ITHACA and NYC! I'm heading your way for a zillion events from Sept 11-17. Here's a list of open-to-all CORNELL activities including two major keynotes; a movie night with dinner and discussion; and a public event at CORNELL TECH in NYC. I'm also appearing TODAY (Sept 13) at AUTUMN LEAVES BOOKS. And I'll be at the BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL on Sept 21.
There's just TWO DAYS LEFT in the Enshittification Kickstarter, where you can pre-order the audiobook, ebook and hardcover of my next book! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.
You cannot vote with your wallet. Or rather, you can, but you will lose that vote. Wallet-votes always go to the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that is not you.
Margaret Thatcher tried to get us to believe that "there is no such thing as society." She wanted everyday people to abandon the idea of having a shared destiny, to throw away any notion of solidarity as an answer to social problems. Despite the fact that Thatcher's own backers happily formed cartels and cabals, from the Mount Pellerin Society to the Heritage Foundation, Thatcher insisted that everyday people should fight their battles alone.
If you want higher wages, don't join a union – just go demand a higher wage from your boss. If you want lower rents, don't demand rent controls, just petition your landlord for a discount. If none of this stuff works (this stuff rarely works), then you are out of luck. "The market" exists to do "price discovery" and you've just discovered the price of your labor (less than you need to survive) and the cost of your home (more than you can afford). You voted with your wallet, and you lost. As Thatcher was fond of saying, "there is no alternative."
This has been our framework for change for the past 50 years. It's like we've had a collective lobotomy and have forgotten the way that actual change comes about. Change happens when solidaristic groups of everyday people – unions, political movements – directly confront politicians and power-brokers and demand change. Your boss won't equitably share the fruits of your labor unless they fear that all the workers on the jobsite will shut down the shop. Your politicians won't do the bidding of everyday people – who can't shower them in cash – unless they fear that they will have their offices blockaded, their homes picketed, and their seats primaried.
Rather than demanding this kind of change, we're supposed to vote with our wallets, making a fetish out of our personal consumption choices and scolding others as "lazy" or "cheap" if they don't quit Facebook or stop shopping at Walmart. This isn't just ineffective, it's counterproductive. Refusing to form solidaristic bonds with people suffering in the same way as you because they buy things you disapprove of means that you can't attain the solidarity needed to make the real change you're seeking.
Shopping harder is no way to save the planet or your neighbors. Individual actions do not provoke systemic change. For that, we need collective action. Join your local tenants' union, your local DSA chapter, your local Electronic Frontier Alliance group:
https://efa.eff.org/allies
And also! Make consumption choices that improve your life and the lives of people you love. Support your local bookstore, buy online from libro.fm and bookshop.org – not because this will break Amazon's monopoly power (for that we will need unionization, antitrust, and tax enforcement), but because when you shop at those stores, you make a difference to the lives of the people who operate those stores, who pay decent wages and don't maim their warehouse workers.
Go to your local family-owned grocer instead of the union-busting monopolist, because they're nice people, the food is good, and they pitch in to help their community, rather than draining its finances and lobbying for tax exemptions.
Buy from artists and creators you like online, join their crowdfunders and Patreons, get their music on Bandcamp – not because this will shatter the hegemony of the five giant publishers, four giant studios, three giant labels, two giant app companies and one giant ebook and audiobook store – but because it will help people whose art you love pay their rent and buy groceries.
Get off Facebook, Insta and Twitter and join Mastodon and/or Bluesky – not because you can disenshittify the internet by switching to federated social media, but because you, personally can have a less shitty time if you get away from the zuckermuskian rot economy.
Do all this stuff – to the extent you can. Support your local bookstore, but don't forego buying and reading books you love because the store is a two hour drive and you only get there once a month. Support your local grocer, but if they don't have the ingredients you need for the special dinner you're making for your friends or your picky kids, then go to Safeway or Whole Foods or Albertsons. Buy art from artists where you can, but if there's a movie you want to stream and the only way to get it is on Prime or Youtube, pay the $3.99. Get a Mastodon or Bluesky account, but if your friends or customers or audience won't move with you, then reach them where they are.
Above all, don't isolate yourself. As Zephyr Teachout writes in Break 'Em Up, when you miss the picket at the Amazon warehouse because you've been driving around for hours looking for an independent stationery story to buy markers and cardboard for a protest sign, Jeff Bezos wins.
Give your comrades grace. Don't call them scabs because they bought McDonald's for their kids after a long shift. Don't turn your nose up at them because they bought a shirt at Zara. Give yourself grace. The damage you do to the cause by flying home for Thanksgiving, using a plastic straw, or using proprietary software is immeasurably infinitesimal. And if you're connected to your family, well hydrated, and get your tech needs met, you will have more energy and resources to throw into the fight for systemic change.
Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better. Your individual hand-wringing about whether to buy organic produce or get a Frappuccino just makes you less effective. It's not a boycott. A boycott is planned, social and solidaristic. It's something lots of people do together. Boycotts work (which is why génocidaires hate the BDS movement). Scabbing isn't buying something from someone unethical. Scabbing is crossing a picket line or breaking a boycott.
Margaret Thatcher's crude trick – "there is no such thing as society" – fools fewer and fewer of us every day. Doing the right thing isn't a matter of personal orthodoxy – it's a matter of movement tactics. We won't cure enshittification by zealously pursuing an approved list of correct merchants and products – we'll do so by changing the policy landscape so that enshittifiers sink and disenshittifiers rise:
If you think buying something different, or shopping somewhere else, will make your comrades' lives better, then sure, by all means, give them a helpful tip! But don't nag them for shopping wrong. The best reason to suggest a consumption choice is to improve the life of someone you care about.
