Two years ago I wrote a screed com­plain­ing about a load of poorly-​​considered aca­d­e­mic spam I was receiv­ing [and I am not about to re-​​invoke the source here]. I was just vent­ing about the fact that back then there was no way to unsub­scribe from their inces­sant request-​​stream for pro­pos­als for con­fer­ences, pro­pos­als for papers, sub­mis­sions for papers, fol­lowups on ignored requests for papers and con­fer­ences, &c &c &c.

They — and peo­ple act­ing in their name — were send­ing out reams of spam. A quick Google search for “aca­d­e­mic spam” spits this orga­ni­za­tion out right there on the front page, men­tioned sev­eral times over. In com­plaint pieces writ­ten back then.

Since then, I stopped pay­ing atten­tion. I’ve come across some indi­ca­tions that the orga­ni­za­tion has cleaned up its act quite a bit: old col­leagues as edi­tors of con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings, some occa­sional cita­tions of the organization’s papers in actual papers I read, that sort of thing. And best of all: very few requests for me to think up a con­fer­ence topic and ask two dozen cronies to come to a warm Greek island and have a jun­ket so we can pub­lish our hare-​​brained otherwise-​​unpublishable poorly-​​worded tech­ni­cal papers.

That counts for “bet­ter”, in my book.

In hind­sight, I can see how social dynam­ics led to the abhor­rent pyramid-​​scheme spam­ming: Euro­pean and Asian sci­en­tists and engi­neers want to under­mine the English-​​speaking hege­mony of what you might call “trans-​​Atlantic” pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies — which arguably demon­strate a short­fall of papers from Mediter­ranean, Asian and East­ern Euro­pean authors. They admire the col­le­gial­ity of small work­shops and self-​​directed con­fer­ences. So they con­coct a pub­lish­ing house and sup­posed vet­ting insti­tu­tion, and solicit pro­pos­als for con­fer­ences and work­shops, whose pro­ceed­ings will be pub­lished by the over­ar­ch­ing orga­ni­za­tion. So pro­fes­sors who feel like out­siders in the trans-​​Atlantic pub­lish­ing world, whether they’re jus­ti­fied in being excluded or not, start send­ing one another invi­ta­tions to par­tic­i­pate in their own specialty’s community-​​building Greek Island junket.

But the small-​​world struc­ture of the social net­work holds a pow­er­ful sway, so that very soon old col­leagues who don’t speak such good Eng­lish, who hold a grudge against IEEE or ACM or Springer or Aca­d­e­mic Press or Wiley because their life’s work was rejected, whose work is not “on the radar” of tra­di­tional print edi­tors, whose careers depend on pub­li­ca­tion counts, whose self-​​esteem depends on like-​​minded appro­bium… they latch onto this and send each other con­fer­ence invi­ta­tions. And they all agree! They will all pay €800 (their respec­tive employ­ing Acad­e­mies will pay, of course), hop on a local air car­rier, and meet on the Island this sum­mer. w00t, all.

But they’re all going to one another’s con­fer­ences, and that just doesn’t add up to enough warm bod­ies. And there are only so many smart-​​enough stu­dents. So to fill the docket they need a few more speak­ers. So they send announce­ments not just to mail­ing lists and Usenet groups, but to every pro­fes­sional they’ve ever heard of in a field remotely like their own. And because of the small-​​world social net­work, these new peo­ple are (a) folks who have never heard of the orga­niz­ers, (b) who are geo­graph­i­cally far away, and © gen­er­ally have lit­tle incli­na­tion to lis­ten to unso­licited requests for work and €800 fees and $3000 air­line tick­ets from peo­ple they don’t know and who can’t write good Eng­lish.

Hijinks ensue.

And ensue to date. Because now, see, this orga­ni­za­tion is today what we can con­fi­dently call “real”. I sup­pose they’ve passed their burst of early over-​​enthusiasm, or adapted their social norms so that — as I have said — two years later they no longer bother so many peo­ple. But, see, as an estab­lished aca­d­e­mic pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tion, a bur­geon­ing pub­lish­ing empire, an emerg­ing social net­work in their own right, they need to man­age their brand. Cap­ture and con­trol what the world is say­ing about them.

Google them­selves, of course. That’s what we all do, isn’t it?

And what hap­pens when you do that? Oh, dear. Right there at the top of the search results you see a bunch of ass­hole non-​​member empow­ered Old School Trans-​​Atlantic English-​​speakers com­plain­ing about how illicit and spammy and annoy­ing and shal­low and dis­rep­utable they are. Or that’s what it looks like; in fact, you’re see­ing two-​​year-​​old screeds from back when annoy­ing was the rule of the day, pre­sented with­out con­text. No mat­ter the con­text: these are promi­nent web pages say­ing Very Bad Things about you.

“Oops”, you might say, if you were in such a sit­u­a­tion. Or maybe, “What did I ever do to them?” Or, “Bas­tards!”. Inter­est­ing test of your self-​​esteem and self-​​importance, that choice.

Now, inter­est­ingly, Google places me right there at the top of the ass­hole non-​​member empow­ered Old School Trans-​​Atlantic English-​​speakers list, based on my two-​​year-​​old screed. Me #1 nay-​​sayer, I. Who would imag­ine that bitch­ing about spam could gen­er­ate such a lovely PageR­ank? [And, lately: Won­der what AdSense will put in the side­bar as time goes on?]

So. Sud­denly they’re com­ing out of the wood­work. Ceasing-​​and-​​desisting. Word­ing like, “Our com­peti­tors, surely with­out your knowl­edge, have posted slan­der on your web­site. Remove at once.” Pro­pa­gan­diz­ing com­ments call­ing all the other Old School Trans-​​Atlantic &c &c bad, evil, use­less, spammy, dis­rep­utable orga­ni­za­tions. IEEE is evil and use­less (yeah, right). That sort of stuff.

Guess they chose option #3, on the self-​​esteem/​self-​​importance menu.

And that makes it even worse, because of course that adds more PageR­ank cred for the old post, and so now peo­ple start find­ing it when they’re con­sid­er­ing attend­ing one of these now-​​professional-​​sounding con­fer­ences, and don’t know who the orga­ni­za­tion is, and so they Google them and find their own self-​​aggrandizing site plus a num­ber of pooh-​​poohing screeds.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

So enti­tle this piece: Some have neme­sis thrust upon them; or, “[The] Society’s to blame.”