Freepress is pretty cool, but not that cool. Meaning they have a nice mission, but aren’t any smarter than the Sierra Club (enjoy your global climate change). Anyway, this is clever and important, but i had to hack it out of their site to put it on mine, which I shouldn’t have had to do, and the only “action” is just listbuilding.
Hint to freepress: embrace viral message distro and give activists more to do than fork over their personal information.
Love,
-Outlandish Josh
Real honest online activism; getting every member of congress on-record about escalation is an important step in stopping it.
It’s also a great use of the interweb; a lot more real and effective than circulating petitions which (pssst, here’s a secret) are mainly about listbuilding.
This, on the other hand, actually may matter, so check the link and see if your representatives have gone on the record (mine have) about whether or not they support the Bush/McCain doctrine escalate in Iraq.
For the first time in my young life, I have participated in Black Friday, the day-after-thanksgiving consumer orgy during which many retail businesses go from losing to making money for the year (from red to black, natch). Or, to put it another way, I broke with my traditional observance of Buy Nothing Day.
I don’t really feel any moral qualms. I need a new laptop for my job, and I have a one-day chance to get the one I want (one of Apple’s new MacBooks) for $100 less than normal. I’m high-rollin’ enough to buy a new laptop, yeah, but not enough that I can sneer at a hundo discount, let alone pay Apple’s “black tax” for the darker cased model.
It’s a matter of public record that I detest the consumption-oriented nature of our culture and economy. I believe it trivializes and perverts the human spirit while simultaneously bringing ruination to the natural world and a sentence of servitude to millions (perhaps billions) of would-be Galileos. We must find a better way.
That being said, I don’t think not buying something on a given day — even if it were done by a statistically significant portion of the population — is all that great a tactic. Economically, it’s as impactful as the Don’t Buy Gas For One Day urban legend. If you want to break out of the consumer cycle and trap, it’s got to be a buy less life, not just a day that averages out over the year.
Now, I recognize that part of the value of Buy Nothing Day is as sort of personal act of observance, a keeping of the faith, but I don’t need that. I don’t need to go to Church to feel spiritually and morally whole either.
Another part of the day is activism, which I think is the most valuable aspect. I’ve participated in this before, doing street-theater in Midtown Manhattan and the like. I think tactically it’s a great day to do education and outreach. You’ve got a big crowd to work with. It would be a great day to give things away in public, maybe free coffee or apples or something, along with the message that “buying shit isn’t the end-all be-all of the world.” In any case, it’s a great day to try and inject a viral idea (meme, sucka) into shoppers heads even as they plunge through the frenzy.
This is likely a moment when they’re psychologically more open than usual, hopped up on debt-fueled euphoria, reptilian brain laid bare by the primitive hunter-gatherer aspect of the experience. It is a classic atavistic endeavor, shopping in a large crowd. It touches us deep in the genes; traditionally in moments like these is when a revelation cometh.
I live out in the country now, and I bought my new lappy online, so I’m all talk on this. But it’s something I think about, how to move forward, get into post-consumer culture. It’s one of the many things I would like to work on with my life.
The Polling Place Photo Project (PPPP). Cool. This is the sort of low-cost activity that can roll up to being meaningful over time. I’ll be snapping some shots of the Westhaven Volunteer Fire Station next tues.
