Fascinating essay, but I'm not quite sure whether it's a problem that sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content.
After all, Demand Media does produce real, editorially vetted content from real human writers. The payment system encourages what I'll call extreme efficiency of research and writing, but that simply optimizes it for the handy-reference domain of search results (e.g. How to fillet a smallmouth bass), which may not be "high quality" as such but does provide direct, clearly written and reasonably valid responses to the search queries that elicit them.
I've seen a lot of pages where I couldn't tell if it was written by a markov-model or a human. Many of the people who get paid for $1 content don't speak English natively.
She's a Markov-based script inspired by the public domain works of a certain poet. All of her incantations are checked to make sure they don't repeat verbatim her model.
Every once in a while she comes up with something inspired.
Most english speakers in the world learnt it as a second language, and it only becomes a problem to me when they're not good at it and they're trying to sell me a service predicated on their language skills.
I'd put a finer point on it: paid writing encourages the creation of content which appears superficially relevant (especially through the eyes of a search engine), but doesn't actually convey any substantial information.
I'd suggest that it is a problem. It's something that Harry G. Frankfurt examined in his essay "On Bullshit" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_bullshit and http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html). I listened to an audio version of it and it was quite fascinating. As the Wikipedia article suggests, Frankfurt posits that bullshit is more corrosive than lies because bullshit bears no relation whatsoever to the truth.
This is exactly what makes Fox News, as an example, so dangerous. They don't care about the truth when they report; they only care about getting more eyeballs. I suspect that ANY spam that humans have to deal with to determine if it's useful is much the same.
After all, Demand Media does produce real, editorially vetted content from real human writers. The payment system encourages what I'll call extreme efficiency of research and writing, but that simply optimizes it for the handy-reference domain of search results (e.g. How to fillet a smallmouth bass), which may not be "high quality" as such but does provide direct, clearly written and reasonably valid responses to the search queries that elicit them.