The Billionaire Boycott Conundrum
whatever.scalzi.com
whatever.scalzi.com
This is what I do. I don't call it a "boycott" because it's not, if you consider a boycott to be a relatively temporary effort with the goal of changing some company's behavior.
Instead, what I do is recognize that there things that I'm simply not OK being a part of or financially supporting, so I refuse to do it. I have no expectation that my avoiding doing business with these companies will change their behavior or even improve the world. I avoid doing business with these companies so that I can sleep better at night.
However, if someone IS trying to cause change then quietly spending their own energy trying to sus out where to spend money ethically is not an effective use of time.
Moreover, if that person believes the thing they are trying to change is actively unethical in the world (extreme examples might be the Holocaust or American slavery) then quietly letting it happen while simply trying to ignore it and not participate might be a worse outcome in their own moral system.
I absolutely understand your point of view and take the same approach for a lot of my own life decisions (usually to my own detriment) so this isn't criticism I just want to highlight that it doesn't cover all the situations where this decision can come up.
Absolutely true, as I said, my goal with this isn't to cause change.
> quietly letting it happen while simply trying to ignore it and not participate might be a worse outcome in their own moral system.
I agree, and I certainly wasn't intending to discourage actively working for change. I put a great deal of effort towards effecting change in other ways. On the other hand, if people started thinking more about what they're actually supporting in their regular purchasing decisions and taking that into account, that also supports change, but in a more holistic way that just targeting a few companies for a boycott and ignoring the impact of supporting the companies that aren't being targeted.
The truth about change is that there's no magic wand here. There's no single sort of action that is effective. It takes a broad effort from many different directions.
It's odd that most discussion I've see about boycotts recently (including this article) has framed them as a solitary choice, rather than part of a social movement. It's important to embrace and pay attention to the social aspects of how one pushes for change. This is the real secret sauce in politics.