Shopping Isn’t a Strategy

An Instagram post of mine about ICE’s top corporate collaborators went viral a few weeks ago. The fact that it got over four million views and over 35,000 shares suggests that people are starting to grasp the central role private businesses play in enabling Trump’s paramilitary thugs. But I was puzzled and a bit frustrated by most people’s reactions. I explicitly underscored that I wasn’t making yet another online-based call for individuals to stop shopping at bad companies:

We don’t need vague calls to stop shopping at these places or one-off rallies — we need sit-ins, pressure campaigns, *organized* boycotts, employee and consumer petitions, sickouts, demands from elected officials, and non-violent disruption to force these companies to immediately break from ICE.

Yet, to my surprise, almost every reply treated my post as a push for individual consumption changes. Here’s a representative sample of comments:

• Sigh. I already boycott Home Depot, and to see Lowe’s on this list makes me sad. I don’t have a local hardware store to choose from. 😢

• I cancelled Prime last summer. I promise you’ll save money and be fine 🙏🏼

• Good luck avoiding business with Amazon.

Why was a call for collective organized action almost universally seen as a manifesto for personal shopping advice? Part of the answer may just be that people don’t read Instagram captions. But there’s also something deeper going on: individualism and atomization pervade our culture, and even action to change the world can, by many people, only be imagined as individual consumption choices rather than taking action together with other people.

This atomization is a relatively new phenomenon. America used to be a country full of clubs, labor unions, churches, neighborhood associations, and bowling leagues. But now, as sociologist Robert Putnam famously put it, we are “bowling alone.”

Without strong membership organizations in our daily lives, and with social media exacerbating our isolation, political consumption has become fundamentally personal rather than collective. Consider the influential quote from Anna Lappé to Oprah Magazine two decades ago: “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”

Consumer choices can be powerful. But it is misleading to suggest that consumption decisions by isolated individuals matter that much. To effectively use your purchasing power to combat corporate injustices such as ICE’s private-sector collaboration, you need to join an organized effort. Like bowling, boycotting is best done ...