Resist

From the “Pivot” podcast with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Starting at about 12:40, Scott says:

If you want to look at the fastest political movement in history, it was actually about exactly six years ago and that was 2020 when the GDP went down 31% because of COVID. We had the greatest political movement in history in terms of actual move to action. And my fear is that every few years we protest, we make signs, we chant, we gather, it feels good, it looks great on CNN, and then nothing happens. If you want to understand real power and the difference between being right and being effective, stop watching protests and start watching gross domestic products, specifically GDP.

Trump does not respond to outrage. He responds to markets. And that’s not cynicism. It’s mechanics. I’m not talking about a labor strike. This isn’t unions, picket lines, or collective bargaining. I’m talking about something quieter, far more unsettling to the system, and that is an economic strike. A short-term coordinated withdrawal from spending, and maybe work, no marching, no slogans, just less. And we forget they did that in Minnesota. They had a day. The businesses closing. It can’t be a day. A day is annoyance. It needs to be a week or a month. And it needs to be national. The US economy is 27 trillion. That’s 74 billion a day. And here’s our power. Our economy is 70% consumer-driven. Consumers actually have more power, not in signs or in guns or even in their vote right now. They have it in the power of the purse, in that a very small change in behavior could have an enormous effect … and nothing in modern American history moves policy faster.

If you think about what you could do here, if wealthy households took their spending down 10% and middle class and lower income households which have a difficult time reducing their spend took it down 5%, you would take GDP negative almost overnight. It’s hard because it requires coordination. It’s risky especially for people living paycheck to paycheck. But that’s exactly why it works. Power fears withdrawal more than resistance because resistance is noisy but withdrawal is expensive. It’s a question around what actually works, and the history and the data I believe are not ambiguous. When nothing moves, everyone listens. And that’s not ideology, it’s economics. You don’t need permission to opt out. And in a system, capitalism, built entirely on participation, the most radical act in capitalism isn’t protest, it’s nonparticipation.

I believe if you could convince America, the entire economy now is built on AI. If you could convince a bunch of Americans to cancel their chat GPT or OpenAI accounts and all of a sudden OpenAI had to announce that their subscriptions had fallen off a cliff, that would ripple into Nvidia. That would ripple into Microsoft. And these are the people that Trump cares about. And this is what the S&P, this is what the economy cares about…

… it’s the boring shit that moves the needle. And here’s something really boring that would stop this. If we could
convince half of Americans who are planning to buy an iPhone in the next 60 days to not buy it, just put it off and we could get 10% of existing Chat GPT subscribers to cancel their subscription, this ends…

These are the people that he cares about, and this is about the market. Look at the only time he’s blinked when the Japanese bond market started taking our 10-year yields up and when tariffs took the markets down. This is how he responds. It’s not cinematic. It’s not romantic. It’s not going to be written up in great history novels, but if you could figure out a way to basically kick a small number of companies related to the tech economy that account for 40% of the S&P right now and who are the people he cares about, if all of a sudden if you took all of your money out of any JP Morgan affiliated bank and transferred it to a local regional bank, if you cancelled all of your streaming media platforms, if you cancelled OpenAI and Anthropic and you said I am not upgrading my Apple phone and there was a real movement that registered and they had to disclose it in their earnings calls. This shit would come to an end pronto…

You cannot shame them. The ghost of Steve Jobs is not going to shame them. The only thing these people care about is whether or not their stock goes down. That’s it. And if their stock goes down, they’re going to stop. They’re not only going to stop showing up to Melania documentaries and giving him inscribed hard disk drives. They’re going to finally find their testicles and come out and speak out against this guy and call him and say, “You need to call this shit off.” And the SNP is going to go down and then everyone’s going to have their hair on fire.

Too seldom asked, however, is why it is so important what white people think of us. To precisely what end must white people master a complex, nuanced social history lesson when it comes to black people? What are the chances that this ever will, or even could, happen, given that very few people are historians or professors? Of course, we must battle the kind of acrid contempt that leads to violence and murder. However, when it comes to matters of whites’ quieter dismissive attitudes and misimpressions, the black intelligentsia’s Ahab-like commitment to transforming their mentality has always perplexed me. Under what conception of human strength do we teach a group of people to obsess over how they are seen in the eyes of others?

WE CANNOT ALLOW ‘1619’ TO DUMB DOWN AMERICA IN THE NAME OF A CRUSADE

Dear Sweet Liberals, Your Pronoun Fetish is Wack

Your email signature pronouns are wack. I have never seen anyone include in their email signature pronouns that don’t match their name. Matt’s pronouns are always he/him/his. Jenna’s pronouns are always she/her/hers. Maybe including pronouns would make sense if you had a name that was ambiguous? But it’s always the Matts and the Jennas (hmmm, why *is* that?), and it’s always he/him/his or she/her/hers — never they/them/theirs or (jeebus forfend) byte/byte/byteself or whatever the effing eff. Since by email no one can tell whether you’re a “Jenna” who really looks like a Matt and you’re trying to head off “misgendering”, your pronoun email sig just makes you look like a toady.

Your nametag pronouns are wack. I don’t even understand the reasoning behind this. Sweet, gender-conforming Matt and Jenna are going to put “he/him/his” and “she/her/hers” (respectively) on their name tags, while all their woque colleagues do exactly the same, and someone gender-confused or -nonconforming is supposed to walk into their institutional sea of perfectly predictable pronoun pronouncements and think — what, exactly? “Wow, I feel so welcome in my gender nonconformity among all of these gender-conforming peeps who can absolutely relate to the experience of being incorrectly sirred or ma’amed on the daily. I’m so excited to announce my unconventional pronouns to them! (Which I would have to do, were I into that sort of thing, as I’m a visitor here and not wearing a name tag!)” I don’t think so, you weenies. If you imagine your pronoun puckering is helping anyone who doesn’t already fit in, you’re wrong. All you’re doing is emphasizing your tedious normality and savoring those sweet, sweet self-awarded “ally” cookies.

Honestly, did anyone, before last night, ever think of using pronouns other than she/her/hers to refer to Kamala Harris? It’s nothing but blatant pandering and virtue signaling at this point, people. Please stop drinking that Kool-Aid and spare the rest of us your foolishness.

More Social Media Hate

If triggering emotions is the highest prize, and negative emotions are easier to trigger, how could social media not make you sad? If your consumption of content is tailored by near limitless observations harvested about people like you, how could your universe not collapse into the partial depiction of reality that people like you also enjoy? How could empathy and respect for difference thrive in this environment?

10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now