TL;DR
Scott Galloway's economic strike targets the things we use, but it should target the things that use us.
Consumer spending at least involves an exchange of value, while the attention economy just takes.
Closing the app is more radical than closing your wallet, but I don’t know if any of us can do it.
My favorite professor-slash-podcaster called for an "economic strike" last week. He's calling it Resist and Unsubscribe, and it's picking up steam. Perhaps it's reached your respective feeds.
His pitch: consumer spending drives 70-80% of GDP, so if enough Americans close their wallets to a specific set of big tech companies, markets will soften, confidence will erode, and political pressure will build. Business leaders will call their friends in Washington and then… something will happen.
That last part remains genuinely unclear. The causal chain gets fuzzy right when it matters most. Capitalism's machinery will seize up and then… victory?
I spent a few days thinking about this. Today I bought a smart lamp on Amazon.
I'm really sorry.
The Seduction of Opting Out
I can appreciate why the idea of an economic strike is seductive. It's hard not to feel utterly impotent these days. The desire to do something, anything, is real.
As Galloway likes to say: in a capitalist society, the most radical thing you can do is opt out.
Americans do have leverage. Our consumers are the engine of the global economy. If we collectively stop spending, industries should feel it within weeks. Earnings calls would turn somber, stock prices would wobble, etc.
The idea that a single ugly earnings call would trigger a moral awakening from this crew strains credulity.
Galloway has built a career translating market dynamics for a mainstream audience. When he argues that consumer restraint could inflict real economic pain, he's probably right about the mechanism.
But he’s woefully wrong about us.
Medium and Message
It’s noteworthy that one of the loudest voices demanding an economic strike is funded by the economy he wants to strike.
Galloway's podcasts and newsletters run ads for enterprise software, financial services, consumer tech. Every week, his audience digests contrarian takes while algorithms serve us promotions for the exact products he wants us to boycott. The sponsors writing his checks are the corporations he's targeting.
Galloway’s list of suggested products to stop buying from.
On the strike's website, Galloway writes: "Hey, we'd boycott Instagram too if we could, but we need it to get this message to you."
He can't opt out either! The system won't permit it, even for its most prominent critics.
Hypocrisy aside, this speaks to something more structural. Any strike has to be organized somewhere and publicized somehow. Debated, refined, spread across networks until enough people hear about it to participate.
And that happens online, on Instagram and Twitter. Podcasts distributed through platforms that track every click and newsletters that feed engagement metrics to advertising algorithms. The very infrastructure that profits from our attention.
We're trying to dismantle a system using the system's own tools.
In Defense of Buying
As discussed, I love buying things.
I love ordering an obscure kitchen gadget at 11pm and finding it on my doorstep before breakfast. I love streaming libraries so vast I'll die before I finish them. I love the abundance of a modern grocery store, the simple miracle of strawberries in January.
And yes, I'm aware this abundance has a cost. The strawberries in January exist because someone picked them for wages I'd never accept. The overnight delivery works because someone drove through the night. The system that makes my life convenient makes other lives harder.
But Galloway's strike doesn't address that inequality. He's asking people to be slightly less comfortable for a month, then return to normal. Like the economic equivalent of Dry January, or a juice cleanse. Briefly virtuous, ultimately meaningless, mostly performed for the benefit of an audience.
More importantly, it targets the wrong thing.
Consumer spending, for all its excess, involves an exchange. I hand over money. I receive goods or services. Something of value changes hands.
The attention economy operates differently.
When I spend three hours scrolling, what do I receive? My attention gets harvested and my emotions get manipulated. I pay with hours I'll never recover, and in return I get a vague sense of dread and a stomachful of lies.
Consumption gives me a very cool WiFi-enabled lamp while attention gives me cortisol.
If we're serious about reclaiming agency, about opting out of systems that exploit us, why start with the part that actually delivers value?
Cost-Benefit
The strike talk has me thinking about which products and platforms I'd actually abandon.
Instagram? Gladly.
Reddit and LinkedIn? Mildly annoying, but probably would be good for me.
Netflix and HBO? I’ll survive.
Amazon and Whole Foods? More than an inconvenience.
Uber and DoorDash? So I'm supposed to stay stranded in my apartment? Starving?
OpenAI? My team would not appreciate my productivity dropping 90%.
Apple? Are you insane?
The products I'd happily boycott are the ones I'm already trying to quit. Social media, doomscrolling, the algorithmic rage machine. Abandoning them wouldn't even have to be a sacrifice, it's self-improvement with a political alibi.
The products that actually deliver value, the ones woven into how I work, eat, move, and live, are hard to imagine life without. I, along with most Americans, will negotiate with myself until the "sacrifice" becomes painless.
Galloway's strike targets the things we genuinely use while ignoring the things that use us.
Attention Strike
An attention boycott would be easier to sustain, would actually benefit the participants, and would starve the platforms profiting most from our engagement.
But nobody's organizing that strike. Because you can't organize it without the platforms you'd be striking against. The coordination problem is unsolvable by design.
Which means attention reclamation can't be collective action. It has to be individual defection. One person at a time, choosing to stop feeding algorithms the outrage they're designed to provoke. Not so much as a protest, but as a personal reclamation.
I'm more willing to try that, and I suspect you might be too.
Just Log Off
So here we are, trapped in a system we built, using tools we can't abandon, critiquing the very infrastructure that carries our critique.
Galloway wants an economic strike to pressure the federal government. What he'll get is more content. More likes, more comments, more attention harvested and sold.
I reject that our most radical opt-out is refusing to buy. Instead, it is refusing to engage with the outrage machine at all.
To be honest, I don't know if I can pull that off. The irony of writing 1,500 words about attention extraction while asking for yours is not lost on me.
But I’m keeping my lamp!!
Up and to the right.