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No-Buy-Friday sends a powerful message to them & us! We must own our power to Buynott! [1]
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Date: 2025-03-20
No-Buy-Friday sends a powerful message to them & us! We must own our power to Buynott!
Recently, a friend let me know that Robert Reich had written positively about the impact of No-Buy-Friday.
Unfortunately, before I was provided with the link, it had disappeared from his Facebook thread, and a search for it elsewhere turned up nothing.
While these days this ‘missing in action’ can trigger paranoia, it might also provide a bit of ‘cold comfort’ if taken as a sign that those controlling things are feeling anxiety from the dropping profits due to ‘buynotts’.
However, it is always wise to stick with what we know and avoid the entanglement of speculation.
I’ve come to prefer the term ‘buynott’, which though it references ‘boycott’, is a more generalized label encompassing a broader take on responsible consumerism. As words can matter, it embodies the potential to segway consumer thinking from ‘protest’ to permanent lifestyle change.
While ‘boycott’ has the connotation of being retaliatory, buynotts are by their nature, more of a corrective act, suggesting the capacity for use in adjusting our economic model to embrace equity and sustainable.
Although this runs against the desires of much of the current financial world, it is actually to their benefit long term, as it can make our bloated novelty-obsessed markets less volatile. More evenly distributed wealth can depolarize the tension between the haves and the have nots, which is currently one of the many forces ripping our world apart.
Most importantly, ‘buynott’ defines the direction we need to embrace for aggressively ramping down our consumption for the sake of the environment.
In the past, boycotts proved to be an effective means for having grievances heard by a power structure that can act adversely toward other more conspicuous forms of dissent. These provide a clear target for ‘establishment order’ to react negatively against, inciting it to deploy surveillance, aggression and intimidation. On the other hand, the dispersed nature of buynotts provides no such focal point, other than their effect.
Strategically controlling our buying choices affords us a stealth approach for getting our ‘lords’ to reconsider their financial ‘welfare’ without threatening our fundamental ‘wellbeing’.
While this does involve sacrifice on our part, in the long-term it should prove to be well worth it.
In a world where AI and algorithms are encroaching daily on our right to privacy, trimming personal consumption remains a private and mostly anonymous act.
While AI does have the capability of determining that you spent no money during No-Buy-Friday, it has little means of sorting out who among millions simply did not make purchases that day, for whatever reason.
This is a reasonably failsafe form of ‘safety in numbers’ — for now. www.vox.com/...
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As it always takes movements like this time to achieve liftoff, with that being relative to the weight of the “cargo” and ‘wind resistance’, what little information has surfaced to help measure its initial effectiveness, appears reassuring, even if slight.
Critical mass is arrived at through commitment, determination and patience — that last being of great value as the others take time to build — and new habits time to take hold.
Economic health and stability is ultimately beneficial for everyone, although those focused on short term gain have lost sight of that. Their greed fueled agenda has backed them into a corner, and their road out is a mirage cast by the faulty optics of their egos. They have little time to prosper in such a scenario and brut-force is powerless to change this fact. They would do well to listen to us, but prefer their own counsel, as it does not obstruct them.
Having long dealt with resistance from many DK readers to embrace meaningful climate pro-action, I harbor deep concern that the lesson we might learn first hand from the act of controlling consumption, could either go unrecognized or ignored. For many life is like a pathway of stepping stones and they see few connections as they transverse it, leaving the trail behind to go forward guideless.
Yet experience, when processed as interconnected, rather than isolated, bears gifts. If we accept these, they will provide us with life-saving perspective we may otherwise lack.
Witnessing the results of this No-Buy-Fridays, whether as participants or onlookers, will hopefully reveal the potential for control we’ve possessed all along as consumers. This we long ago abdicated — yet by simply taking conscious command of our role in the ‘marketplace’ and employing it to serve a better end-result, we take it back.
More importantly, if we don’t get a handle on our runway obsessive compulsive consumption, ASAP, we’re fucked. No-Buy-Fridays set us in that direction, toward an important goal that by these means can help to resolve one exponentially greater.
For now, those of us on the front lines continue to be undermined by our some of our own troops, who not only remain insufficiently committed, but in many ways, oblivious to the full enormity of the danger we face.
We are Gaia’s ‘poor’ heirs.
If No-Buy-Friday shows us that we can own the power of ‘Buynott’, we might just “inherit the earth” — with a future reshaped by fiscal responsibility.
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