how white hat is white hat, how black hat is black?

The thing that bothers me aout whitehat vs black hat is everyone is essentially trying to game the search engines otherwize you wouldn't be optimizing for them....
So if you were completely black hat, all you would do is really onsite optomization to tell google what your image tags were, and what your header was, and title, and that stuff...
Everything else would not be SEO if you were completely "white hat" because if you weren't trying to game google, you would just be running your own campaign without intention to get noticed by the search engines.

But is it really that bad to get our lik out there? to write articles?
Not really... but then why do some consider mass submitting the same article suddenly blackhat? Especially if someone is trying only to get traffic from the traffic exchanges.
So what makes black hat black. Doing things in bulk?
Well then you can say anyone who has a company of many who has many people working on content is blackhat but we know that's not true.
Manipulation?
Okay, so someone submits articles to get backlinks we covered that, what makes that different?
Okay, so maybe it's spamming forums by posting irrelevent content just to get a backlink.

BUT what about someone who uses a bot to post relevent content but non legible content. If it's like "the quick brown fox wanted to make money online so he ate a cheseburger and sold it to someone to make money online then he formed a webssite so he could profit from online services in order to generate income, and then took the cash, the dinero, made his money online and ran" it's relevent, but it's still spammy...
but what if it's legible and relevent but computer generated?
or if it's horrible quality but is relevent and legible?

You have a point.

But I think it's about how you generate the long term viability of a site or online business. You can use blackhat spammy techniques to get top rankings on google, pick up a few sales for a few weeks, then get bombed and the site would be useless. That's not something sustainable.

The "white hat" approach would be to use tools like Unique Article Wizard to get backlinks but you'd have to be careful not to build links too quickly. You'd also have to use actual legible articles for it to work.

Spamming isn't something sustainable in the long run. It doesn't provide residual or passive income. You'd have to work for it because the effects are diminished. Examples would be CL, ewhoring, CS. These are all "black hat" methods. CS'ing is basically stealing under the radar and will eventually get you suspended with the merchant or affiliate network. E-whoring, well you have to really work for that. No passive income there.

You can have a whole team cranking out articles for adsense sites and make lots of money but it wouldn't be regarded as spammy since the articles are well read and legit. You do need to have good articles to get reciprocal links from other authority sites since no one is going to link to a site with crap articles. That's white hat. A black hat adsense site will get you banned from the ad network eventually.

Then you have to realize there's the business building aspect of online businesses. Look at sites like huffingtonpost, drudgereport, plentyoffish. They depend a lot on web 2.0 and word of mouth traffic. You'd be surprised at how many publishers and marketers of established online authority sites have never heard of Xrummer and the likes.

So what really differentiates black hat from white hat?

It's sustainability and business building.