It's a literal spambot. While a handwriting robot is potentially wonderful (I'm a particular fan of Jaquet-Droz's automaton the Writer, finished in 01774, which is probably the first programmable pen plotter, containing perhaps the second vector font after the Romain du Roi), that's horrible. This is why we can't have nice things.
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
... all these scenarios are in fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.
In this case, the value being sacrificed is that if you write a letter to the government disputing your tax assessment, you get a fair hearing. Stacked on the crooked timber of humanity, the best inventions immediately sink to the worst, most contemptible ends.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the use of the letters. Although there is definitely some truth to your statement, I don't think is as dark and wicked as it seems. This is a marketing technique to try and get customers to use their tax dispute service, not the communication technique to the government itself. The hypothetical worst case here is that people throw out handwritten mail because every company uses handwritten mail for spam, but, to be fair, if you've gotten a piece of handwritten mail in the last year you're in the minority.
You're right, I misunderstood some of Aaron's explanations. He clarified later that this is just garden-variety spam, which is still pretty dark and wicked, just not in the same way.
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
... all these scenarios are in fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
In this case, the value being sacrificed is that if you write a letter to the government disputing your tax assessment, you get a fair hearing. Stacked on the crooked timber of humanity, the best inventions immediately sink to the worst, most contemptible ends.