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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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That last panel hit me like a truck because... yeah, that's what people think happens when they do their little personal choice things to pretend they matter.
They really buy like a paper book once and go "ah, yes, Bezos is fuming right now" while he makes another billion.
We have lost all sense of how to influence society and all ability to gauge scale. For all the folksy traditionalism in this (which includes driving a gas guzzler from the 70s, apparently?) the Internet has created this entirely disproportionate sense of our footprint on the world and this strip is as much a result of the hyperconnected dystopia as everything it's complaining about.
In my experience this is extra bad for Americans who, frankly, didn't need that much of a push to go from their individualist, self-centered perception of society to this vision of sitting on a couch listening to a walkman as activism.
I’ll buy something other than a ‘gas guzzler’ the second I’m not required to trade away my privacy to go electric, and can disable every single last beep, ding, screech and other unnecessary sound some stupid fuck thought was a good idea.
Oh how I long for the day someone invents a car without a touchscreen.
Absolutely correct!
I believe in "voting with your wallet" and I do little sacrifices to respect my ideas, but I'm conscious that I'm just one step above people clicking on petitions online in terms of impact.
I think the point is that we're deluded to think that voting with our wallets does anything. You still work. You still buy. You still support the system. The one step you're taking only gets you partway from the couch to the refrigerator. It doesn't get you out the door and into a protest that would actually make a difference.
Of course, because I'm no more 16 arguing that a revolution is the solution.
Indeed, you are thoroughly pacified. Your objections and moral outage quelled and your sense of significance sustained by the illusion that simply buying from a different conglomerate will have any impact.
Any suggestion that your impotent protest is inadequate must surely come from a childish fool.
Ping me when you changed the world with whatever you are actually doing behind that keyboard 👋
Masturbating, I'm masturbating. And so are you when you think that voting with your wallet does anything.
Wow! Do it in public fully naked with the reasons of the protest tattooed on your body. You may hit the news and reach lots of people!
It's so hard for people to agree that we should be doing something. Instead you argue that you are not going to do anything just out of spite all because OP personally may not be doing anything but their words are a bit preachy. If OP was a hypocrite but they still said the right thing why would you deliberately disagree? What would motivate you to act?
Ok, let's dive into it. What does "doing something" exactly mean? I've been into this since before I could vote, so I saw quite through it.
"Doing something" means a lot of different things for different people. Signing a petition, going to a march, writing on a wall, you name it. For some people "doing something" means sitting all day discussing about socialism and revolution in a living room. For others it is more biking together with Critical Mass against oil on weekends. There are those seeking small daily actions like recycling, and then there are the activist jumping on a boat with Greenpeace to save the whales, and the terrorists doing anything from damaging something to placing a bomb.
What does it mean for you "doing something"? Once you determine that, determine how much of that something would be adopted by the general population and what level of change could that reasonably achieve. I'll anticipate the result of you exercise: the bigger is your something and the smaller will be the adoption, but the product in terms of impact will be always "very small".
Take Occupy Wall Street to make an example. I loved the whole thing, I love the work of David Graeber, and it was a massive success, but what did they achieve in practice? The expression 99% entered in the general culture and there may be a bit more awareness of the problem of billionaires, but looking at cold metrics it was like a big storm, then the sun came back and a few days later the last puddle evaporated.
Who said I'm not doing anything? OP said "You still work. You still buy. You still support the system." to which I replied that I'm no more a naive 16 years old who shouts fuck the system and dreams to live off-the-grid avoiding the rat-race... and then goes back home to have dinner with mum.
If you are an adult and you want to go for it, be my guest! You may become Greta-Thunberg-famous, and people will follow you on social media. You will convince some people that, I don't know, we should buy durable and reparable things to save the planet and fight consumerism. You will have an impact, albeit very small, and that will be a massive achievement if you dedicate your whole life to that.
Just, please, stop with idiotic replies accusing people to be enslaved in the system because it's an insult to anyone who is currently looking for a solution for cancer, saving lives as a firefighter, building houses where people will live, growing crops, and even keeping up internet so people can praise the revolution against the machine from their bedrooms.
