this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Oh we are way passed the point where "voting with your dollar" means literally anything. These billionaires are making more money than they ever have in human history. They have literally turned all of society across large swaths of the world into a gigantic personal capital generator. It makes literally not a single difference if all of us here boycotted them or not. It's meaningless.
Tell that to Disney.
A big problem is that people need smartphones for so much of modern life. You can stop watching Disney and your life won’t meaningfully change but it’s really hard to avoid evil smartphone companies. Part of me wants to switch from Apple but what would I go to? Samsung who’s just as bad about right to repair? Google who’s Google? I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’m not going to say that the choice is as easy as cancelling a streaming service.
Do you though? They're convenient, for sure, but you can also use a dumbphone and a laptop.
Yea, just gunna carry my laptop around with me everywhere. And that’s not even talking about all the nonsense on laptops that most people can’t deal with.
Keyword: convenient
How the fuck would I access my bank then? All banks literally require their apps to access the account or sometimes even open the account, nevermind actually pay for anything or get a debit or credit card.
>Inb4 some American downvotes because they forget the rest of the world exists
We get it, Americans use cash in America, and they use magnetic stripe cards and cheques and all these other technologies that were phased out in rest of the world before I was even born, but that's not really an argument to make on a global platform.
In your part of the world...
In most of the world that isn't 1 country that starts with 'United States' and ends with 'of America'
Fairphone. Right to repair, plus good custom ROM and linux on mobile support.
Useless without passing Google's Integrity checks.
Two phones.
One for everyday life.
The other for documentation of events, activism, direct action, this app mentioned in the post, and maybe even rebellions.
(actually if you are doing a rebellion, you better use meshtastic or some sort of radios, and remember: do not transmit from home)
Yeah this is generally the take I hear the most. The smartphone is presented as a necessity and for a lot of people that may be true, but what it really is is a tool for capitalism. It spies on you, gives you fomo, serves you ads, gives access to all kinds of addictive content... oh and work apps!
It's like AI, shoved down our throats until people think it's needed. It's not.
Your smartphone serves you ads?
Yeah except I do actually need one for work, paying rent, paying bills etc. It's a helluva position of privilege to be able to say no to something like that, and that's coming from someone who doesn't have a car, which is far less necessary.
You can't do those things any other way, eh? That's crazy...
It's a privilege to say no, eh? Interesting take.
No, we cannot do those things any other way.
Yes, it's a privilege to be able to simply say no to having a bank account, for one you'd need to not be in paid employment and not on any financial assistance, so basically a NEET and/or like a foreign-born investor, for which you need to be pretty rich.
You do realize bank accounts and paying bills existed before smartphones, right? There are still people out there that don't use credit/cards, mail in bill payments and refuse to use smartphones and yet still DUI the things you think can't be done without a smartphone. Blue collar workers also exist. But this is another pointless interaction so what's it really matter.
You do realize that countries outside the US exist, right? Because the answer is No. No, they do not do these things outside of United States of America - which is 1 country.
Yes, as weird as it seems to you - the world is not entirely in one country called United States and what applies to what you know of your country does not apply in the entire world.
Here in the UK even grandma does not mail in bill payments, nor do most places accept this, she does it via the app or the utility company website for Direct Debit, or she has someone do it for her via the app before she goes on to be racist on Facebook.
This is the same way for blue collar workers. They in-fact - must have debit cards because they must have bank accounts to even get paid via PAYE and IR35 and thus pay taxes. While there are jobs outside of that, the people who work those jobs will be paid into bank accounts, and cash in hand jobs mean via PayPal or Venmo or some such that all also require bank accounts and KYC.
Hell, you can't even rent a place without showing them your bank statements, or straight up letting the letting agency login to your bank account via some third party data harvesting / "income analysis" tool so they can "confirm" your income and employment status. I had this exact thing demanded when I was looking for a place up and down the country just over half a year ago by every letting agency under the sun, from small to big, south to north.
Yes there are people without bank accounts, but it's usually only because they've either:
a) Just arrived and have no permanent address which is required to set up a bank account, meaning they have to pay rent upfront for 6mo to a year to avoid checks to even get an address, which they can't get because they can't get a job which again - requires a bank account - trapping them in a cycle of poverty unless they have savings in a foreign bank account with which to pay upfront rent Or: b) Are destitute and homeless, again - without a permanent address, which is required for a bank account.
The same goes for smartphones. You're not realistically gonna get a job without a smartphone.
Credit cards yes - most people do not use them, and their dominance as a default and even commonplace household usage as 'deficit spending' on Temu is most commonly a US phenomenon.
That's because debit cards are the default in the rest of the world - credit cards are not. Since everyone has a bank account and smartphone, most people pay with Google Pay via NFC on their phone anyway IRL, and many people shop online, which is the use of a debit card - paying for things.
As opposed to credit cards, which are seen as borrowing. Not that many people are keen to borrow money or engage in any finance that could be seen as "gambling", definitely least so the wagies, with the exception of some horse betting or memestocks or in the case of 100% brain use - a savings account at a bank or building society, all of which almost universally already require a bank account meaning a minimum of 2 apps.
I personally do have one but I'm in the minority.
You saying this interaction is pointless is very self-reporting, because you are essentially stating that you will not change your mind regardless of how many times and how much you are corrected.