And speaking of which: this is my last blog post before my Kickstarter to pre-sell the audiobook, ebook and hardcover of my next book, Enshittification, winds down. I don't have a Patreon, I don't paywall my work or sell ads. I support my family by selling books, and the Kickstarter is the way to buy the books that does me the most good – I get the most money per book this way, and it does more to help the books get on the bestseller lists:
So I'd love it if you'd consider backing the campaign. But also: don't worry about it if this isn't the easiest way for you to read my work. If you're short on cash, or you can't use Kickstarter, or you prefer the library, get the books some other way. That's fine. Your individual consumption choices can make a difference to me, personally; but the way we will change society is by joining and participating in a movement. I'd much rather live in a better world than live in this one with an extra $20 or $30 from your book purchases in my bank account.
Click here to pre-order my next book, ENSHITTIFICATION: WHY EVERYTHING SUDDENLY GOT WORSE AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I suppose this is inevitable in a world where "fetish" is used far more often in the sexual sense than it is to mean "object with a spirit inside," but "commodity fetishism" DOES NOT MEAN "really, really liking commodities"
It means treating social aspects of commodities as if they're inherent in them, e.g. when we say "a fur coat is worth $5000"
Wallace Shawn, of all people, wrote the best simple explanation of this I've come across.
« Le nouveau pouvoir consumériste et permissif a utilisé nos conquêtes mentales de sécularistes, d’illuministes et de rationalistes pour construire son échafaudage de faux sécularisme, de faux éclaircissement, de fausse rationalité. […] Il a porté à sa limite maximale sa seule sacralité possible : la sacralité de la consommation comme rite et, naturellement, de la marchandise comme fétiche. »
— Pier Paolo Pasolini, « Le nouveau pouvoir », dans Écrits corsaires.
“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”
― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Marx describes how capitalism flips life upside down.
He’s saying: the more you deny yourself living, the more you accumulate wealth. The less you enjoy, feel, love, or create, the more money you can save, and in capitalism, that saving becomes your measure of success.
But this comes at a cost. You become poorer as a human being even as you become “richer” in possessions.
This section appears in Marx’s discussion of alienated labour, where he begins outlining one of his core early ideas, the concept of alienation. Marx identifies four dimensions of alienation in capitalist society:
Alienation from the product of labour.
Alienation from the process of labour.
Alienation from one’s “species-being” (human essence).
Alienation from other people.
The quote mainly illustrates the third type: alienation from one’s species-being. According to Marx, human beings are naturally creative and self-expressive; we realize ourselves through productive, conscious activity and social interaction. However, under capitalism, this creative potential is subordinated to the accumulation of capital. People no longer produce freely for their own fulfillment, but instead produce as a means of survival or profit.
In this quote, Marx is showing how capitalist logic encourages self-denial as a way to accumulate wealth. Every human act that expresses life (eating well, socialising, studying, creating) becomes seen as a cost rather than a value. The less one lives and enjoys, the more one can save; and in capitalist terms, this accumulation of savings becomes a sign of success. Marx argues that this inversion, valuing “having” over “being”, is a core symptom of alienation.
This connects to several of Marx’s later ideas. In Capital (1867), he develops the concept of commodity fetishism, where social relationships between people appear as relationships between things (commodities). Objects and money seem to possess value in themselves, detached from the human labour that created them. This process extends the alienation he described in the Manuscripts: the products of human activity gain independence and power over their creators.
The quote also anticipates the concept of reification, later developed by Marxist theorists such as Georg Lukács. Reification refers to the process by which human qualities and relationships are transformed into measurable, object-like forms. Under capitalism, time becomes quantifiable (“billable hours”), creativity becomes a “marketable skill,” and personal identity is shaped by ownership and productivity.
Marx’s argument is not moralistic but structural. He is not simply criticising greed or materialism; he is describing how the economic system itself reorganises human behaviour and consciousness. Capitalism rewards accumulation, so self-restraint and reduced self-expression become economically rational behaviours. In the process, human life becomes a means to sustain the system of capital, rather than the system existing to sustain human life.
The anti-capitalist YouTuber who is proudly anti-AI and resolutely refuses to take sponsorships and comes out with a physical merchandise line is, uh, an interesting phenomenon. "Unique, high quality, made by a real artist that isn't just some shitty YouTube merch" is the exact quote I just heard. And the requisite "made by a real artist without a single AI involved!" But it isn't made by a "real artist," is it? It might be designed by one, but it was made by a factory worker in the Global South!
The moral superiority! To act like it's more moral to buy the labor of Global South workers than read out some sales copy! To decry the crimes of the US government while at the same time leaning on the empire's army to extract that labor! To brag about your connection to a "real artist" and have the artists' names listed up and down your store but never once mentioning the factory workers who actually produced it! To over and over again tell us how AI is so destructive to the environment meanwhile you have no idea where the products you sell come from, what the conditions of the laborers are, or what their environmental practices are. To pretend like you're somehow separate from other YouTube merch while having the exact same material impact.
And sure, like, Western artists or YouTubers or whatever obviously aren't the biggest problem or driving the entire exploitative economy, but their class interests are clearly aligned with the ones who are, and I think we can figure out which of these things has a worse material impact on the world.
