The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating unoptimizability as a habit | tiny personal victories over a broken capitalist system won't change society, but they can be very satisfying
4mon 22d ago by slrpnk.net/u/stabby_cicada in inperson@slrpnk.net from pluralistic.net
any election that requires you to "vote with your wallet" is always won by the people with the thickest wallets… Now, that's not to say that boycotts are useless. But a boycott is a structured and organized campaign.
Shitty logic. He’s essentially saying: you might as well become part of the problem if you cannot rally a massive following. Veganism proves individual (non-collective) boycotts can have impact.
Doing a 1-person boycott is not just to counter a detriment. It’s training. Cultivating a strong constitution develops discipline and control. Boycotting can be a lifestyle. Once you get on that path, you look around and see what pushovers most spineless consumers are.
You also escape the shitty optics of hypocrisy if you boycott everything harmful, not just follow a crowd in extremely rare moments. Important respect is lost when a would-be leader trips people’s hypocrisy sensors.
The problem with "conscious consumption" is that it comes out of the neoliberal tradition in which every political matter is supposedly determined by your individual actions, and not your actions as part of a union or other political institution that works as a bloc to overthrow the status quo.
Nonsense. Everyone on board with this thought pattern is exactly why we have fewer collective actions. We need to evolve more. If everyone thought through their actions (as he condemns), that would result in movements without the effort-prohibitive organisation that limits our potential. Increasing organisational effort is not a wise move, especially when it results in feeding the adversary.
Cory Doctorow would benefit from listening to the Rutger Bregman brief lectures.
Small numbers of people /can/ have impact. It’s defeatist to think the contrary.
For example, if a creditor stops accepting cash payments, it doesn’t take many debtors refusing forced-banking and not paying their bills for the creditor to reverse their policy.
This turns the careful shopper into a cop who polices other people's consumption, demanding that they stop eating some foodstuff or using Twitter or watching HBO Max. Squabbling over whether using a social media network makes you a Nazi generates far more heat than light – so much heat that it incinerates the solidarity you need to actually fight Nazis.
Shame is a powerful emotion that Doctorow fails to grasp and exploit. It can’t be a core plan but it helps when it is part of the mission.
Shame on Doctorow for cultivating inaction.
he's proposing getting organized. you're proposing shopping in a different part of the same store.
They are not mutually exclusive. I endorse both personal transformation and social transformation. Doctorow advocates feeding the adversary as a normal way of living with a dependency on tech giants, while organising incoherent actions to the contrary. One step forward, two steps backward.
Doctorow’s advice is actually damaging. He tells people it’s okay to support the oppressor, which is exactly what the convenience zombies want to hear. He also dismisses shaming the pushovers, which is to throw away a powerful tool for no gain.
He tells people it’s okay to support the oppressor,
no he doesn't. he said personal boycotts aren't effective
no he doesn’t. he said personal boycotts aren’t effective
Same thing. This is non-sequitur logic. If an individual action is “not effective”, that’s clearly an endorsement for not boycotting personally, thus patronise.
no, you're making a leap of logic
Nonsense. There’s no “leap” in understanding a definition. Boycotting /means/ patronisation is not okey. To not boycott is to be okay with patronisation. By definition. You can’t have it both ways. You cannot coherently claim it’s not okay to patronise a baddy while taking a stance against boycotting.
Is it okay to patronise bad player X? If not, then boycotting is required. If yes, then you are not boycotting.
being ok with patronization is not the same as endorsing oppression. that's the lep you're making
Context is paramount. In this context, the supplier is the oppressor. If the supplier is not an oppressor, that’s out of scope.
(edit) btw, endorsing oppression and supporting oppression are not the same thing. I said Doctorow /supports/ oppression with his stance, not that he endorses it. He clearly does not endorse it, but his approach does not do justice to his intent.
he's not endorsing oppression, and saying he is simply is a lie.
You’ll have to quote where I said he was “endorsing” oppression.
He tells people it’s okay to support the oppressor
Exactly. “Support”, not “endorse”.
youre stretching the definition of "support" to meaninglessness, and playing a semantic game.
Not at all. If you feed the oppressor, you support it. It’s a perverse stretch to claim the contrary -- and it renders the word support meaningless. You cannot feed an oppressor (or promote someone else feeding an oppressor) and simultaneously claim to not support it. Vegans understand the concept well, and their movement reflects it.
anyone who says "Cory doctorow supports oppressors and tells others to do the same" is lying.
Yet this is evident from his writing. He guides people to not boycott oppressors. It’s there in black and white. You seem to think the emporer wears no clothes.
you are making leaps of logic and accusing him of making statements he is not. this is bad faith.
