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.
Sure, regulations would do it much better, but the best I can do is exactly that. Not consume the shit. Not my fault the vast majority are just unreflected consumers.
So your suggestion is that I should buy one too (Assuming i needed one) because my “vote” doesn’t matter anyway?
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.
Oh I’m not a murican and already am protected as much as one could. Doesn’t change the point though.
Yet voting with my wallet is my local political action. Nothing else I could do besides actually getting involved with politics. Not my fault the majority doesn’t understand how they get screwed.
If roughly 10-20% would actually not buy it, assuming they would have if it weren’t shite, it would matter a lot. 5-10% would already be noticeable.
So, according to your point, you could also just buy another one, doesn’t matter anyway. And any other critical customer, who wanted to skip it, could too. As long as we’re below the noticeable 5%-treshhold. “It’s not my fault I have to buy this switch, it’s the government’s lack of regulation!”
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.
I don’t get political because i don’t care enough. Already got enough hobbies to fill the day and no offspring to make this world a better place for.
And your point isn’t just exactly correct.
Examples where wallet-voting indeed changed things that just come to mind:
Netflix acc-sharing witchhunt. Salesdrop lead to back ruddering.
#deleteuber-movement lead to 200k uninstalls and hence forced über to adapt
Nestlé’s hideous water-scandal lead to effectively make them ditch the whole project
EA and its battlefront 2’s microtransactions. Massive Säle drop made them change it.
Bud light boycot seriously affected bud.
Probably more like those. Might not be a universally a viable tactic to vote with your wallet (and maybe even voice that) but often certainly is or was.
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.
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.
I guess we might slightly miss each others point.
It really really should not take “as much work” if only people would just not be dumb consumers only. If at least 20-30% would actually only buy shit when it’s not shit, even excluding your point with “not caring ENOUGH”, it would be enough in each case. But we won’t.
Microsoft is the Antichrist, but I need office!
I hate Apple’s isolation, but look at this sleek design!
I hate not owning games anymore, but steam has SPÖ many!
Netflix is the worst, but everyone saw this show hence I need to too!
etc. It just hurts to see the obvious and most simple solution to be so rarely effective. And I’m surely not the epitome of intelligence and knowledge.
We won’t indeed. And that’s why the neoliberal fantasy where the market self-regulates is bullshit.
We won’t because our set of incentives isn’t infinitely fluid to the point where every negative, hostile or illegitimate action is unprofitable. And we shouldn’t have to, because there already is a mechanism to account for that fact, and it’s the law.
We’re not meant to judge our spending money in fungible commodities and entertainment based on political stances and larger considerations about long term convenience. We’re not meant to weigh whether Nintendo has a right to disable our device remotely as part of the choice to play a cute racing game.
That’s not the sphere where those choices belong. We’ve been told it is by neoliberal capitalists who don’t want a government to tell them what they can and cannot do, so they keep insisting that they can be as crappy as they want because if they do something the public won’t like they will “vote with their wallet” and the market will settle in the optimal spot of profit vs service. And if it doesn’t a competitor will give people what they want and they’ll buy that instead.
But that’s a lie. It never worked that way, and it doesn’t work anywhere close to that way in a global online oligarchy. You’re meant to be able to buy whatever the hell you fancy because there is supposed to be a state regulating things to be safe, fair and protected when you engage in small commercial exchanges.
Because you need Office, Microsoft doesn’t get to be the Antichrist. Because Netflix has the show everybody wants to watch it doesn’t get to be the worst. The idea is those companies are supposed to be held to the level of being-the-worst-Antichrist we all deem minimally acceptable. Market forces can play within that space, and no further.
So you want Netlfix to not be the worst? Get a legislator to enforce it and watch Stranger Things to your heart’s content. Because whether you like Stranger Things isn’t supposed to be connected in any way to how Netflix conducts its business or how abusive it can be in the process of doing so.
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.
Sure, regulations would do it much better, but the best I can do is exactly that. Not consume the shit. Not my fault the vast majority are just unreflected consumers.
So your suggestion is that I should buy one too (Assuming i needed one) because my “vote” doesn’t matter anyway?
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.
Oh I’m not a murican and already am protected as much as one could. Doesn’t change the point though.
Yet voting with my wallet is my local political action. Nothing else I could do besides actually getting involved with politics. Not my fault the majority doesn’t understand how they get screwed. If roughly 10-20% would actually not buy it, assuming they would have if it weren’t shite, it would matter a lot. 5-10% would already be noticeable.
So, according to your point, you could also just buy another one, doesn’t matter anyway. And any other critical customer, who wanted to skip it, could too. As long as we’re below the noticeable 5%-treshhold. “It’s not my fault I have to buy this switch, it’s the government’s lack of regulation!”
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.
I don’t get political because i don’t care enough. Already got enough hobbies to fill the day and no offspring to make this world a better place for.
And your point isn’t just exactly correct. Examples where wallet-voting indeed changed things that just come to mind:
Netflix acc-sharing witchhunt. Salesdrop lead to back ruddering.
#deleteuber-movement lead to 200k uninstalls and hence forced über to adapt
Nestlé’s hideous water-scandal lead to effectively make them ditch the whole project
EA and its battlefront 2’s microtransactions. Massive Säle drop made them change it.
Bud light boycot seriously affected bud.
Probably more like those. Might not be a universally a viable tactic to vote with your wallet (and maybe even voice that) but often certainly is or was.
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.
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.I guess we might slightly miss each others point. It really really should not take “as much work” if only people would just not be dumb consumers only. If at least 20-30% would actually only buy shit when it’s not shit, even excluding your point with “not caring ENOUGH”, it would be enough in each case. But we won’t.
Microsoft is the Antichrist, but I need office!
I hate Apple’s isolation, but look at this sleek design!
I hate not owning games anymore, but steam has SPÖ many!
Netflix is the worst, but everyone saw this show hence I need to too!
etc. It just hurts to see the obvious and most simple solution to be so rarely effective. And I’m surely not the epitome of intelligence and knowledge.
We won’t indeed. And that’s why the neoliberal fantasy where the market self-regulates is bullshit.
We won’t because our set of incentives isn’t infinitely fluid to the point where every negative, hostile or illegitimate action is unprofitable. And we shouldn’t have to, because there already is a mechanism to account for that fact, and it’s the law.
We’re not meant to judge our spending money in fungible commodities and entertainment based on political stances and larger considerations about long term convenience. We’re not meant to weigh whether Nintendo has a right to disable our device remotely as part of the choice to play a cute racing game.
That’s not the sphere where those choices belong. We’ve been told it is by neoliberal capitalists who don’t want a government to tell them what they can and cannot do, so they keep insisting that they can be as crappy as they want because if they do something the public won’t like they will “vote with their wallet” and the market will settle in the optimal spot of profit vs service. And if it doesn’t a competitor will give people what they want and they’ll buy that instead.
But that’s a lie. It never worked that way, and it doesn’t work anywhere close to that way in a global online oligarchy. You’re meant to be able to buy whatever the hell you fancy because there is supposed to be a state regulating things to be safe, fair and protected when you engage in small commercial exchanges.
Because you need Office, Microsoft doesn’t get to be the Antichrist. Because Netflix has the show everybody wants to watch it doesn’t get to be the worst. The idea is those companies are supposed to be held to the level of being-the-worst-Antichrist we all deem minimally acceptable. Market forces can play within that space, and no further.
So you want Netlfix to not be the worst? Get a legislator to enforce it and watch Stranger Things to your heart’s content. Because whether you like Stranger Things isn’t supposed to be connected in any way to how Netflix conducts its business or how abusive it can be in the process of doing so.