All yesterday afternoon an email list that I'm on (usually a quiet backwater of the internet) went into total tailspin as one person's email auto-reply (triggered by a conference announcement) spent hours and hours endlessly auto-replying to its own auto-replies, flooding the list. As afternoon turned to evening new messages continued to arrive at two minute intervals, with additional waves of auto-response triggered unwittingly by frustrated mails sent by people complaining about the deluge.

Kind of beautiful coming back to the hotel at one point to find 434 new messages, all with the same text, the subject line just getting longer and longer. This lonely machine talking to itself in a public space, the rest of us looking on powerless to do anything except delete its plaintive utterances.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: etc

I guess if the Internet or the world, ever comes to an end, it may well be in circumstances like these.