I get the boycotts for Target, Walmart, and Amazon for rolling back their DEI programs and bowing to Trump. What companies are treating employees fair or standing up for human decency? Seems like Costco gets brought up?
Most things I need I can get from my local grocery store which seems pretty non evil but where do you go if you need like a new keyboard?
Costco
Gog
Newman’s Own. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newman’s_Own
If there’s a place that you just can’t stomach to shop because of how they treat their employees then I highly recommend you do not shop there. I was avoiding Walmart before avoiding Walmart was cool.
However…
Boycotts only really work when organized, towards an end goal. What was Walmart doing before, what is it doing now, what do we want it to do, and who’s coordinating? That’s how you change corporate policy through boycott.
If certain DEI policies are important enough to you to boycott when a company removes them then that’s fine. I guess it’s also worth asking what it is about any given program that makes it good enough for not, which companies should or shouldn’t have it, why, and all that.
Bandcamp, because it is the best place for independent music and there is nothing close to it.
Steam, because they started with non-horrible DRM (compared to other options) and now they are one of the companies that help Linux succeed for gaming (Steam Deck is just a Linux computer with controllers attached, and Proton is awesome for running Windows games on Linux).
Steam, because they started with non-horrible DRM (compared to other options)
Au contraire, Steam was LOATHED back in the day, they were the first to force you to install a store just to play a single game.
For other games, you needed to enter a CD key on install (which keygens helped with) and then you needed the CD itself in the drive (which cracks helped with). Steam started the trend of online DRM in games, which was then adopted by others who made even more draconian offerings (I think for Spore you could only get 3 hardware IDs registered?)
Ah good point, totally forgot the early times, I was too young back then I guess. Okay then the impact of Steam is kind of mixed then. From practical experience it is more up to the game developers to enforce or not enforce it and often in practice especially indie games are DRM free or it is easy to circumvent. Steam at least does not install some surveillance rootkit on your system. And I’d claim that it plays about the same role in the indie game ecosystem as Bandcamp plays for music and GitHub plays for open source software, at least that is my impression.
And contra Bandcamp is of course, they recently sold out i.e. got bought by some larger fish with totally different but music legal stuff related business and Bandcamp lost a lot of employees. But at least for now I don’t see drastic enshittification ot Bandcamp yet.
I guess ultimately there is no perfect saint company, they are entities that must generate profit, and only sometimes it really means making customers happy, but more often than not it doesn’t - that’s just capitalism, how it works everywhere.
I’m not sure if it’s still true, but I seem to recall SC Johnson having profits as the lowest of their corporate objectives with higher ones being things like improving people’s lives and bringing value to the world.
Granted, it’s all just text, and times change, but I’d be curious to know if there’s any truth to it, especially today.
You mean the fuckers who gave kids cancer with talcom powder and have done everything in their power to not pay damages?
Yeah. Fuck. That.
Nope. That’s Johnson & Johnson. Different company.
Bruh if my company was named SC Johnson after what Johnson and Johnson has been up to I’d change my company name to avoid what dumb asses like me just assumed.
I believe you mean Johnson & Johnson, which is a different company.
No idea about the morals of SC Johnson, I hadn’t heard of them till now, but have used a product or 2.
I’d say Steam.
Only as long as Gabe Newell runs it. After that it will enshittify like any other company that needs to make profits.
Private equity is salivating over the idea of
running his carefully built brand into the groundmaximizing value extraction from steam.The current meta here is that things like brand loyalty and reputation are not really worth preserving, and are only as good as whatever short-term gains you can squeeze out of them.
Supposedly gaben has threatened to release code in a death switch that would make every steam user able to play their games without phoning home.
I know that I would never buy another game if steam went down the toilet. Piracy was fun when I was a kid, and I bet it could be fun again.
Let’s hope musket doesn’t buy it.
This Steam?
King Arthur Flour!
Dr Bronners soap has specifically reaffirmed their DEI policies since Trump’s reelection, and they have a 5-to-1 cap on the top-level exec’s salaries compared to their lowest paid retirement-vested employees. They seem to walk the walk from what I’ve seen and read.
