A drop of sewage will ruin a barrel of wine, but a drop of wine does nothing for a barrel of sewage. This is a brilliant example of how Disinfolklore — how a story — can slightly mislead us. But “a drop of wine does nothing for a barrel of sewage” — that completely goes against what I try to do in my work, through positive trolling. If we indulged ourselves with the idea that a drop of wine does nothing in a barrel of sewage, none of us would be on Twitter.
Source: Sympathetic Magic · Podcast: Touching on Contagion in Disinfolklore (Nov 2025)
Property 4 of Contagion — Negativity Dominance — states that negative contagion overwhelms positive. The sewage/wine metaphor seems to confirm this. But the author rejects it as a counsel of despair: the entire Counter-Disinfolklore project, the Code of Positive Trolls, is predicated on the opposite proposition. If one drop of wine truly did nothing, there would be no point in positive trolling. The daily evidence of Twitter’s pro-Ukraine community refutes the metaphor.
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