You cannot vote with your wallet. Or rather, you *can*, but you will lose that vote. Wallet-votes always go to the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that is not you.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits
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I want to tell this to all the parents at my kids school who spend half their time on the group chat obsessing over having the correct constellation of corporate boycotts because Instagram/Tiktok told them this was how to Do Activism.
The secondary boycotts / solidarity actions in support of United Farm Workers in the 60's and 70's definitely qualified. I don't know that I could put a finger on a precise answer but somewhere closer to that than what I'm seeing bandied about in the various hashtags right now.
These recent scattershot boycott campaigns seem more intended to distract and fragment attention, than focus it on a single coherent issue. But that might be my internal Dale Gribble coming out.
Cory Doctorow
The Lack Thereof 
Forbearance