Individually we do not make much of a difference in anything but that’s an excuse to avoid searching for a better company and often tolerating a worse offer (e.g. a fair trade product that costs more, or lacks modern features).
Change in politics certainly matters but your individual support of a political party in terms of one vote has practically no affect on the result in a winner-take-all/first-past-the-post voting system. Your individual “vote” in support of a company is at least a non-zero value, and sometimes is multiple “votes” per year.
People often say it would be better if just more people voted, but that’s only helpful for them because they imagine they would vote for the main party they like the most. I doubt that’s the case. The most important structural reform imo is to increase the representation of the public in government - and it’s not a main party’s self interests to do that. Voting is unlikely to change that.
Yes it is. What other company for payment management will you find? It’s an extremely narrow oligopoly, and that’s even counting the credit card agencies that suck just as much as PayPal.
You have zero agency as an economic player. Exactly zero.
You won’t impact PayPal getting richer by researching a different coupon provider than Honey. That’s not how this is going to play out at any point in time.
You don’t enact change by leveraging the breadcrumbs of an income you have as a salaried worker. You do so by leveraging real collective power in an organized, effective manner. As a player in government (by voting or holding office, because running is also part of democracy) or as a non-government organization. Those are your options. Anything else is whatever the equivalent of greenwashing is for activism.
There are no good options sometimes. I place my hope in GNU Taler as a means to send and accept payment in the future (it’s anonymous for the buyer but the seller is identifiable for tax reasons).
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the effectiveness of voting with wallets.
What would you call an example of ‘real collective power’?
Individually we do not make much of a difference in anything but that’s an excuse to avoid searching for a better company and often tolerating a worse offer (e.g. a fair trade product that costs more, or lacks modern features).
Change in politics certainly matters but your individual support of a political party in terms of one vote has practically no affect on the result in a winner-take-all/first-past-the-post voting system. Your individual “vote” in support of a company is at least a non-zero value, and sometimes is multiple “votes” per year.
People often say it would be better if just more people voted, but that’s only helpful for them because they imagine they would vote for the main party they like the most. I doubt that’s the case. The most important structural reform imo is to increase the representation of the public in government - and it’s not a main party’s self interests to do that. Voting is unlikely to change that.
Yes it is. What other company for payment management will you find? It’s an extremely narrow oligopoly, and that’s even counting the credit card agencies that suck just as much as PayPal.
You have zero agency as an economic player. Exactly zero.
You won’t impact PayPal getting richer by researching a different coupon provider than Honey. That’s not how this is going to play out at any point in time.
You don’t enact change by leveraging the breadcrumbs of an income you have as a salaried worker. You do so by leveraging real collective power in an organized, effective manner. As a player in government (by voting or holding office, because running is also part of democracy) or as a non-government organization. Those are your options. Anything else is whatever the equivalent of greenwashing is for activism.
There are no good options sometimes. I place my hope in GNU Taler as a means to send and accept payment in the future (it’s anonymous for the buyer but the seller is identifiable for tax reasons).
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the effectiveness of voting with wallets.
What would you call an example of ‘real collective power’?