The Brand Anti-Fragility Movement
#74 Reader subscription dollars are carrying democracy right now. More brands are avoiding it altogether
Welcome back to TracingVRL, the COVID project that tracks the information going viral. If you’re reading a forwarded copy, but would like to subscribe, you can do that here ⤵️.
Hello new signups: These news murals are curated and arranged to be pleasurable to consume. For many, this newsletter is best experienced with a *shallow dive*, allowing the mural to scroll beneath the eyes, only plunging for *deep dives* intermittently on items of interest. Also, briefly:
While much content here is paywalled after a time, I encourage everyone to view my 🔓 unlocked visual-aid investigative report about antivirals like Paxlovid [ Dec 20 2023 Analysis & Investigation: Surrendering on COVID Antivirals (TracingVRL) → ].
For election season I’ve created a sub-section for time-sensitive Bulletins. Yesterday’s added context to breaking news, and the full infographic is unlocked for paying subscribers [Apr 18 Bulletin: On Ukraine Aid Vote (TracingVRL) → ].
Onto this edition of the TracingVRL news-mural newsletter …
Contents:
News *Was* Inexpensive to Consume
Journalism Impact of TracingVRL, Partial View
What We’re Up Against
Brand Anti-Fragility Movement
=>Fragility
=>Anti-fragility
=>Commerce Can Drive Empathy
Taxes & Fraud
COVID Guidelines, The State of
🎁 Fun Articles About Oakland Public Schools
🗄️ = Repeat item from the archives
🎁 = “Gift” link
News *Was* Inexpensive to Consume
But it’s still cheap when considering the alternative
Nov 21 2022 The Digital Public Sphere, from 1647 to the day before yesterday (MIT's Ethan Zuckerman YouTube Channel) - @37:00 mark: “I'm going to argue that the U.S government has actually stepped in a number of times in history to intervene and give us the healthier public sphere. And in ways that don't necessarily conflict with cherished ideas like freedom of speech. They have had to do with building infrastructures not to do with ordering people to say one thing or saying of other things.” “For about 80 years after the passage of the [1792] Post Office Act , private letters cost roughly ten times as much as a newspaper.“
Apr 15 Deducting News Subscriptions as Work Expense Is Difficult (TracingVRL) - In past issues, I encouraged the editors and journalists who get this newsletter to upgrade to the paid tier on grounds this subscription qualifies as a deductible business expense under U.S. tax law. This would apply to economists reading this newsletter, not to mention pediatricians and public health workers, teachers and the one group which has probably figured out this deduction, investors. But I tried Monday to deduct my own news subscriptions through the IRS’ easy file workflow app, bouncing me into the “Schedule C” form which showed me owing more than made sense. So I backtracked, prepared a Form 1040 as a placeholder, then filed for an extension to give the deductions another try this Saturday.
Apr 14 2024 [Misinformation Hall of Fame: ] Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls by Richard Engel | The case for making journalism free—at least during the 2024 election (Atlantic Monthly) - TracingVRL says: How should journalists eat and pay rent, job-secure Richard Engel of NBC News? I'm operating this project at a financial loss as it is, and keeping careful records, taking a financial management class, to get this cashflow-positive. But it's your lucky day: for just $16, if redeemed before May 25, you can get 12 months of access to TracingVRL paywalled content.
Journalism Impact in the Zeitgeist
This is a partial view of the list I keep. Journalism impact is hard for small outlets like this one to measure because most people, myself included, don’t document a perfect chain of provenance that influenced their own work. So you measure befores-and-afters, assume someone forwarded your work to the right people, or that your efforts are resonating somewhere.
Dec 21 2023 [Before: ] Analysis & Investigation: Surrendering on COVID Antivirals | This started as a rant about the under-use of Paxlovid and ended with four camel humps (TracingCOVID) -
Jan 25 [After: ] Underuse of Antiviral Drugs to Prevent Progression to Severe COVID-19 Veterans Health Administration, MarchSeptember 2022 (Centers for Disease Control) - This is a 2022 study re-published in the CDC's weekly MMWR report.