The only one that comes directly to mind is Valve.
Besides that I’m not going to follow this narrative too much of finding “the good ones”.
I don’t really believe in ethical consumption, but Penzys spices are awesome! They’re such troll too, I love it!
Costco
It should be noted that they are actively trying to bust their workers union so maybe boycott them when your local asks you to.
NetBSD, Signal Foundation, other FOSS orgs
ACAB: All Corporations Are Bastards. Corporations are not your friends. Brands aren’t your friends.
Stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yup. Everyone has to buy something. The point is to direct people to do that at places that are LES evil rather than giving in and saying “nothing matters I guess I’ll just do whatever.” Defeatism is collaboration.
I used to not vote because all politicians are evil. Someone pointed out that if everyone picks the lesser of two evils then things are going to get less evil. I’ve voted every opportunity since.
Corporations are just legal structure organizing people together to do something. The soup kitchen, local artisan, person cutting hair out of their house, they all set up an LLC to operate under. They didn’t instantly become evil.
But if I need to buy a blender, plywood, or underwear (my shopping list this weekend), I’m going to have to buy it from a corporation. If I could buy it from a less evil corp then hopefully I make things less evil.
One way to fight the corporations is to stop worshipping at the altar of blind consumerism, and embrace the concept of “Reuse, Repair, Recycle.”
Stop buying stuff you dont need. Keep using what you have, sell/buy used items, repair things, and if it cant be fixed or repurposed, then recycle it.
Repairing things is a big one. Often repairs are remarkably easy. My wife has been ready to replace numerous appliances over the years, and I figured it was worth taking a shot at fixing it, if I can save a few hundred bucks, and successfully extended the life by years.
Very satisfying, and it forces your wife to rethink her conclusion that you are an incompetent dolt.
Sorry. My underwear is beyond repair
I hear some people enjoy that particular fashion statement.
lol. Intimates are poorly constructed, but we also ask a lot of them. In all seriousness though, I have repaired undies and bras and gotten another 6 months to a year out of them.
Voting for lesser evil just slows down the evil, it doesn’t reverse it. It’s still going in the wrong direction.
If people would vote for good that’d be a choice. Consistently voting for “less evil” works towards that goal - having good candidates.
If “more evil” candidates keep winning, what message does that send to candidates?
Yeah. Lots of people didn’t vote because we had two evils. The greater evil won…
You cant run a candidate who supports a far right wing genocide from the left and expect to win. Its really that simple. It’ll probably be that simple next time as well.
What we need is Russian and israeli influence kept out of the US government with no exceptions. Zionist influence on the dems is why Harris lost, not some ‘voters dont understand that voting for evil is just necesssary’ like you pretend. Stop telling the voters they need to be ok with war crimes. Thats cowardly BS. I’ll never be OK with murder and you shouldnt ever be either.
Russia and Israel do not control the US Empire. Both have a minor fraction of the power and wealth of the US, it is not that easy to influence US policy. The US’s relations with other countries are dominated by the US.
The US props up Israel not because the US is controlled by Israel, but because Israel secures the US’s interests in the Middle East via massive terror campaigns.
pointed out that if everyone picks the lesser of two evils then things are going to get less evil
That’s just absolutely not how it works even if you take it at face value. Both evils can be greater than the one rn, that has absolutely no bearing on which one is “lesser” among them.
Repeal of Citizens United and change that.
All Corporations Are Bastards, in a four hundred year unbroken chain going all the way back to the English East India Company and Dutch East India Company, and even before those.
I get that, but anarchy doesn’t manufacture shower tiles and I need to buy some.
I’m not saying we should boycott every corporation. I’m saying it’s a fool’s errand because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
And we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A poke with a stick isn’t good but it’s sure as shit better then a pistol whipping.
We’re not trying to boycott EVERY corporations. We’re voting with our wallets for the lesser evil the same way we vote at the ballots for the lesser evil.
If the extent of your participation in politics is choosing between evils, and not trying to actually achieve good, then you’re accepting evil as eternal and unchangeable. It is much more important to focus on organizing, and thus working towards good.
Dropout TV
