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Let me tell you about the “boycott light”: It is of course difficult to directly eliminate all American products and all American technology from your life. Smartphones are one technology in particular for which there is no real European alternative. And of course, in some cases Amazon is the only place where certain products are available or where certain products are significantly cheaper than elsewhere. Boycotting is hard, but there is a way to hurt them without hurting yourself.

But: the big tech companies live from your “engagement”. The more time you spend on YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, the more advertising they can show you. And the more profitable you are for these companies. That's why they rely on all these addiction mechanisms, because every minute you spend there is hard cash for the companies. This also applies to the eCommerce giants. PayPal collects a commission for every payment. Visa and Mastercard too. Amazon also takes its cut and so on.

Every minute that you are not surfing Facebook but are on Lemmy, Mastodon, on other websites or even offline is a minute in which your engagement there drops and in which no profitable advertising can be shown to you. You can of course stop using those services completely and delete all accounts, but if that's not possible, a partial boycott is also a good idea. If only one of your friend groups stays on Facebook and you move with the others, that's less time spent there and therefore less profit for Zuckerberg. Your local football group wants to stay on WhatsApp, but you can move your friends to Signal? Less time spend in WhatsApp, KPIs are going down.

And of course it's hard when certain products are significantly cheaper on Amazon than in other stores. But if you compare prices before you buy and then buy many products elsewhere and don't just go for the default Amazon, then that's poison for Bezos pocket. If you simply select the other payment methods for stores and not PayPal by default, that attacks their business model. Does a store only have PayPal? Then you can of course do without the purchase completely, but: If you no longer use PayPal as the default, but only where it is absolutely necessary, then the KPIs at their HQ will be on fire.

This also applies to other digital services: If you no longer use Google Search as your main search, but only as a backup when you haven't found what you want in other search engines, then they will absolutly go nuts at Google HQ. If you use an Android phone but refuse to use the AI and all the cloud services, then that kills their engagement metrics and honestly: it doesn't do you any harm.

So: If you are unable to do a full boycott, a partial boycott is still an effective method of harming certain companies. Try to be as unprofitable as possible for you in your circumstances.

Source: https://mastodon.social/@mattgemmell@mastodon.scot/114205290161616044