ACAB: All Corporations Are Bastards. Corporations are not your friends. Brands aren’t your friends.
I used to not vote because all politicians are evil. Someone pointed out that if everyone picks the lesser of two evils then things are going to get less evil. I’ve voted every opportunity since.
Corporations are just legal structure organizing people together to do something. The soup kitchen, local artisan, person cutting hair out of their house, they all set up an LLC to operate under. They didn’t instantly become evil.
But if I need to buy a blender, plywood, or underwear (my shopping list this weekend), I’m going to have to buy it from a corporation. If I could buy it from a less evil corp then hopefully I make things less evil.
One way to fight the corporations is to stop worshipping at the altar of blind consumerism, and embrace the concept of "Reuse, Repair, Recycle."
Stop buying stuff you dont need. Keep using what you have, sell/buy used items, repair things, and if it cant be fixed or repurposed, then recycle it.
Repairing things is a big one. Often repairs are remarkably easy. My wife has been ready to replace numerous appliances over the years, and I figured it was worth taking a shot at fixing it, if I can save a few hundred bucks, and successfully extended the life by years.
Very satisfying, and it forces your wife to rethink her conclusion that you are an incompetent dolt.
Voting for lesser evil just slows down the evil, it doesn't reverse it. It's still going in the wrong direction.
Stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yup. Everyone has to buy something. The point is to direct people to do that at places that are LES evil rather than giving in and saying "nothing matters I guess I'll just do whatever." Defeatism is collaboration.
Repeal of Citizens United and change that.
All Corporations Are Bastards, in a four hundred year unbroken chain going all the way back to the English East India Company and Dutch East India Company, and even before those.
Costco
It should be noted that they are actively trying to bust their workers union so maybe boycott them when your local asks you to.
Dr Bronners soap has specifically reaffirmed their DEI policies since Trump's reelection, and they have a 5-to-1 cap on the top-level exec's salaries compared to their lowest paid retirement-vested employees. They seem to walk the walk from what I've seen and read.
i use the nothanks app on my phone to scan the bar codes and it tells me if it's okay to buy or if i should boycott, along w why
I found the thing you mentioned a good idea so I googled the app to find out how they decided who should or should not be boycotted. I landed their homepage and it said they offered digital marketing solutions.
I'd love to use something like that if community driven but sounds like an important conflict of interest.
that's good to know that they're doing the same thing as adblock plus did.
there are other apps that do the same thing and i'll be trying them now; thanks for the heads up.
edit: maybe this one?
Buycott seems promising cause campaigns and boycott lists are user-driven (which, you know.. could also be faked I guess) and haven't found anything fishy in their policies yet, but still snooping around on them. Gonna look into their ownership now.
Edit:
So umm... apparently Buycott was founded by a random 20 something year old LA dev (Ivan Pardo), a 2008 CS guy from Colgate University who basically coded it on his own. Boycott's social media has been inactive since 2016.
Their business model is they sell access to their barcode API, which basically means they sell the pics of the barcodes and the product descriptions people add voluntarily to companies to do what they want. Not great but you know... better than digital marketing services.
Buycott is related to solidarity tech, which Ivan Pardo also founded, and is a CRM who claims to be "helping unions & grassroots organizations build people-powered movements that transform society...." which could be legit. They're not free and they're not cheap and they claim to cater to unions, advocacy orgs and non profits... but idk. Am I full paranoid delusional or does this sound like a honeytrap kinda thing? Like if I was an evil right wing politician this is exactly the kind of company I'd want to have leverage over to be able to sabotage opposition. And we don't know who Pardo's partners are. Only that he's founder.
Oh, also, solidarity tech openly claims they give their customer info to Google analytics in their terms, which, you know... Kinda concerning when your "I'll handle your grass roots movement" software sees no reason to not freely give your information to the most blatant and thinly veiled CIA front in contemporary history.
