Have you noticed that while corporations sell you junk drinks, artisans sell you cheese and wine? And there is a transfer of antifragility from the small in favour of the large—until the large goes bust.

The problem of the commercial world is that it only works by addition (via positiva), not by subtraction (via negativia): pharmaceutical companies don’t gain if you avoid sugar; the manufacturer of health club machines doesn’t benefit from your deciding to lift stones and walk on rocks (without a cell phone); your stockbroker doesn’t gain from your decision to limit your investments to what you see with your own eyes, say your cousin’s restaurant or an apartment building in your neighbourhood; all these firms have to produce “growth in revenues” to satisfy the metric of some slow thinking or, at best, semi-slow thinking MBA analyst sitting in New York. Of course they will eventually self-destruct, but that’s another conversation.

Now consider companies like Coke or Pepsi, which I assume are, as the reader is poring over these lines, still in existence—which is unfortunate. What business are they in? Selling you sugary water or substitutes for sugar, putting into your body stuff that messes up your biological signalling system, causing diabetes and making diabetes vendors rich thanks to their compensatory drugs. Large corporations certainly can’t make money selling you tap water and cannot produce wine (wine seems to be the best argument in favour of the artisanal economy). But they dress their products up with a huge marketing apparatus, with images that fool the drinker and slogans such as “12.5 years of providing happiness” or some such. I fail to see why the arguments we’ve used against tobacco firms don’t apply—to some extent—to all other large companies that try to sell us things that may make us ill.