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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Oh we are way passed the point where "voting with your dollar" means literally anything. These billionaires are making more money than they ever have in human history. They have literally turned all of society across large swaths of the world into a gigantic personal capital generator. It makes literally not a single difference if all of us here boycotted them or not. It's meaningless.
A big problem is that people need smartphones for so much of modern life. You can stop watching Disney and your life won’t meaningfully change but it’s really hard to avoid evil smartphone companies. Part of me wants to switch from Apple but what would I go to? Samsung who’s just as bad about right to repair? Google who’s Google? I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’m not going to say that the choice is as easy as cancelling a streaming service.
Your smartphone serves you ads?
I would say you’re missing some nuance in these arguments, though.
With a phone people no longer need laptops or full-sized computers and they also get a phone and camera to go along with it. They get a lot of power even just using fairly mundane apps like email, file storage, and a calendar. And then you have access to the internet and all the power that comes with that. I also don’t know why you think phones show ads.
AI, on the other hand, is hot fucking garbage at everything it does. Why anyone uses it I can’t say, it’s so bad and it’s known that it’s actively making people dumber. I don’t touch the stuff and my life has been going just fine.
they would have been perfectly fine it was simply that the optics were bad enough to warrant a response
Why do they care about the optics? $$$
Do you really think this situation is comparable in any way to Jimmy Kimmel? I really don't. Even if it were, nowhere near that many Apple customers care whether or not the app that targets fascist militias is on the app store or not.
Jimmy Kimmel made Disney a lot of money. They had to choose between pressure from the US government, and losing a popular source of revenue along with the vast amount of liberals who swore them off. Jimmy Kimmel was not a real institutional threat to the US government. So the US government did not have a very strong incentive to continuously push for him being taken down, and Disney had a lot of incentive to keep him around.
An app that targets fascists makes Apple no money. The US government faces the loss (or rendering ineffective) of their fascist police force. Both sides therefore face a huge amount of pressure to have the app taken down. It would have to be a gigantic part of their profit margin to warrant any pushback from Apple. I'd be very, very surprised to hear that this change is ever overturned through a boycott.
Every revolution famously begins with everyone giving up completely.
Can you show me where I said to do nothing? Or is boycotting the only form of collective action you're aware of?
Defeatist subservient take
Yes, as opposed to spending money at another capitalist institution that will inevitably do the same thing, which is somehow not a subservient take.
There are a lot of other ways to apply pressure besides boycotts. I dont think a boycott would ever work against Apple over this.
Every time I hear people talk like that I begin to think they dont understand basic microeconomics.
...and it happened in a vacuum, just all by itself.