He didn’t say it was new to him, he said it was scummy, and he’s right. Spam is a scourge, whether it is in the form of email, phone calls, or people knocking on my door. “Outbound sales” steals people’s time, attention, disk space, and electricity. It may be an unavoidable (certainly not “essential”) part of our world, but the people who do it are making our world worse.