'VE been getting more and more spam lately that promises to get rid of other spam.

It's spam, but it's also anti-spam, and in many ways that seems like a new thing in the world: spam so filled with self-loathing that it promises to save me from ever having to deal with any future examples of itself, almost as though - and here's where the creepy organ music should start - it were self-aware.

Certainly, I'm not suggesting that a brainless piece of electronic trash has attained consciousness and is actually thinking about anything, including me. (Besides, as a practical matter, if anti-spam spam really did achieve awareness through self-hatred - or as Ralph C. Merkle, an Internet security expert, puts it, "Loatho, ergo sum" - it would probably self-delete and save me the trouble.)

But researchers like Professor Merkle, who directs the Information Security Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, say it's also not really safe to predict where the vast forces of the Spy vs. Spy spam world will lead, in either society or technology. Yes, they say, spam is a humble, junk-ridden wasteland, but it is also a hugely powerful machine of innovation, with an open-ended destiny that might ultimately raise some pretty profound philosophical questions, perhaps even to the point of touching the boundaries of what we think of as identity.

Already my in-box feels like a lab project run amok: I have spam. I have a filter that purports to block spam. And now I have the double agent of anti-spam spam from filter providers that must run the gantlet of my existing filter to try to sell me more filters - and here's the key - by proving that it can get through the filter I already have.

These skirmishes are not driven by traditional economic competition. What's happening here is not competition in which the winner gets a bigger market share. It's more like a race in which each side motivates the other to achieve faster innovation and smarter strategy. The closest analogy is probably not from the business world at all, but in military stealth technology, where systems designed to detect submarines or airplanes battle other systems designed to evade detection.

And what they're racing for is us. The very basis of the spam wars is a search for better analysis of the way human beings think. Those on the defensive side seek to understand what we want to block by analyzing our choices, while the offense tries to find the ever more perfect mirror of what we will actually pause to look at. Each in its own way is trying find a model of human perception: spammers countered by filters countered by spammers, with no goal or destination in sight, only the ever-accelerating process itself.

"It brings home the idea of technology living an independent existence - a parallel universe of computer programs living in a world of their own, having their own quarrels," said Sherry Turkle, the director of the Center on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Spam is a great example of autonomous technology raising philosophical questions, and it's playing out in everybody's in-box day after day."

Science fiction writers have theorized for years, of course, about the moment when the gloriously ambivalent machines of human creation develop consciousness. Usually, as in movies like "The Terminator" or "2001: A Space Odyssey," it comes to no good.

But in science fiction, the engines of artificial intelligence are almost invariably the products of Big Science, developed in fancy labs by idealistic dreamers with good intentions. There's usually a moral about best-laid plans.

A machine consciousness that evolved from spam would be quite different, because the spam wars - and here's where it starts to get scary again - are shaped, to a great extent, by the tiny number of people who actually reply to spam solicitations.

What that means is that if a deep-think computer consciousness like Hal from "2001" somehow evolved from the ashes of the spam wars, it might very well be obsessed by the coarse and grubby issues from which it arose: penis size, cheap pharmaceuticals, debt consolidation and online gambling.

"Spam is narrow-minded and goes straight for the weak," said Tim Lowing, a comedian and social critic in Winnipeg who often talks about technology in his stand-up monologues. "I think it's too bad we don't have philosophy spam - spam that promises to make people better and genuinely aware of the world."

Of course, as John le Carré has pointed out again and again in his novels, every spy is deeply conflicted. Imagine, for instance, that you are the owner of a spam-filter company sending out anti-spam marketing solicitations. Do you want your filter products to block those messages or not? If they don't block anti-spam, an existing customer might say, "Hmm, my filter doesn't work." And if your filter does block your anti-spam, then you're branded as a spammer: even your own product says so!

"It's a slippery slope," Eric Smith, a programmer and founder of spamblogging

.com, a site for the discussion of spam, said by e-mail.

Some theorists, like Professor Turkle at M.I.T., say the first real flash points of spam and human identity might come when our ever more sophisticated anti-spam programs start to understand us a little too well.

We might tell our filters, for example, that we don't like certain kinds of e-mail, but the filters could eventually start to challenge us by observing that what we say is inconsistent with what we do - that sometimes we actually look at the messages or come-ons that we profess so strongly to condemn. In such a future world, the supple intelligence of the super filter could become a kind of alter ego, knowing us better, perhaps, than we know ourselves.

"As spam becomes more and more sophisticated, most people think your filter will be developed by a smart agent observing you carefully, so the question becomes, what kinds of information do people want their software agent to know?" Professor Turkle said.

And perhaps at the same time, by scooping up the tiny crumbs of our privacy that we leave on the Net every day, spam will eventually be a mass medium no more. The spam that arrives will be unique, directed to each individual, personalized and custom-fit. Spam programmers have found, for example, that professors at M.I.T. tend not to block e-mail poetry from their in-boxes, so some spam is now getting through in verse.

In my case, I'm still deeply enjoying the irony of anti-spam spam. As I thump away on my delete button each morning, I find myself pausing at the spam that says it will rid me of spam, and I often feel I'm being offered a glimpse into a kind of M. C. Escher print in which the iterations continue on forever into some golden braid of mist and meaning. And maybe that means the anti-spam spammers have got me figured out. They've learned how to make me look, and that's their goal.

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