In their webpage they say they are "Trusted by Progressive Campaigns and Causes" and name a full total of 5 clients: Debt Collective, UAW, Pilipino Workers Central and CWA. As a non american I don't know what these things are...
idk I don't trust them. But I'm also running out of options at this point. Might as well use something. They seem like the best so far.
I checked out boycat.io
Searched a bunch of "everyone knows they're bad" companies and the info they provided seemed accurate, reasonable and well sourced.
However, their business model seems kinda fishy. first of all they sell "I'm a nice company" certifications, which in itself s a conflict of interest, but especially if you can't find who the owners of boycat are anywhere on the site or the internet, their whois information is private and if you look at their privacy policy, they allow themselves the right to track "usage data" (i.e. what you scanned) and "location data" which they later allow themselves to "share" with "service providers", which are "companies providing hosting, data analysis, marketing, customer service, and technical support.".... so umm... Yeah. Basically same conflict of interest as the other company, but less explicit.
And again,. not once do they say who owns them, how they started or is behind them nor do they provide an explanation on why they don't talk about themselves... Cause I could understand well intending devs trying to keep private to stop companies from threatening them, but tell the community this is why you don't share your info. Their contact us doesn't work either.
I would really like to see something community driven but i guess big companies could infiltrate something like that easily. I'll look into other solutions and let you know if i find anything promising.
ps: 90% of their news were about Israel-palestine, which, you know.. OK, good and important but ummm.. I'd also like to know about other stuff.
Open source orgs
NetBSD, Signal Foundation, other FOSS orgs
You can always go for smaller/niche companies. System76 and Wooting come to mind for keyboards.
You have to do research and pay a premium. But you're way more likely supporting a business that cares about its employees.
In general consume less. And when you do need to make bigger purchases, do your research.
Bandcamp, because it is the best place for independent music and there is nothing close to it.
Steam, because they started with non-horrible DRM (compared to other options) and now they are one of the companies that help Linux succeed for gaming (Steam Deck is just a Linux computer with controllers attached, and Proton is awesome for running Windows games on Linux).
Steam, because they started with non-horrible DRM (compared to other options)
Au contraire, Steam was LOATHED back in the day, they were the first to force you to install a store just to play a single game.
For other games, you needed to enter a CD key on install (which keygens helped with) and then you needed the CD itself in the drive (which cracks helped with). Steam started the trend of online DRM in games, which was then adopted by others who made even more draconian offerings (I think for Spore you could only get 3 hardware IDs registered?)
Dropout TV
Gog
Patagonia is a good outdoors brand from the US
I don't really believe in ethical consumption, but Penzys spices are awesome! They're such troll too, I love it!
NAACP has a list of companies committed to DEI: https://naacp.org/campaigns/black-consumer-advisory
Seems like Costco gets brought up?
Costco only does this shit as a union busting effort btw.
I mean… is that union busting? I thought I read the union threatened to strike. Costco raised wages to advert a strike. Isn’t that just unions working as intended?
King Arthur Flour!
If there's a place that you just can't stomach to shop because of how they treat their employees then I highly recommend you do not shop there. I was avoiding Walmart before avoiding Walmart was cool.
However...
Boycotts only really work when organized, towards an end goal. What was Walmart doing before, what is it doing now, what do we want it to do, and who's coordinating? That's how you change corporate policy through boycott.
If certain DEI policies are important enough to you to boycott when a company removes them then that's fine. I guess it's also worth asking what it is about any given program that makes it good enough for not, which companies should or shouldn't have it, why, and all that.
Costco
The only one that comes directly to mind is Valve.
Besides that I'm not going to follow this narrative too much of finding "the good ones".
I'm not 100% sure, but I think HEB hasn't done anything yet to kowtow to the current admin's policies.
I'm not sure if it's still true, but I seem to recall SC Johnson having profits as the lowest of their corporate objectives with higher ones being things like improving people's lives and bringing value to the world.
Granted, it's all just text, and times change, but I'd be curious to know if there's any truth to it, especially today.
Used computer store for keyboard, or Craigslist or Market place
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