It is an admission that your bizarre insistence that your experience is universal - as if you not knowing how things are in the rest of the world is some sort of attack on you - is in fact, terminal. I'm sorry for you.
I don't claim to know how things work in America, I've heard American colleagues say crazy stuff about how everything is tied to your credit ratings, which isn't the case here nearly as much, but I also don't claim that everything i know about my country - the UK - applies to the rest of the world, because of course it doesn't, I'm claiming that what you're saying - what might be true in your country - the US - is a universal worldwide experience.
I'm not sure what you expected claiming this in this international discussion on this international community on this international website on this international internet.
Nice job. You won.
I would say you’re missing some nuance in these arguments, though.
With a phone people no longer need laptops or full-sized computers and they also get a phone and camera to go along with it. They get a lot of power even just using fairly mundane apps like email, file storage, and a calendar. And then you have access to the internet and all the power that comes with that. I also don’t know why you think phones show ads.
AI, on the other hand, is hot fucking garbage at everything it does. Why anyone uses it I can’t say, it’s so bad and it’s known that it’s actively making people dumber. I don’t touch the stuff and my life has been going just fine.
they would have been perfectly fine it was simply that the optics were bad enough to warrant a response
Why do they care about the optics? $$$
Do you really think this situation is comparable in any way to Jimmy Kimmel? I really don't. Even if it were, nowhere near that many Apple customers care whether or not the app that targets fascist militias is on the app store or not.
I do think it's comparable. All of this is about money. Americans are funding all of this crap with the, albeit controlled, choices we make with our money. Our taxes are funding genocides and coups and war and destruction; our purchasing habits are funding the decline of our planet and our social structures and our sanity.
You're right though, consumers will likely never change in large enough quantities to make a real difference. People are already resubbing to Hulu so...
Jimmy Kimmel made Disney a lot of money. They had to choose between pressure from the US government, and losing a popular source of revenue along with the vast amount of liberals who swore them off. Jimmy Kimmel was not a real institutional threat to the US government. So the US government did not have a very strong incentive to continuously push for him being taken down, and Disney had a lot of incentive to keep him around.
An app that targets fascists makes Apple no money. The US government faces the loss (or rendering ineffective) of their fascist police force. Both sides therefore face a huge amount of pressure to have the app taken down. It would have to be a gigantic part of their profit margin to warrant any pushback from Apple. I'd be very, very surprised to hear that this change is ever overturned through a boycott.
To an extent, yes, but the dollar has been decoupled from gold a long time ago, they can literally just print money in the billions and they do (although there days it's probably
money++on a mainframe), completely sidestepping tax money..Every revolution famously begins with everyone giving up completely.
Can you show me where I said to do nothing? Or is boycotting the only form of collective action you're aware of?
No, but great idea gatekeeping collective action. We surely need less of it.
I wasnt gatekeeping it. Just pointing out how ultimately ineffective it is in creating meaningful change.
...and it happened in a vacuum, just all by itself.
Defeatist subservient take
Every time I hear people talk like that I begin to think they dont understand basic microeconomics.
Yes, as opposed to spending money at another capitalist institution that will inevitably do the same thing, which is somehow not a subservient take.
There are a lot of other ways to apply pressure besides boycotts. I dont think a boycott would ever work against Apple over this.
ah good ol Cynicism. Might as well find yourself a giant pot to live in while they're still available!
I dont understand why recommending other forms of collective action makes me cynical.
Where was that again?
?
are these other forms in the room with us?
I'm not sure why you're taking such an aggressive / dismissive tone towards me. Did your comment really warrant a breakdown of possible forms of collective action? It never really seemed you were interested in a nuanced discussion in the first place.
I think collective action in this circumstance is better spent on directly obstructing ICE operations. The developers of the app would be better served by making their project accessible in browser, and self hosted so as to prevent further attempts to make it inaccessible. Group collective action should be focused on demonstration and obstruction of the root of the problem, ICE itself. How you go about the depends a lot on when/where but there are a lot of ways to obstruct their operations.
Ive never personally spent money on any kind of Apple device. I would certainly encourage others not to as well, a thing I was already doing. But I think focusing on Apple as the root problem here is a mistake in the first place.
Sorry dude just tired of this defeatism online and even if voting with your wallet doesn't work we never collectively manage to even test it. Just exhausting. Maybe youre right maybe it doesn't work and it's stupid but the bigger point is that people just don't put effort into it.
Just lemmy users? Sure, but you don't stop with just lemmy users.
Honest to god do you think that money magically appears in their pocket. We can still claw it back. Unionize, boycott, collective action is our strongest pressure against them and IT DOES WORK.
Which is why governments fight so much to make it hard.
In my neck of the woods it's not cool to unionize and there's no home owners' association, people only rally for their favorite sports team but don't bother voting.
I guess we get what we deserve.
I agree that collective action is our strongest pressure against them and it does work.
I do not think a boycott itself is likely to reverse Apple's removal of the app. I also think it makes more sense for the app to become available from a web browser, or some other avenue that circumvents the need for Apple's approval in the first place.
I also believe that collective action in this circumstance is better spent on ICE itself, which would be more effective (its the reason the US government wants Apple to remove the app in the first place) and more direct to fascist power.
Im sure thats why disney quickly reversed gear with cancelling kimmel after loosing 3.8B overnight