically generated content)
- use an unfiltered channel (email lists are the holy grail because humans generally cannot filter their email efficiently)
- guess the filter configuration, remove undesirable content indicators, add desirable content indicators (smarter anti-captcha bots, complex spam generators)
Once it passes automated filters, the request is theoretically subject to human filtering. In practice, people prefer to switch to immediate interaction.