I feel like in the past ten years, boycotting has stopped being a tool for forcing action on specific policies and become a form of harassment and monastic self-denial. Less “I will not be giving my money to you until you improve these specific conditions” and more “don’t touch the contaminated thing, lest you also become contaminated.”
yeah
I mean personally i find it really striking how this happens in fandom/entertainment
with every individual artist/writer/etc. who does something sufficiently unacceptable
In ways that are different from how it’s applied to corporations that also do unacceptable things, on much bigger scale, doing far more harm than any one individual could do
individual level it’s “Pirating their work isn’t enough. don’t interact with it at all. Not even fanworks or discussion. Every time you even talk about the material, it benefits the Enemy by keeping them relevant. Except of course when I talk about how evil they are. which I do in every other post, often in undescribed screenshots so you’re forced to see it even if you filtered every possible keyword. The important thing is how clear I’m making it that I am not contaminated.”
But with a big corporation, the most they’ll ever say is “don’t pay money to see that specific movie in theaters.” (“the other ones are ok! even though they all funnel money into the same company. See, that one’s got good people working on it. Sure they’re probably not being paid and they’re trapped in this project in the most abusive ways, but the point is, they aren’t the enemy so you aren’t dirty by touching their work.”)
It’s a combination of “cleanse yourself of the feeling of contamination,” and that other big fallacy (“a problem is not worth fighting if it would be slow and boring work to change a system. Only if it’s the fault of specific individual people we can hurt or kill, which will fix the problem.”)