{"id":4302,"date":"2025-11-04T10:51:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T15:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/?p=4302"},"modified":"2025-10-31T15:53:44","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T19:53:44","slug":"fake-outrage-real-damage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/2025\/11\/fake-outrage-real-damage\/","title":{"rendered":"Fake Outrage, Real Damage 🤖✨💀"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The real lesson of the Great Cracker Barrel Logo Debacle of 2025: Stop and think, dammit.<\/em><\/strong>

In August a struggling restaurant chain whose customer base is mostly over 65 made a mild logo change. (That change wasn\u2019t even really a change: the \u201cnew logo\u201d closely matched the alternate version of the logo Cracker Barrel had been using on menus and digital ads for six years.)

This \u201cchange\u201d triggered a social media firestorm, which ignited a minor culture war brushfire. A week later ~40% of that company\u2019s market value had gone up in smoke, and already weak foot traffic dropped another 8% (per WSJ<\/a><\/em>). That’s $545 million gone, and no doubt more than a few jobs with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within 60 days the chain pulled a complete 180, trashing 18 months of work on everything from visual identity to food-prep procedures.

Then it turns out that the social media firestorm was mostly fabricated. Around half of all the griping was automated bots (via NRN<\/a><\/em> and Restaurant Business<\/a><\/em>). Much of the \u201creal\u201d complaining from humans was in response to the fabricated controversy.

Now the whole story comes out, and I\u2019ve seen a string of mediocre \u201cthought leadership\u201d posts on LinkedIn using this as an object lesson. Those pieces of \u201cthought leadership\u201d invariably have turned out to be entirely AI written. ( 🤖✨ writing is pretty easy to spot, but I still use Pangram<\/a> to check my work.)

Meanwhile, Cracker Barrel still serves mediocre food slowly to a dwindling audience under the auspices of a logo and decor that haven\u2019t changed since the Carter administration. At every stage in this farce, people are reacting to and amplifying artificial signals rather than honestly listening and talking to each other\u2014and causing real harm in the mix\u2014and never stopping to ask if they actually care, if any of this matters, if what they are doing is tending toward making things better, if they even have a goal or preferred end-state in mind\u2026oy.<\/em>🤦‍♀️<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The real lesson of the Great Cracker Barrel Logo Debacle of 2025: Stop and think, dammit. In August a struggling restaurant chain whose customer base is mostly over 65 made a mild logo change. (That change wasn\u2019t even really a change: the \u201cnew logo\u201d closely matched the alternate version of the logo Cracker Barrel had … Continue reading “Fake Outrage, Real Damage 🤖✨💀”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[11],"tags":[95,1158,804,53,180],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/a2mi.social\/@dave0\/115492226454522706","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4302"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4302"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4308,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4302\/revisions\/4308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davideriknelson.com\/sbsb\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}