Comment by ryandrake
2 days ago
This is correct. Which is why "vote with your wallet" is also a flawed strategy. At the scale these companies are operating, individual action does not move the needle, and it is impossible to coordinate enough collective action to move the needle.
There is no feasible way for a normie like me to convince enough people to take any kind of action collectively that will be noticed by FAANG.
I think we like to pretend otherwise, like oh if enough people stop using Instagram, they will fail. This is only true in the most literal sense, because "enough" is an enormous number, totally unachievable by advocacy.
"Vote with your wallet" implies that the rich deserve more votes. Individual action in dollars per vote simply can't matter against the rivers of wealth in ad spend and investors. It's not just a flawed strategy, but sometimes believing in "vote with your wallet" signifies consent or at least complicity that the advertiser buying a lot of ads or the rich idiot with a lot of money invested in gaining your private data "should" win.
We need far better strategies than "vote with your wallet". I think it is at least time to get rid of "vote with your wallet" from our collective vocabularies, for the sake of actual democracy.
Sayings like "Vote with your wallet" come about as a byproduct of living in an economic system that is on its face democratic and capitalist yet somehow still concentrates political and market power in the hands of a few.
If something is bad, it's said that the free market will offer an alternative and the assumed loss of market share will rein in the bad thing. It ignores, as does most un-nuanced discourse about economy and society, that capitalism does not equate to a free market outside of a beginner's economics textbook, and democracy doesn't prevent incumbents from buying up the competition (FB/Instagram) or attempting to block competition outright (Tiktok).