Voting with your wallet does nothing. It’s a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.
Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there’s something to vote about. Most people don’t.
And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn’t count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.
So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.
No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn’t a political action. Your political action is political action.
If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.
How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I’m sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the “voting with your wallet” thing doesn’t stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.
No, hold on, you get past the “other than get involved with politics” part very quickly there.
You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?
You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That’s getting involved with politics. If that doesn’t do it then the next recourse isn’t to spend money for posturing, it’s to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.
That’s what you can do.
What you can’t do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That’s not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don’t care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.
This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say “but what else could I do besides getting into politics” and pretend they’ve done something by buying some shit over some other shit.
Nah, man, that’s not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don’t need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.
But just to be clear, “voting with your wallet” is doing nothing. That’s the choice you’re making.
To be clear, I agree that you don’t have to be into politics. Not caring enough is fine. Social media expressions of opinion are always black and white. AI is the end of the world, Nintendo’s piracy stance is a war crime, Windows is the antichrist… You’re allowed to be bummed out by any of those and not do anything about it because you’re not bummed out enough. That’s a refreshing degree of online moderation, if anything.
What I take issue with is confusing those sorts of market results with actual political action. A brand can decide something unpopular isn’t worth pursuing for PR reasons, but they can also decide it IS worth it. To my knowledge the people I shared Netflix accounts with that were impacted by the location checks are still impacted by those. Your EA and Uber examples were barely impactful at all until regulators got into the mix, and regulators got into the mix hard about those issues. I invite you to go look up how both of them played out, because, man, is there a difference between how fast the companies reacted once there was someone in a public position going “hey, maybe we need to take a look at this”.
Mistaking how a brand manages its public perception for effective political actions is dangerous. Letting corporations appease you through those means only serves to set up a bad precedent when those brands decide the time has come to squeeze and go hard on monetization. You need public institutions that are strong and vigilant enough to put some bite behind that public displeasure.
Can a boycott work? Sure. As a coordinated political action, the consumer-side equivalent of a strike. This takes just as much work and coordination as any other political activity.
But spending your money based on the outrage that reaches you through social media is not a functional way to generate change. It’s just you being part of the mass of consumers brand manage with their messaging tools. You’re a rounding error in a stat, part of the manipulation of the market that is built into every corporate action. When you do that you’re a focus group data point, not a political actor.
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deleted by creator
No it is not.
Voting with your wallet does nothing. It’s a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.
Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there’s something to vote about. Most people don’t.
And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn’t count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.
So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.
deleted by creator
No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn’t a political action. Your political action is political action.
If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.
How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I’m sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the “voting with your wallet” thing doesn’t stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.
deleted by creator
No, hold on, you get past the “other than get involved with politics” part very quickly there.
You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?
You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That’s getting involved with politics. If that doesn’t do it then the next recourse isn’t to spend money for posturing, it’s to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.
That’s what you can do.
What you can’t do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That’s not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don’t care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.
This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say “but what else could I do besides getting into politics” and pretend they’ve done something by buying some shit over some other shit.
Nah, man, that’s not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don’t need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.
But just to be clear, “voting with your wallet” is doing nothing. That’s the choice you’re making.
deleted by creator
To be clear, I agree that you don’t have to be into politics. Not caring enough is fine. Social media expressions of opinion are always black and white. AI is the end of the world, Nintendo’s piracy stance is a war crime, Windows is the antichrist… You’re allowed to be bummed out by any of those and not do anything about it because you’re not bummed out enough. That’s a refreshing degree of online moderation, if anything.
What I take issue with is confusing those sorts of market results with actual political action. A brand can decide something unpopular isn’t worth pursuing for PR reasons, but they can also decide it IS worth it. To my knowledge the people I shared Netflix accounts with that were impacted by the location checks are still impacted by those. Your EA and Uber examples were barely impactful at all until regulators got into the mix, and regulators got into the mix hard about those issues. I invite you to go look up how both of them played out, because, man, is there a difference between how fast the companies reacted once there was someone in a public position going “hey, maybe we need to take a look at this”.
Mistaking how a brand manages its public perception for effective political actions is dangerous. Letting corporations appease you through those means only serves to set up a bad precedent when those brands decide the time has come to squeeze and go hard on monetization. You need public institutions that are strong and vigilant enough to put some bite behind that public displeasure.
Can a boycott work? Sure. As a coordinated political action, the consumer-side equivalent of a strike. This takes just as much work and coordination as any other political activity.
But spending your money based on the outrage that reaches you through social media is not a functional way to generate change. It’s just you being part of the mass of consumers brand manage with their messaging tools. You’re a rounding error in a stat, part of the manipulation of the market that is built into every corporate action. When you do that you’re a focus group data point, not a political actor.
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