this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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A lot of people own a gram of sugar and make up a lot of sugar cubes. Informing them and motivating boycotts can have an accumulating effect.
But I'd say vote with both anyway. Your democratic vote and your money.
No, it can't. It's an ultraliberal fiction about a self-correcting market we know for a fact doesn't play out in reality.
This would require wealth to be roughly evenly divided, it would require enough supply to always have a supplier available who brands on whatever issue the consumer is trying to push on every market and it would require the consumer to research every issue and track it throughout the corporate ownership chain effectively.
It just doesn't work like that. The way it works is I don't like to pay Microsoft OR Google for their crappy office suites, but the open source alternatives are bad and the people I work with require using those for compatibility reasons, so I pay both.
What I can do, though, is set up a social democratic state where I don't have to make an ethical or political statement with my choice of office software, I have a government in place that will fine the crap out of them for their infractions.
And if that's not working, my action can be placed on pressuring the government, for which I have way fewer constraints and way more agency.
If it makes you feel funny to pay for a thing absolutely pay for something else. That's all well and good. But don't fool yourself and others by pretending it's an effective form of political action or a moral responsibility. It's neither.