You *Can* Do Something To Hurt the Oligarchs

Boycotts, strikes, and the Abstinence Fallacy.

Warning: If you still have vestigial conservative leanings, I’m going to stretch your tolerance today. It’s not super comfortable for me, either. Let’s go.

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(Shutterstock)

1. Leverage

If you haven’t listened to Tim’s talk with Scott Galloway yet, you should. I’ll give you the short version.

• Galloway has started a campaign called Resist and Unsubscribe.

• The idea is to begin a boycott that hits a number of tech companies who have capitulated to the Trump regime.

• The best way to send a message to private industries in a democratic society is to punish them economically.

• Small, coordinated actions can have big consequences.

Galloway has put together a list of Trumpophile companies—Google, Meta, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, ChatGPT, Uber, and others. He’s calling on people to join him in cancelling monthly memberships and using alternative services.

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Can our actions make a difference? Galloway argues that they can, because of how much leverage these firms rely on for their market valuations. Here’s Scott:

[I]f you just, for example, unsubscribe from a paid version of ChatGPT because they’re raising money at 40 times revenues, you’re literally denting that company’s valuation by $10,000 by just using the free option.

And here he is explaining the unit economics of unsubscribing:

So I’m getting about 60,000 to 80,000 uniques a day to the site. . . . It estimates that I get 4 percent to 5 percent conversion, meaning that for every 100 people that come to the site, 4 to 5 unsubscribe . . .

They, on average, unsubscribe from two platforms. They spend about an average of $200 per platform . . . [I]t ends up being approximately a million dollars in unsubscribes revenue.

Understand that for many of these companies, their stock price is based on a multiple of 10x revenues—which gives us that leverage again:

It’s 10 million bucks a day. I think I’m gonna take a third of a billion dollars out of the market cap of these companies, Tim. Now, does that mean anything when they’re trading at trillions of dollars? Not overnight. But if slowly but surely other people, as they’re starting to do, start to build their own resistance movements over time, these individuals are going to notice.

Let’s just do it and be legends?

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2. Abstinence

I can hear your objections. You can’t unsubscribe from all of these services. You need to have Netflix to amuse your kids. Or you need Amazon Prime to save on delivery fees.

That’s okay. Have you heard of the Abstinence Fallacy?

One of the cognitive traps people build for themselves is the idea that if a line can’t be held completely, then it’s not worth holding at all. Sociologists call this the Abstinence Fallacy, in which people set themselves up to abstain from a behavior and then, if they violate it once, decide that the abstention was never worth doing at all. So they do that behavior again and again.

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The Abstinence Fallacy usually applies to states of risk. You decide that you’re never going to participate in some risky behavior—drug use, driving while intoxicated, riding a motorcycle without a helmet—and then, when you slip up and do the risky behavior, you take it as a sign that avoiding it was pointless.

But that’s not how risk works. Every instance of risky behavior is a unique point. Reducing the overall number of instances reduces your cumulative risk profile—even if you slip up and occasionally do the risky behavior.

We can apply the same paradigm to boycotts.

You may not be able to unsubscribe from all of the companies Scott Galloway mentions. That’s okay.

Because if you can unsubscribe from any of them, you’re hurting the oligarchs and putting muscle behind the boycott.

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Let me tell you what I didn’t do: I didn’t unsubscribe from Apple One, because I have my family’s entire cloud storage system running through iCloud. I didn’t unsubscribe from Netflix, because my kids watch some shows on the platform. And I didn’t unsubscribe from YouTube Premium, because I watch a lot of YouTube content for work and I need to skip ads in order to save time.

But after listening to Scott and Tim, I cancelled my paid ChatGPT account. I cancelled AppleTV. I cancelled Audible. I’m switching from Uber to Lyft for all ride-hailing. I’m holding off on buying a new MacBook Air. And I’m looking into swapping out Amazon Prime in favor of Walmart for retail delivery services.¹

Could I ditch more services in the future? Yes. But that’s no reason not cancel what you can right now. Today. As soon as you’re done reading this.

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So that’s my challenge to you. Cancel something. Even if it’s one thing. Tell us in the comments what it was.

And then share this newsletter with one person you think might be open to joining us.

Just from a unit economics perspective, we can make enough of a difference—right here, in this community—to be noticed. If 5 percent of the people who get this email click through, it will double the traffic to Scott’s Resist and Unsubscribe site for a day. That’s like giving him a 3 percent increase in unsubscriptions for the month.

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3. Strike Prep

While we’re at it, there is something else you can do. Start trying to sock away a little money. Not everyone can do this; I get it. But if you have the ability to put aside even $20 a week, do it.

Robert Evans recently gave a speech about preparing for the battle against fascism. You can listen to it here or read a transcript here.

After the speech he took questions and one of the points he made is that the most powerful weapon citizens have against a fascist regime is a general strike. But strikes don’t just happen any more than boycotts just happen. They require organization and planning. In particular, they require cash savings so that people can survive during a strike.

I know it makes me sound like a commie, but you can double your effect if, while trimming your consumption to hurt the oligarchs, you started building cash reserves in order to make the strike weapon a credible threat.

Because the more credible a general strike is, the less of a chance there is that we’ll have to employ it during a crisis.

1. How weird is it that we now live in a world where Walmart is the lesser evil?