I quoted him. Read my first comment. If he did not mean what he said, he should revise his statements and position.
(edit) Also, read Doctorow’s article. He repeats several times with different phrasing that an individual action is “problematic”. You’ve grossly missed his thesis. It’s one of his main conjecturing claims.
I quoted him.
and then you made a leap of logic from what he said.
this phrase:
He’s essentially saying:
is a huge red flag. you're not just quoting him. you're telling everyone else how to interpret what he's saying, removed from the context of his piece.
Read the quote:
The problem with “conscious consumption” is that it comes out of the neoliberal tradition in which every political matter is supposedly determined by your individual actions, and not your actions as part of a union or other political institution that works as a bloc to overthrow the status quo.
“Conscious consumption” is what he uses to describe boycotting by an individual. He describes it as a “problem”. Again, it’s not just a single statement. It’s his thesis littered throughout. You’ve missed the major point in his work.
BTW, in the quote above he pushes a false dichotomy fallacy. You can (and should) boycott individually AND act in union with others taking actions. They are not mutually exclusive.
everything you've said in this specific comment to which i'm responding is good faith interpretation of what he said. but this isn't the whole of what you're claiming he is saying and implying.
Of course it’s not the whole of my position. The comment you are replying to is just one facet of the problems with Doctorow’s stance, which you misunderstood as indicated in the comment prior.
I did not misunderstand. you are intentionally misinterpreting him.
It’s on you to show that. I quoted him. Those words have meaning. He restated his points in multiple different ways so there is no question about his thesis. You can’t cling to this strawman claim without actually showing a difference between his words and the ideas I am opposing.
Like a politician, Doctorow is telling people what they want to hear. They want to be told they don’t need to make a potentially sacrificial personal transformation or accept the burden of personal responsibility by opting-out of being an enabler of an oppressor.
Conversely, I tell people what they /need/ to hear, as brutal as it may be. Which is aligned with Rutger Bregman’s ideology.
He restated his points in multiple different ways so there is no question about his thesis
and yet you still added to it. your bad faith interpretation of his statements needs no further evidence for anyone who has read this conversation.
and yet you still added to it.
It’s on you to show that. I don’t believe I added anything to his claims. I’m not going to quote the whole (very wordy) article. I quoted bits and attacked his thesis.
it's prima facie: you weren't simply quoting him, you were re-interpreting what he was saying.
I don’t know what you mean by “re-interpret”. I interpretted his article once because I only read it once. Of course I can only have my own interpretation. I am not a mind reader. If Doctorow feels he is being misinterpretted, he can revise or add clarity.
so when you said "what he's essentially saying" you were lying. what you could have truthfully said is "i'm afraid he might mean". you chose to put words in his mouth. that's bad faith.
so when you said “what he’s essentially saying” you were lying
Not at all. It’s very long and wordy article. It would be inefficient to requote the whole thing. I assume people have read it. It’s important to be concise in what I am responding to, and to transparently show my interpretation of what I read so someone has a chance to say “that’s not right” (which you have done, but failed to effectively support).
what you could have truthfully said is “i’m afraid he might mean”.
That would falsely misrepresent my confidence. I am confident that I have comprehended Doctorow as he intends.
and I'm telling you that you have made a leap of logic
That’s a meaningless claim when you don’t articulate the “leap”.
I've done so numerous times
And you got it wrong. So if you’re trying to recycle the same claim rather than articulate a new “leap” in logic claim, it’s futile.
And you got it wrong.
saying something doesn't make it true. anyone who reads this thread will know i'm right.
anyone who reads this thread will know i’m right.
You certainly did not convince me. I gave rationale. If you don’t like the rationale, it’s on you to counter it. Good luck trying to convince others.
You can (and should) boycott individually
if it were an effective method, i could agree. if it's not effective, then it's not a good use of our effort.
As I said, the vegan movement proves that individual boycotts are effective. Apart from that, you lose insight if you talk the talk without walking the walk. You must live the lifestyle to gain the insights on what needs to change and what to demand. Otherwise it’s like trying to fight in the dark from the outside. Like trying to fight for change in a country where you have never lived.
If you don’t actually boycott Cloudflare (for example), you have no idea the full extent of the damage it does. The superficial view of CF without experiencing life without CF does not equip you to know where the battleground is or what it looks like. You are working blind.
As I said, the vegan movement proves that individual boycotts are effective.
What are you calling effective? You have an increasing population. You have a rise of meat-eating car-driving right-wing nutters voting fascists into power. What do you expect? The fact that we can walk into a restaurant and ask for a vegan menu proves positive effect occured. The fact that even prisoners can specify that they are vegan and get a vegan meal while incarcerated shows it was effective.
