Journal Interrobang's Journal: Do Nothing and Yell About It: Dollar Voting Mechanics 720X
As you may or may not be aware, "dollar voting" is a quaint term for the quasi-political act of spending your money in ways designed to influence the behaviour of corporate or similar entities producing and/or selling various products. It works in two ways, which I will refer to as Opt-Out Dollar Voting and Opt-In Dollar Voting. Most people are aware of the first kind; fewer people know how the second kind works.
Opt-Out Dollar Voting:
Opt-out dollar voting works by diverting money from corporations* (a term I will use from now on for the sake of lexical brevity) by refusing to spend money on products made by corporations whose actions you do not like, support, or agree with.
Opt-In Dollar Voting:
Opt-in dollar voting works the other way: You give your money to corporations which behave in ways you like, as a way of rewarding and encouraging such behaviour. Of the two, opt-in dollar voting is the more effective -- after all, the majority of people buy things, as opposed to abstain.
The Silent Boycott:
So why does The Moral Majority's well-publicized boycott of Delsey paper products in the 80s provoke such a swift and sudden response (all out of proportion to its numerical strength), whereas the masses of Slashdotters, geeks, and media enthusiasts who have gone on RI/MPAA boycott provoke nothing at all? It ain't the numbers, folks (you really think Jerry Falwell commands more legions than computer users?); it's the PR. When organizations like the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, or the Heritage Foundation stage a boycott, they tell people about it. They send press releases. They make phone calls. They fax, e-mail, and tell everybody on their endlessly intermeshed mailing lists. Above all, they let the executives of the offending corporations know exactly what they are doing, and why, en masse.
As I said in my post to the same effect, "The problem with opt-out dollar voting is that unless you specifically make your targets aware that they're losing sales, they don't notice, or attribute it to the right cause." When I wrote the post, I was thinking about Jello Biafra's anecdote about convincing music stores not to Tipper-Sticker their albums, but then I realized that the same principle applies, and has been applied (sometimes with phenomenal success) in other places and ways as well. If every Slashdot poster (and/or a significant proportion of Slashdot readers) sent one letter informing one corporation of something they either have or have not done that has earned/lost them a customer, there'd probably be a big response. (Come on, folks, if Falwell and Dobson can do it, so can we!!)
Gearing Up The PR Machine, or How The Religious Right Can Help Us
There are a few things which the Radical Religious Right learned in the 1980s that we would do well to emulate. First of all, for such a wired bunch, we don't talk well to others (i.e. those not in the geek inner circle). If we want to be truly effective as a political (in the sense of "interpersonal/relational") force, we're going to have to learn to preach to others, not just to the choir, which means:
learning how to communicate our aims to lay people as well as technologically-minded people (e.g. "Why Palladium Is Bad For YOU!");
learning how to communicate effectively with corporate and other power structures (lobbying), which includes developing such fine skills as
writing press releases and learning where to send them;
developing contacts within the media and using them;
learning how to communicate with all different kinds of people (suits, Joe and Jane Average, politicians) in ways they'll understand and respond to -- in the rhetoric biz we call it "code-switching";
and networking, networking, networking -- and not in the hardware sense, either.
We need to make other activists from other areas (anti-poverty, consumer rights, legal, etc.) aware of these "geekly" problems, and explain to them how they affect them and what their significance is to the issues that concern them (which requires spinning ["repurposing"] your concern to their point of view).
Crazy Glue:
Best of all, for most of this stuff, you don't even have to leave your chair (or your can of Coke). You do, however, have to pause that game of Quake for awhile. These sorts of actions require a little bit of invested time, which could otherwise be spent doing some activities which, I'm sure, would provide more immediate gratification, but how long does it really take to write a letter or use your modem to send a fax?
You might be surprised at the results you can get,too. A lactose-intolerant friend of mine and I got a company to notice us by a "petition" we started by e-mail. We just asked everyone we knew to send this company an e-mail asking them to remove lactose from one of their food recipes, provided the e-mail address, and asked them to pass it along. 10 000 e-mails later, the lactose disappeared.
My challenge to you is to write ONE letter. Politely, quietly, and with as much good grace as you can muster, write one letter, praising or damning ONE organization for something good or bad that they did. Dollar voting does work, but you have to tell the polling officers that you voted.
(Special Slashdot Aside: Best of all, this strategy works well for ALL stripes in the political rainbow: Left, Right, Libertarian, Conscientious Objector, et cetera. You're just exercising your right to speak out about the marketplace, right? And we all like that.)
* Corporations: We all know that lots of organizations do this and can be swayed by this type of pressure, but corporations are the "usual suspects" and biggest offenders.
