Rounding a very large number up to infinity isn't entirely irrational, but once you get organized enough, you just might be able to find time - or a system - to bring that very big number down to an entirely tractable value.
Yes, this is a species of "careful shopping" but my point isn't to say that shopping carefully is useless - rather, that it's a drastic error to mistake this useful (and surprisingly satisfying) *tactic* for a *strategy* that will truly alter the system.
34/
@pluralistic It's like the conscious alcoholic who very consciously chooses his drinks.
@pluralistic I think you can make society worse through mindless, careless, valueless consumption. I.e. the world is a better place, if the fediverse exists and we don't consume whatever advertising the big players want us to consume. Better than without, that is what an individual can achieve.
@pluralistic
"Individual actions can help and shouldn't be disparaged, but we must focus our energies on achieving systemic change"
Is the sweet spot IMO.
@pluralistic
It's impossible.
You can however sometimes boycott one company, but even that can be impossible.
Any election that requires you to "vote with your wallet" is always won by the people with the thickest wallets (statistically speaking, that's not you):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits
Now, that's not to say that boycotts are useless. But a boycott is a structured and organized campaign. The Montgomery bus boycott wasn't a matter of a bunch of people waking up one morning and saying, "You know what, fuck it, I'm gonna walk today":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott
2/
"Conscious consumption" arises out of the tradition that gave us Margaret Thatcher's maxim, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
Any attempt to change society by shopping very carefully is destined to fail, but it's worse than that.
3/
The Montgomery bus boycott was an *organized* project, put together by a powerful membership organization, the NAACP, that demanded far more of its members than merely shopping very carefully. The boycott was the *end stage* of an organized resistance, not a substitute for it.
4/
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.
5/
"Conscious consumption" arises out of the tradition that gave us Margaret Thatcher's maxim, "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first."
6/
Any attempt to change society by shopping very carefully is destined to fail, but it's worse than that. Because "shopping very carefully" never makes systemic change, its practitioners inevitably decide the reason they're not seeing the change they yearn for is that their allies *aren't shopping carefully enough*.
7/
