While tens of thousands of people have joined Facebook groups in Sweden and Denmark calling for no longer buying American, Norwegian company Haltbakk Bunkers has announced that it will stop supplying US military vessels with fuel.
My gf (who is not on the fedivere or any social media) came to me the other day and wanted to stop buying U.S products. Not that we really did before. Spendrups make better soft drinks than Coca-Cola and Pepsi anyway.
I’m trying to think, apart from technology, what do I buy from American brands?
American food doesn’t really come here except fast food franchises which I don’t frequent anyway.
Nobody has an American car.
My car’s electric anyway, so no American oil companies fueling it.
Clothes are probably all from Asia anyway.
I don’t subscribe to any streaming services.
I’ll order 5 or 6 things from Amazon a year. So that’s easy to stop.
Sure there might be the odd brand that is unknowingly American, but I’m left asking “What does America export?” because I can’t think of much in my life.
This sounds great. But if you didn’t buy anything in the first place there’s also zero effect of boycotting. Then the movement can of course succeed quite easily, but at no net gain.
I feel like you tried to dodge the elephant in the room: the tech. The hardest part to get rid of is the technology, and in particularly the tech stack. Social media, servers, windows, outlook… The dependency is real at all levels, and I’ve yet to hear of any company trying to escape. This is also where I believe the boycott will fail at an consumer level, people will keep using META, stream from Netflix, order from Amazon etc. Since people are still using these, so will our companies and politicians.
That is a great point. It’s indeed really tricky to e.g., build a modern pc without American owned semiconductor companies when it comes to processors and graphic cards. There’s like… British ARM processors which isn’t really suited for most applications.
My gf (who is not on the fedivere or any social media) came to me the other day and wanted to stop buying U.S products. Not that we really did before. Spendrups make better soft drinks than Coca-Cola and Pepsi anyway.
I’m trying to think, apart from technology, what do I buy from American brands?
Sure there might be the odd brand that is unknowingly American, but I’m left asking “What does America export?” because I can’t think of much in my life.
This sounds great. But if you didn’t buy anything in the first place there’s also zero effect of boycotting. Then the movement can of course succeed quite easily, but at no net gain.
I feel like you tried to dodge the elephant in the room: the tech. The hardest part to get rid of is the technology, and in particularly the tech stack. Social media, servers, windows, outlook… The dependency is real at all levels, and I’ve yet to hear of any company trying to escape. This is also where I believe the boycott will fail at an consumer level, people will keep using META, stream from Netflix, order from Amazon etc. Since people are still using these, so will our companies and politicians.
Well exactly. Tech is about the only thing I can think of boycotting. I can certainly do services with little harm, but hardware is difficult.
Ah, now I understand!
That is a great point. It’s indeed really tricky to e.g., build a modern pc without American owned semiconductor companies when it comes to processors and graphic cards. There’s like… British ARM processors which isn’t really suited for most applications.
Arm isn’t even owned by Brits anymore. SoftBank has a majority holding in them (Japan)