The Twilight of Ethical Consumerism

I was motivated to post this because of some of the discussion occurring about the Google monopoly case. A recurring theme seems to be that we just need to rely on individual marketplace decisions to deal with Google and that a large enough plurality of people should stop using google search if we really think it is a problem.

I thought that this article focuses the objection I'd felt to that sort of solution, namely that basically cedes our power for collective action and the use of governmental and legal remedies in favor of an essentially individual effort against the colossal collective power of large corporations. I think the article does a service is pointing out that the trend toward "ethical consumption" has basically just been a decades long stall tactic that has given large corporations and consumerism a pass on materially improving in any way.

In the same way that upper-middle class people buying expensive clothes has done exactly nothing for the working conditions of Bangladeshi workers, a few of us more technically savvy professionals using Firefox and Fastmail is going to do nothing to loosen Google's grip on the internet.