Episode 524: Black February(TrueAnon)We’re joined by Dylan Saba and Jake Romm to talk Munich, international laws and systems, Iran, Cuba, many things of a global nature…
https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-524-151467586Your Individual Boycotts Aren’t HelpingAn Instagram post of mine about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) top corporate collaborators went viral a few weeks ago. The fact that it got over four million views and more than 35,000 shares suggests that people are starting to grasp the central role private businesses play in enabling Donald Trump’s paramilitary thugs. But I was puzzled and a bit frustrated by most people’s reactions. I explicitly underscored that I wasn’t making yet another online-based call for individuals to stop shopping at bad companies: " We don’t need vague calls to stop shopping at these places or one-off rallies — we need sit-ins, pressure campaigns, *organized* boycotts, employee and consumer petitions, sickouts, demands from elected officials, and non-violent disruption to force these companies to immediately break from ICE." Yet to my surprise, almost every reply treated my post as a push for individual consumption changes. Here’s a representative sample of comments:
I already boycott Home Depot, and to see Lowe’s on this list makes me sad. I don’t have a local hardware store to choose from. 😢
I cancelled Prime last summer. I promise you’ll save money and be fine 🙏🏼
Good luck avoiding business with Amazon.
Why was a call for collective organized action almost universally seen as a manifesto for personal shopping advice? Part of the answer may just be that people don’t read Instagram captions. But there’s also something deeper going on: individualism and atomization pervade our culture, and even action to change the world can, by many people, only be imagined as individual consumption choices rather than taking action together with other people. This atomization is a relatively new phenomenon. America used to be a country full of clubs, labor unions, churches, neighborhood associations, and bowling leagues. But now, as sociologist Robert Putnam famously put it, we are “bowling alone.” Without strong membership organizations in our daily lives, and with social media exacerbating our isolation, political consumption
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