But no, seriously, you can rage all you want about brands and corporations, but in cultural industries content is always king.
That’s why you need regulation. You can’t expect people to not play or watch cool stuff just because you’re aware of and latched onto some particular moral, ethical or economical transgression. It’s res publica to prevent the misbehavior so people don’t have to have a stance on the extent of licensing for software/hardware combo services whenever their kid wants the cute gorilla game.
It’s not a terrible example. You can have delicious vegan food and you can have moral objections to the process of eating meat.
But if your reasoning is to enact some larger impact on climate or the practices of industrial meat production your own consumption habits are mostly irrelevant and you should focus on regulating those things instead.
The difference is that food isn’t a licensed product. You can have very sustainable meat at home. You can’t source sustainable Mario Kart.
Veganism is mostly about animal suffering. You cannot have meat at home without suffering, though I agree it can be very much less than current industrial scale of death.
As for mariokart, you could find or fund open source or ethical alternative developers
That’s why the intent matters. If your concern with meat is that you’re unwilling to inflict any suffering to an animal for food, then sure, that’s independent from the wider effects. If you don’t care about the larger impact beyond the small impact you have then by all means, your individual actions are all that matters.
But if your concern is systemic: how the meat industry functions, the climate impact, sustainability and so on, those things are a bit different. One, because you can bypass those issues and still eat animal products, on a personal level, but also because your not eating animal products doesn’t have much of an impact at all in the overall issue.
The other thing is misunderstanding how products, brands and commerce in general work. I mean, if you can go and fund the, what? Fifty to a hundred million dollars Mario Kart World must have cost, by all means be my guest. I have a couple of pitches I may want to run by you.
But even in that scenario I’m afraid people don’t particularly care for your open source knockoff. They want to play Mario Kart. Because it’s Mario Kart. For some it’s branding, for some it’s because their friends are playing and they want to play together, for some it’s nostalgia from their childhood, for some it’s just that they don’t care or know and that’s the name they recognize.
You could fund half the game’s industry to be free and open source and people would still play Mario Kart.
So if you want Nintendo to not be dicks about it you need to regulate them, not put your money where your mouth is.
Luckily I don’t have kids and hence don’t have to buy them such crap 😁
But yeah sure, I’m all in for regulations. But voting with your wallet is still the most basic way to say “lol no”.
If I’d be hellbent on gaming on-the-go I’m sure there are alternatives that come close at least. If not, the I guess I’d carry a laptop around for that
Voting with your wallet does nothing. It’s a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.
Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there’s something to vote about. Most people don’t.
And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn’t count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.
So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.
Sure, regulations would do it much better, but the best I can do is exactly that. Not consume the shit. Not my fault the vast majority are just unreflected consumers.
So your suggestion is that I should buy one too (Assuming i needed one) because my “vote” doesn’t matter anyway?
No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn’t a political action. Your political action is political action.
If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.
How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I’m sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the “voting with your wallet” thing doesn’t stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.
Oh I’m not a murican and already am protected as much as one could. Doesn’t change the point though.
Yet voting with my wallet is my local political action. Nothing else I could do besides actually getting involved with politics. Not my fault the majority doesn’t understand how they get screwed.
If roughly 10-20% would actually not buy it, assuming they would have if it weren’t shite, it would matter a lot. 5-10% would already be noticeable.
So, according to your point, you could also just buy another one, doesn’t matter anyway. And any other critical customer, who wanted to skip it, could too. As long as we’re below the noticeable 5%-treshhold. “It’s not my fault I have to buy this switch, it’s the government’s lack of regulation!”
No, hold on, you get past the “other than get involved with politics” part very quickly there.
You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?
You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That’s getting involved with politics. If that doesn’t do it then the next recourse isn’t to spend money for posturing, it’s to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.
That’s what you can do.
What you can’t do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That’s not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don’t care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.
This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say “but what else could I do besides getting into politics” and pretend they’ve done something by buying some shit over some other shit.
Nah, man, that’s not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don’t need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.
But just to be clear, “voting with your wallet” is doing nothing. That’s the choice you’re making.
I don’t get political because i don’t care enough. Already got enough hobbies to fill the day and no offspring to make this world a better place for.
And your point isn’t just exactly correct.
Examples where wallet-voting indeed changed things that just come to mind:
Netflix acc-sharing witchhunt. Salesdrop lead to back ruddering.
#deleteuber-movement lead to 200k uninstalls and hence forced über to adapt
Nestlé’s hideous water-scandal lead to effectively make them ditch the whole project
EA and its battlefront 2’s microtransactions. Massive Säle drop made them change it.
