The Currency Of Purchase and Attention

 If we want to change the world in the current era, the currency that we have to spend is our purchases and our attention.

To be fair, these are the currency of the modern era as opposed to earlier eras.  The individual vote is largely irrelevant in a society of millions of people.  Violent revolution is unlikely in the age of modern armies.  But the economy - which the world really rather runs on, as you cannot eat votes or revolution - needs a continuing stream of income.  And the society and social culture wants - needs - attention to continue to be relevant and make them work.

I am not speaking of a boycott - these can work, but not in a meaningful way.  A boycott is meant to be a short term or single event to prove a point, a sharp immediate check.  What needs to happen is starvation.

How do you starve a company, a movement, an institution?  Here are a few thoughts from that I am trying to implement:

1)  Curtail spending:  This happens at two levels.  The first is to curtail spending with specific companies or organizations.  The second is to curtail one's spending in general.

This accomplishes three things:  It denies companies and organizations operating capital.   It denies government tax revenue.  And, it gives the individual the power of having the money not spent available - in a world where money is spent as soon as it comes in, the one with the reserve is King.

2) Cut off your attention:  Most online social media outlets make money not from the use directly from the user, but from the businesses that have access to the user - those annoying ads that pop up at unwanted times or scroll through your feed.  By removing your attention from those social media outlets, you (again) deprive them of a source of a revenue as companies are smart enough to realize what works (and ad campaigns that do not result in revenue will be terminated).

The other - more subtle - result that comes as the attention is cut off is that these outlets become less relevant.  No-one who is "in" wants to spend time or energy on a platform or that is failing (think MySpace).

3) Practice the art of thinking for yourself:  Businesses and institutions in the modern world thrive on individuals not thinking for themselves.  They tell us what we should buy, when we should buy it, how we should think and believe.  Thinking for ourselves - conversing among ourselves, actively reading the great old works and thinking on them, and then changing that information into action - pushes back and denies them the influence they desire.

I am aware that what I am discussing is not the speediest path to resolving issues.  It may seem like a set of passive activities (although if you save more, do more thinking, and then do more for yourself, you will be far busier than you think). However, it does engage your mind and will in something a bit more productive than just grumbling about the state of the world.  And it will ready all of us to approach that new world from a position of strength, not weakness.

After all, sometimes victory comes not to the strongest or the powerful but to those who can endure longest.