First of all, I didn't accuse anybody of anything here except try to push back against what I percieved as a comment that is disapproving of debate:
Secondly, Minimizing participation in the orphan-crushing machine but also debating politics on available platforms are not antithetical. Debating online is as important as doing the rest of the things you say are "real" worthwhile pursuits. For instance: How can we pursue a cure for cancer if the political climate ensures scientists are scorned and distrusted? If evangelising about the "real" problems you care about is labelled as politics then can you really make progress without "political" action such as debating?
In the same vein, doing the small things in protest is the stepping stones to doing bigger things. It works the same way for any pursuit. Why shouldn't I practice discipline with my disdain for all the small evil while also pushing for more?
Edit: Add the quote that i felt was misunderstanding why we need to protest in our own small ways.
Edit2: I think we are in agreement. I misread the thread. My comment is actually a refutation of the main post.
I love debating because, with time, I became aware of angles I had missed. However, I stop when the other side embraces extremist, black&white, and childish positions. "Fuck the system" works when you are a teenager or listening to punk rock, but otherwise it is just ridiculous.
You can't. However, you also can't if you are not 100% in the system and aligned. Anything requiring funding or permits most likely becomes harder the less aligned you are since you'd clash with politics, you'd never meet people with money, you'd become a liability, and so on.
I'm all in to go to protests, to vote with my wallet, and to preach my values. I'm also conscious of the negligible impact that I will have since large organized movements can barely move the needle, and that there are so many other ways to change the world.
The comic is hyperbolic and not in a good way. "They wouldn't like it" - yeah, if millions of Americans did the same. And it isn't even necessary to go pre-digital or pre-internet to "cut out the middleman".
I agree with you on most, but this:
is hyperbole on your part.
First of all, by-default internet connected cars haven't been a thing until relatively recently (10 years max I guess). And then, gas guzzling does not necessarily correlate with age. Cars consuming less than, say, 5l/100km have existed since at least the 80s (1st hand experience, and the car was already 20 years old at that point).
I guess the car thing comes from the use of "pre-computerized". Cars have had computers in them much longer than they've been connected to the Internet by default. I guess my mistake was taking the panel at its word there.
Also, man, I appreciate the alignment, but the "millions of Americans" really made me feel icky. Beyond the moral and political refusal to give Americans primary decisionmaking power on these things, these trends and companies are global. Even in the US you probably would need tens of millions to make a dent, but some of these userbases are in the billions. Millions of Americans decided Facebook was for old people and left it and it's still the biggest social media platform on the planet by some margin. That'd be the collective inability to gauge scale in a dystopia of global monopolies I was talking about.
Your comment made me remember how 25 years ago it was unthinkable, even illegal, for a company to spy on you without consent. Tech isn’t the problem, regulation has also become a joke, that’s what gave tech bros free reign, as long as they make loads of money fast so rich investors can concentrate even more wealth.
this is it. guilliotines exist. is organizing against corporations, or actually understanding the tech we use so hopeless for regular people that they feel have to maintain 1980s shit just to be rid of it?
Also, it's getting harder and harder to live without modern devices.
Try living in the modern world without a cell phone. It's hard to do almost anything without one. If you get a flip phone that can handle text messages you can get a bit further, but it's a matter of time before that's not enough.
And sure, you can listen to cassettes on a walkman. And maybe you saved some tapes from 40 years ago, and maybe they still work. But, how do you get more music? Sure, you can probably find a place to order tapes online. But, then they want to verify your account and that means texting a verification code to your phone and...
As for print media. Sure, you can still buy paper books. But, if you want a real newspaper, good luck. There are a few that are still around, AFAIK you can still get the NY Times in print. But, I really doubt you still even have a local newspaper, let alone a newspaper that prints on paper.
All but one of the major papers where I'm from have a print version. I imagine that changes in different countries.
But... yeah, point taken. Over here you can't even not have a Whatsapp account. Some businesses and transactions just... assume you do and default to it for communication.
An interesting wrinkle is that some of that legacy media is part of this loop, too. You can, in fact, buy new tape players and tapes and you can put new music into them. It's all just very expensive trendy, hipstery small run collector stuff that costs a lot of money and sells to privileged people with a nostalgic desire for posturing. Which does put a lot of where this message ends up in context, I suppose.