Bud light boycot seriously affected bud.
Probably more like those. Might not be a universally a viable tactic to vote with your wallet (and maybe even voice that) but often certainly is or was.
To be clear, I agree that you don’t have to be into politics. Not caring enough is fine. Social media expressions of opinion are always black and white. AI is the end of the world, Nintendo’s piracy stance is a war crime, Windows is the antichrist… You’re allowed to be bummed out by any of those and not do anything about it because you’re not bummed out enough. That’s a refreshing degree of online moderation, if anything.
What I take issue with is confusing those sorts of market results with actual political action. A brand can decide something unpopular isn’t worth pursuing for PR reasons, but they can also decide it IS worth it. To my knowledge the people I shared Netflix accounts with that were impacted by the location checks are still impacted by those. Your EA and Uber examples were barely impactful at all until regulators got into the mix, and regulators got into the mix hard about those issues. I invite you to go look up how both of them played out, because, man, is there a difference between how fast the companies reacted once there was someone in a public position going “hey, maybe we need to take a look at this”.
Mistaking how a brand manages its public perception for effective political actions is dangerous. Letting corporations appease you through those means only serves to set up a bad precedent when those brands decide the time has come to squeeze and go hard on monetization. You need public institutions that are strong and vigilant enough to put some bite behind that public displeasure.
Can a boycott work? Sure. As a coordinated political action, the consumer-side equivalent of a strike. This takes just as much work and coordination as any other political activity.
But spending your money based on the outrage that reaches you through social media is not a functional way to generate change. It’s just you being part of the mass of consumers brand manage with their messaging tools. You’re a rounding error in a stat, part of the manipulation of the market that is built into every corporate action. When you do that you’re a focus group data point, not a political actor.
Yea, distribution and creation of art has to be separate. Only way I see against enshitification.
Like, there must be a choice between ad spreader datahoarder low price offer and premium low data no ad offer. There must be no monopoly over distribution of a specific art piece if it is no unique art form, like a hand drawn picture. (Like music, games, movies, series, trading card game, tabletop games, apps etc.)
Meaning, nintendo, netflix, apple, disnay and similar would have to offer distribution licenses according fair market rights and not limit those licenses to themself as self distributor.
Because Banana!
But no, seriously, you can rage all you want about brands and corporations, but in cultural industries content is always king.
That’s why you need regulation. You can’t expect people to not play or watch cool stuff just because you’re aware of and latched onto some particular moral, ethical or economical transgression. It’s res publica to prevent the misbehavior so people don’t have to have a stance on the extent of licensing for software/hardware combo services whenever their kid wants the cute gorilla game.
And yes, I do own a Switch 2.
Same for veganism. Taste is always king :/
It’s not a terrible example. You can have delicious vegan food and you can have moral objections to the process of eating meat.
But if your reasoning is to enact some larger impact on climate or the practices of industrial meat production your own consumption habits are mostly irrelevant and you should focus on regulating those things instead.
The difference is that food isn’t a licensed product. You can have very sustainable meat at home. You can’t source sustainable Mario Kart.
Veganism is mostly about animal suffering. You cannot have meat at home without suffering, though I agree it can be very much less than current industrial scale of death.
As for mariokart, you could find or fund open source or ethical alternative developers
That’s why the intent matters. If your concern with meat is that you’re unwilling to inflict any suffering to an animal for food, then sure, that’s independent from the wider effects. If you don’t care about the larger impact beyond the small impact you have then by all means, your individual actions are all that matters.
But if your concern is systemic: how the meat industry functions, the climate impact, sustainability and so on, those things are a bit different. One, because you can bypass those issues and still eat animal products, on a personal level, but also because your not eating animal products doesn’t have much of an impact at all in the overall issue.
The other thing is misunderstanding how products, brands and commerce in general work. I mean, if you can go and fund the, what? Fifty to a hundred million dollars Mario Kart World must have cost, by all means be my guest. I have a couple of pitches I may want to run by you.
But even in that scenario I’m afraid people don’t particularly care for your open source knockoff. They want to play Mario Kart. Because it’s Mario Kart. For some it’s branding, for some it’s because their friends are playing and they want to play together, for some it’s nostalgia from their childhood, for some it’s just that they don’t care or know and that’s the name they recognize.
You could fund half the game’s industry to be free and open source and people would still play Mario Kart.
So if you want Nintendo to not be dicks about it you need to regulate them, not put your money where your mouth is.
