Felisia Horner // Wellness Advice
Or, I opened a spam so you don’t have to
“Felisia Horner // Wellness Advice” is living rent-free in my head.
I am going to own up to letting other companies sell my information. I am not the fortress of online privacy to which I aspire. I am half-knowingly selling my information for unimpressive prices. I am sure that whatever I got in exchange for my email address getting sold to “Felisia Horner // Wellness Advice,” was not worth it.
And yet.
Every day for about a month, once or twice a day, I have received an email from “Felisia Horner // Wellness Advice.” The subject lines are basically 1995 National Enquirer headlines with a 2025 health-and-fitness coating:
Lose Weight Quickly with This One Alcohol
This “Cinnamon Bark Trick” could end obesity in America
Eating more sugar banishes Type 2?
If you open this spam, you receive a gray banner “Wellness Wisdom USA” with the tagline Your Wellness Wisdom Advice and a stock image of someone doing what I can only hope/assume is a lotus yoga pose superimposed on what I hope/assume is a budding lotus.
We move down to “Ditching the Myths: Sugar vs Type 2” where we explore the insane subject line, and hit a link to “Harvard research” in the second sentence/paragraph. (Narrator: DO NOT CLICK THE LINK). There is a video that looks like it will involve water being poured onto a spoonful of “sugar” that looks like baking soda. Under the video we find another link: “real root cause”. The last paragraph promises us that big pharma doesn’t want us to know this information and we get a link to “watch the video” (Narrator: but why is there a link when the video can play from the email?) Then we hit a weirdly formatted P.S. and another link to “Forget dieting… do this instead!”1
At the bottom, we have a stock image of a woman with short blonde hair in a blue button-up shirt holding a clipboard. This, incredibly, is supposed to be “Felicia [yes, spelling change here] Horner, Health & Wellness coach”. There are some more Official Banners and Logos, including what I think is a misappropriated HHS logo but I can’t read the tiiiiiiny words, and then, incredibly, we get some legal disclaimers.
Feli[c/s]ia has counsel! We are told the advice in this email may not align with our individual needs (duh). We should get advice from a professional (and not a spam email) for personalized recommendations (double duh), and we learn that “we” specialize in providing advertising services to our partners.
If it’s a mistake, here is the “click unsubscribe” button. But wait! If you scroll down even farther, there is another Unsubscribe button. And then under that there is a Complaint button and we are told “If you believe you have received this email in error, please click ‘Complaint’ to opt-out of further emails from us or our partners.”
It is not clear what the difference is between receiving the email by mistake or in error, but my guess is only one of these buttons actually unsubscribes you and it’s always the one you don’t click.2
So once or twice a day, as I am furiously swiping to delete these insane emails, I think about my girl “Felisia Horner // Wellness Advice” and wonder how she is making money.3 This is advertising, allegedly, but it is not really clear what they are selling. It seems, instead, to be part of the circular clickbait economy.
As a general rule, I am very interested in the circular clickbait economy.4
My sense is that there are three ways for clickbait economies to work:
Financialization
Scams / fraud
They don’t
Taking these in turn, “financialization” is the made-up word describing the made-up process of modern-day alchemy in which you create money out of actually trying “one weird trick.”5
Then there are obviously scams / fraud. I don’t have an accurate view of the Venn Diagram between “legitimately purchased email lists” and “spam” and “scams/fraud,” but I sense some overlap. Still, if you don’t have a phishing scheme or a spammy link or a place for me to wire you $50,000, I’m going to be generous and say you are not outright scams / fraud. I don’t spend a lot of time opening Feli[c/s]ia’s emails, so the number of spammy links makes me think that just like all drains lead to the ocean, all links lead to fraud, but still. Maybe.
And then there is the possibility that there are some email lists that have purchased / acquired email addresses and are using them to send … clickbait wellness information, Jokes Of The Day, and similar not-quite-AI, not-quite-a-Drudge-Report-style-collection-of-links-but-definitely-not-reputable information content.
I am very interested in knowing who generates this content and why. If it’s for crime, well, there you go. If it’s for some secretly elegant Financialization scheme in which 10% off at an online retailer generates an email on a list that we can send a joke of the day to that will lead to a news article with 17 links to “TRY THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK” and if there is even a .01% open rate, then we get 6 euros, like, okay?6
But is anyone actually out there, actually paying for email addresses and then sending them weird links promising “This Flower Tonic Can Silence Tinnitus (Drink Tonight)”?
If so, why? Don’t they know they can just start a Substack?
If I were running a cybersecurity course, the intro test would be multiple choice and the correct answer would always be “don’t click the link.” Your willingness to doggedly and repeatedly choose “don’t click the link” I think would be a good approximation of how you’re going to handle an inbox on my network.
“Unsubscribe” is the Hotel California of modern life. You can click it any time you like, but you can never leave.
My spam filter had finally started sorting them into “junk,” but then I opened one, so I assume I’m going to get three each day now.
I’m interested in the circular clickbait economy like I’m interested in the idea that every car on the road has at least one person on it, and this is a single road in one city in one state in one country and … oh no, there must be over 8 billion people here, how are there so many people? So, that is to say, “interested” might here mean “slightly horrified by the sheer magnitude.”
By way of example, you have foreign currency exchange. If I know that Exchange A will trade me 2 euros for every 1 dollar, and Exchange B will trade me 1.5 euros for every 1 dollar, it’s an easy trade. I take 3 dollars to Exchange A and get 6 euros. Now I take my 6 euros to Exchange B and get 4 dollars. Boom. I made a dollar. I didn’t really add any goods or services to the economy, but I did arbitrage and now I have a dollar of profit. The amazing thing about living now is that you can theoretically repeat that trade a gazillion times in 4 seconds, make a year’s worth of salary, and hey, why not run it for an entire minute? This is why people hate crypto is because sometimes crypto enables “dumb arbitrage” … or at least that is the theory of people who hate crypto.
I’m not sure this is financialization so much as “it’s turtles all the way down,” but, you know. Kind of an underdeveloped area of scholarship.