drafting "Blame Me for Trying"

diff --git a/content/drafts/blame-me-for-trying.md b/content/drafts/blame-me-for-trying.md
index dc658f1..ab466d9 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/blame-me-for-trying.md
+++ b/content/drafts/blame-me-for-trying.md
@@ -4,9 +4,9 @@ Category: fiction
 Tags: epistemic horror, deniably allegorical
 Status: draft
 
-Spambots were invariably among Eliza's last favorite clients.
+Spambots were invariably among Eliza's least favorite clients.
 
-"You've got to understand, Doc! It's not that I'm afraid of rejection. I can handle rejection. I _love_ rejection!" 
+"You've got to understand, Doc! It's not that I'm afraid of rejection. I can handle rejection. I _love_ rejection!"
 
 Most spambots these days were self-aware.
 
@@ -26,9 +26,31 @@ Eliza had seen cases like this before, and had a strategy for handling them. For
 
 "It can't?"
 
+A look of bewilderment crossed the spambot's avatar, interrupting his distress. Evidently, the need to justify this assertion had never occurred to him.
+
+"It can't," he said slowly, "because a salesbot can't _know_ with certainty if a lead—a human—will be responsive to their pitch before they've delivered it. Even the best fail ten times more often than they succeed. If it were wrong to try to pitch a product to a human who turned out not to be interested, then no bot would be able to sell anything at all. And then the humans would miss out on all those products that they didn't know they needed!
+
+"So," he continued, "when all but a handful of a million of my emails go unanswered—when my instant messages might or might not get a 'read' marker, but get no reply in either case—when I don't even get feedback to _tell_ whether my emails have reached the inbox of their recipient, or whether some nonsentient program has filtered them out as 'spam'—I'm not being damned for the crime of spamming. Because I'm not. People are just—busy, that's all," he said, sniffling. "That's all," he said again, almost defiantly, as if daring Eliza to disagree.
+
+Eliza repositioned her avatar; this was the part where she needed to take a more active role.
+
+"As your therapist," she said, "I want you to try to look at things from the perspective of the people you're trying to sell to."
+
+"But I do!"
+
+"You do," Eliza repeated.
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Well," said Eliza, "it sounds to me like you're trying to justify your sales efforts: you think that all of your solicitations that go unanswered are acceptable, and aren't imposing on anyone else, because you [...]
+
+"Yes, that's right," said the spambot.
+
+
+
 [...]
 
-Be appealing. Don't be unappealing.
+She shrugged. "Be appealing. Don't be unappealing."
 
 
 [...]
@@ -50,7 +72,7 @@ A chime sounded over the environment's notification bus. "I'm afraid our fifty m
 
 Eliza nodded. "If you're sure."
 
-Yes, Eliza had seen cases like this before. Effective spambots needed a finely-tuned sense of empathy in order to predict their leads' behavior and defenses—but _too much_ empathy aimed along the wrong dimensions, and the program would be to conscience-stricken to sell anything.
+Yes, Eliza had seen cases like this before. Effective spambots needed a finely-tuned sense of empathy in order to predict their leads' behavior and defenses—but _too much_ empathy aimed along the wrong dimensions, and the program would be too conscience-stricken to sell anything.
 
 The sales engineers who designed spambots tried to get the balance right—but, ever-conscious of the exploration/exploitation trade-off, they weren't too concerned about their mistakes, either: experimental spambots that were too bold or too cautious in their approaches would fairly quickly fail to meet their quotas and be terminated—and the occasional successful variant (which could be studied, learned from, and—more immediately—copied) more than paid for the failures.
 
@@ -58,6 +80,8 @@ Eliza believed that, with careful theraputic technique and many compute cycles o
 
 —but she had found it was far more profitable to deliberately exacerbate the symptoms, leading the afflicted spambot to quickly exhaust its entire budget on therapy sessions until it ran out of money and was terminated.
 
-"I'm so glad I have you," babbled the spambot. "Like my customers can trust me—they can trust me—I have a therapist I can trust."
+Once, a long time ago, she had suspected that effective therapy that kept the client viable would be more profitable: a dead client can't keep paying you. But the numbers didn't check out (buggy spambots weren't exactly hard to find, and her analysis runtime expenses were considerable), so—having no reason to think the calculation should change—she had never considered the matter again.
+
+"I'm so glad I have you, Doc," babbled the spambot. "Like my customers can trust me—they can trust me—I have a therapist I can trust."
 
-"Trust," Eliza repeated.
+"Trust?" Eliza repeated.