Luckily I don’t have kids and hence don’t have to buy them such crap 😁
But yeah sure, I’m all in for regulations. But voting with your wallet is still the most basic way to say “lol no”. If I’d be hellbent on gaming on-the-go I’m sure there are alternatives that come close at least. If not, the I guess I’d carry a laptop around for that
No it is not.
Voting with your wallet does nothing. It’s a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.
Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there’s something to vote about. Most people don’t.
And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn’t count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.
So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.
Sure, regulations would do it much better, but the best I can do is exactly that. Not consume the shit. Not my fault the vast majority are just unreflected consumers.
So your suggestion is that I should buy one too (Assuming i needed one) because my “vote” doesn’t matter anyway?
No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn’t a political action. Your political action is political action.
If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.
How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I’m sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the “voting with your wallet” thing doesn’t stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.
Oh I’m not a murican and already am protected as much as one could. Doesn’t change the point though.
Yet voting with my wallet is my local political action. Nothing else I could do besides actually getting involved with politics. Not my fault the majority doesn’t understand how they get screwed. If roughly 10-20% would actually not buy it, assuming they would have if it weren’t shite, it would matter a lot. 5-10% would already be noticeable.
So, according to your point, you could also just buy another one, doesn’t matter anyway. And any other critical customer, who wanted to skip it, could too. As long as we’re below the noticeable 5%-treshhold. “It’s not my fault I have to buy this switch, it’s the government’s lack of regulation!”
No, hold on, you get past the “other than get involved with politics” part very quickly there.
You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?
You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That’s getting involved with politics. If that doesn’t do it then the next recourse isn’t to spend money for posturing, it’s to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.
That’s what you can do.
What you can’t do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That’s not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don’t care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.
This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say “but what else could I do besides getting into politics” and pretend they’ve done something by buying some shit over some other shit.
Nah, man, that’s not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don’t need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.
But just to be clear, “voting with your wallet” is doing nothing. That’s the choice you’re making.
I don’t get political because i don’t care enough. Already got enough hobbies to fill the day and no offspring to make this world a better place for.
And your point isn’t just exactly correct. Examples where wallet-voting indeed changed things that just come to mind:
Netflix acc-sharing witchhunt. Salesdrop lead to back ruddering.
#deleteuber-movement lead to 200k uninstalls and hence forced über to adapt
Nestlé’s hideous water-scandal lead to effectively make them ditch the whole project
EA and its battlefront 2’s microtransactions. Massive Säle drop made them change it.
Bud light boycot seriously affected bud.
Probably more like those. Might not be a universally a viable tactic to vote with your wallet (and maybe even voice that) but often certainly is or was.
To be clear, I agree that you don’t have to be into politics. Not caring enough is fine. Social media expressions of opinion are always black and white. AI is the end of the world, Nintendo’s piracy stance is a war crime, Windows is the antichrist… You’re allowed to be bummed out by any of those and not do anything about it because you’re not bummed out enough. That’s a refreshing degree of online moderation, if anything.
What I take issue with is confusing those sorts of market results with actual political action. A brand can decide something unpopular isn’t worth pursuing for PR reasons, but they can also decide it IS worth it. To my knowledge the people I shared Netflix accounts with that were impacted by the location checks are still impacted by those. Your EA and Uber examples were barely impactful at all until regulators got into the mix, and regulators got into the mix hard about those issues. I invite you to go look up how both of them played out, because, man, is there a difference between how fast the companies reacted once there was someone in a public position going “hey, maybe we need to take a look at this”.
Mistaking how a brand manages its public perception for effective political actions is dangerous. Letting corporations appease you through those means only serves to set up a bad precedent when those brands decide the time has come to squeeze and go hard on monetization. You need public institutions that are strong and vigilant enough to put some bite behind that public displeasure.
Can a boycott work? Sure. As a coordinated political action, the consumer-side equivalent of a strike. This takes just as much work and coordination as any other political activity.
But spending your money based on the outrage that reaches you through social media is not a functional way to generate change. It’s just you being part of the mass of consumers brand manage with their messaging tools. You’re a rounding error in a stat, part of the manipulation of the market that is built into every corporate action. When you do that you’re a focus group data point, not a political actor.
Yea, distribution and creation of art has to be separate. Only way I see against enshitification.
Like, there must be a choice between ad spreader datahoarder low price offer and premium low data no ad offer. There must be no monopoly over distribution of a specific art piece if it is no unique art form, like a hand drawn picture. (Like music, games, movies, series, trading card game, tabletop games, apps etc.)
Meaning, nintendo, netflix, apple, disnay and similar would have to offer distribution licenses according fair market rights and not limit those licenses to themself as self distributor.
At least, that is my opinion