To be clear, “effective” does not mean “mission complete”. Abolition of slavery was very effective. That does not mean slavery is entirely eradicated. The fight against slavery will likely continue throughout our lifetime.
(edit) I suspect if you find a chart for the numbers of vegans, that will also be increasing.
this reads like cope. make any excuse you want, but if you want to save animals from the livestock industry, you're going to need to choose an effective method.
There is no single magic bullet. An effective method is not a singular tactic or event against a complex problem. You need many effective methods and campaigns, one of which is vegans doing their individual boycott. Slavery reduced over many generations. It cannot even be solved in a single generation. As Rutger Bregman states, it often takes one generation just to work on awareness and influence before the execution of actions. Only 1 of major initiating actors in abolition of slavery lived to actually see it fall. IIRC, it was the same for the suffragettes. Only one of the key players in the fight for women’s rights lived to see the day when a notable stride was made.
if i told you holding your breath was helpful, i doubt you would even try that before focusing on more effective methods.
And?
so you should try to think about your methods and whether they're effective. if you wouldn't just hold your breath, it's probably because you're smart enough to recognize there is no causal link between your respiratory function and the animal agriculture industry. the same is true of your shopping habits.
There is a causal link. Patronisation feeds money (or profitable data) to the oppressor. There is no reasonable question that patrons increase revenue. There is no reasonable question that revenue supports a company’s operations.
You’re also missing the other point that I made. Reducing the adversary’s revenue is not the only effect. It’s a training exercise. Boycotting puts you into a disciplined lifestyle that enables you to study how the infra works without the oppressor. You see what patrons do not. You support alternative markets and competitors. It enables identification of problems with the alternate path, thus enabling corrective actions.
By refusing to send email to a Microsoft recipient, I consequently support the postal service (which is under threat by email). Support for the postal service is more important than MS’s loss of my profitable data. If the recipient does not publish a physical address and it’s a gov agency, I make an open data demand to force them to publish it, ultimately to enable compeition with MS. The recipient is also burdened by having to deal with paper mail. That burden serves as pressure to use a less controversial email supplier.
You’re also missing the other point that I made.
no. i read it.
Patronisation feeds money (or profitable data) to the oppressor.
but depriving them of that in a disorganized way doesn't actually cause them to change their methods.
but depriving them of that in a disorganized way doesn’t actually cause them to change their methods.
Nonsense. That’s not how business works. A disorganized boycott lacks an express list of demands. That does not mean the oppressor does not know what drives the boycott. If they know what the issue is, the business case wins.
More importantly, as explained in detail, behavior modification is not the only goal. I have no demands for Microsoft. MS is unredeemable. There is nothing they can change to reverse my boycott. The boycott ensures that MS gains no revenue from me. MS loses the empowerment of the capital they would otherwise acquire from my patronage. I am free from serving as an enabler. I force other people to feed Microsoft’s competitors. If they want to talk to me, they cannot use outlook.com.
Slavery reduced over many generations.
there are more slaves now than ever.
That counters Rutger Bregman’s research. Citation needed.
well estimates vary, but as recently as 2009, one estimate was over 29 million people. i'd love to see bregman's research if you can provide it.
this is useless. do you have a transcript?
The central analogy to the civil rights movement and the women's movement is trivializing and ahistorical. Both of those social movements were initiated and driven by members of the dispossessed and excluded groups themselves, not by benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf. Both movements were built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a shared humanity in the face of a society that had deprived it and denied it. No civil rights activist or feminist ever argued, "We're sentient beings too!" They argued, "We're fully human too!" Animal liberation doctrine, far from extending this humanist impulse, directly undermines it.
Both of those social movements were initiated and driven by members of the dispossessed and excluded groups themselves, not by benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf.
Nonsense w.r.t to abolition of slavery. The most significant work was done by white outsiders. Source: https://www.bbc.com/audio/brand/m002mqm3
You’ve grossly missed his thesis.
the fucking irony
btw, endorsing oppression and supporting oppression are not the same thing.
this is a semantic game
No, that difference between those words is important. My stance is in fact that Doctorow does not endorse oppression but he supports it through his actions and advocacy -- unintentionally of course.
you're stretching the definition of support to meaninglessness.
Doctorow does not endorse oppression but he supports it through advocacy
this is so self contradictory no one should take it seriously
Only if you don’t know the nuanced difference between “endorsement” and “supports” will you fail to take it seriously. Endorsement deals with deontology (intent) whereas support is utilitarian in meaning.