Jun 23 2023 [Before: ] Line of Scrimmage (TracingCOVID) - “Truth-softeners: Select parties who commit to small lies about inconsequential things between telling advantage-gaining whoppers engage in the former activity as a fulltime practice. Coincidentally this softens up the perceived truth of their audiences, giving these shapers more room to insert their own agenda.”
Jun 28 2023 [After: ] This Is Why Trump Lies Like There’s No Tomorrow (New York Times) - TracingVRL says: this came out less than a week after my newsletter on truth-softeners. "In some cases, lying by autocratic political leaders can be an attempt to weaken norms and institutions that restrict the scope of their actions."
What We’re Up Against
Feb 19 The Misinformation Pandemic: Over 300 Vaccine Myths and Counting (NewsGuard's Reality Check) - “Most Surprising fact: Two-thirds of all the news and information websites that NewsGuard has rated as untrustworthy since our launch in 2018 publish health care misinformation”
Feb 21 Reality Check Commentary: Kremlins World-Class Dashboard Maximizes Disinformation, at 26 Cents Per Lie (NewsGuard's Reality Check) - "The leaked information disclosed that workers at Russian troll farms earn $660 a month for writing 100 comments per day on social media. That’s 26 cents per lie, assuming 25 workdays per month. The documents also include a price list to pay social media influencers 'willing to work with Russian clients' and to pay up to $39,000 for pro-Russia commentaries published in major media outlets in the U.S. and Europe."
Feb 12 France, Allies Accuse Russia of Increased Disinformation Activities (Voice of America News) -
Nov 16 2023 Decline in local news outlets is accelerating despite efforts to help (Associated Press) - "An average of 2.5 newspapers closed each week in 2023 compared to two a week the previous year, a reflection of an ever-worsening advertising climate, according to a Northwestern University study issued Thursday." "While digital outlets have emerged to fill some voids, they’re closing at roughly the same rate as new ones start, the report said.”
Jan 29 Latino journalist layoffs threaten coverage of 2024 election disinformation (NBC News) - “...Jean Guerrero saw firsthand how outrageous claims of cures on social media were being passed around Latino families by relatives. Her father had sent her one on YouTube.” “But on Tuesday, Guerrero, the newspaper's only Latina opinion columnist, got a layoff notice, one of the many Hispanic and other journalists of color among the 115 newsroom staffers that the outlet chopped.”
Jan 19 Latinos fight a small COVID booster rate—and big misinformation (NPR) -
Apr 15 The Local Ingredients That Fuel Misinformation (Bloomberg) - “Lake and McDowell each had two local newspapers in 2021; the papers in McDowell which residents say countered misinformation have since closed. These counties also had higher rates of overdose deaths—one key indicator of despair.”
The Brand Anti-Fragility Movement
The brand anti-fragility movement is a counterforce to broad trends in which brands – corporations buying ad space in media – explicitly demand through web forms that their ads not appear alongside a-la-carte web content which social media platforms index with supposedly controversial metadata keywords like “news”.
Apr 17 2023 They are blatantly blocking news: Confessions of a programmatic sales lead on brand safety filters impact on publishers direct-sold ads (Digiday) - “It seems like a dumb question to ask when we are [insert publications name here]. [We end up] asking a client, Are you targeting or blocking news or the news category? And they basically will say, Yes, we are, that is our best practice.”
=>Fragility
Is all anxiety negative? Beyoncé names her pre-performance anxiety “Sasha” and relies on that persona to electrify her audience.
Mar 22 2023 Exposure to COVID-19 and aggression: the mediating role of anxiety and the moderating role of rumination (National Institutes of Health) - “A negative emotional and motivational condition known as anxiety occurs when there is a threat to one's safety (Eysenck et al., 2007).”
=>Anti-fragility
May 06 2022 Essay: In Praise of Anxiety (Wall Street Journal) - “Nobody likes to feel anxious. Anxiety is among the most pervasive and reviled of human emotions. An entire industry has sprung up to aid us in eradicating it, from self-help books and holistic remedies to pharmaceuticals and cutting-edge cognitive behavioral therapy. Yet we are an ever more profoundly anxious society.”
=>Commerce Can Drive Empathy
Feb 14 The World’s Most Important Industry Has a New Captain and Shes Piloting It Into the 21st Century (Wired) - “As it turns out, it’s not social media that connects us in the 21st century. It’s ships. Shipping is a $14 trillion-plus industry, and the overwhelming majority of the world’s goods–a colossal 90 percent of them–spend time at sea. Marina believes that shipping is good for humans, as to trade with people around the world is to acquire empathy for them. To see them in their places, to see what they need, what they want. It’s globalization.”
Taxes & Fraud
Apr 16 Bogus 'tax service specialists' duped business owners in latest Covid relief debacle, IRS says (NBC News) - “...Then he started to get bombarded by telemarketers who were claiming to be ‘tax service specialists,’ telling him he qualified for a special IRS pandemic relief credit. Among hundreds of calls and emails, he signed up with a company and agreed to pay a 10% fee. He ended up with a check for $330,000—money he plowed back into his business” ”But it turned out Volner wasn’t eligible for what’s known as the Employee Retention Tax Credit, or ERC, which has very specific and narrow criteria.”
COVID Guidelines, The State of
Should health authorities keep a linguistic stent around | fever-free without the assistance of fever-reducing medicine for 24 hours | in the recent isolation guidelines? Also, the CDC appears to have scrubbed those relaxed guidelines from their website.
Apr 15 Many healthcare workers unsure about COVID vaccine boosters for themselves, kids (CIDRAP University of Minnesota) -
Mar 01 Why is the CDC Treating COVID Like It's the Flu? (New York Magazine) - “Instead, per the CDC, they should stay home if they feel sick but can leave home and resume normal activities as soon as their symptoms are getting better and it’s been a day since they had a fever (without the help of fever-reducing medication).”
Fun, Factual Articles on Oakland Public Schools
🎁 Mar 28 Furious Oakland parents are declaring war on politics and status quo in schools: This is a call for excellence (San Francisco Chronicle) - “They are taking a page out of the parent empowerment playbook—one used elsewhere in the country to ban books, regulate access to bathrooms and restrict race-based instruction. But in this case, they hope to use their combined effort to make sure kids of color can read.”
🎁 Apr 15 This Bay Area elementary school is teaching kids an invaluable life skill: How to handle money (San Francisco Chronicle) - “[Fifth-grader] Mecca Pruitt found success quickly in business, earning a profit weeks after launching his company and reaping gains in the stock market, a hobby that has him checking trends throughout the day and researching potential trades at night and on weekends. 'Finance is my love language,' he said. But he’s not your typical Bay Area businessperson."
The TracingVRL news murals are powered by the Tracing’s proprietary news crawler.
Coda: A.J. Fish Bio
Apr 19 Delayed Writer "Bio" Biography (TracingVRL.substack.com) - A.J. Fish is a programmer-journalist with resume entries from ad tech, public health and daily journalism jobs who has survived relationships with manipulative people. In collaboration with fellow travelers who also survived relationships with manipulative people Fish has developed an unwritten guidebook for navigating narcissistic and manipulative personalities.
Fish also navigated the U.S. health system and reached wellness after diagnosis with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis and vertigo.
Fish holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, achieved after first dabbling in forestry studies. After college, Fish took city college night classes in news writing. Fish's grandfather Evander MacLeod emigrated out of Scotland in the 1930s, as did Mary Anne MacLeod, who happens to be the late mother of one presidential candidate. Fish has no definitive proof of familial relations with said candidate.
Catch-up Footnotes
1 Wellness climate deniers were referenced by Tracing issue #70, New Name, Year 5:
Nov 16 2023 The Instagram wellness influencers spreading climate misinformation (HEATED.world) -
2 Tree immunity is attained through underground root networks, retired forester asserts referenced by issue #71 Whether History’s Rhyming:
May 04 2021 Trees Talk To Each Other. 'Mother Tree' Ecologist Hears Lessons For People, Too (NPR) -