Over the past decade plus of extreme political polarization (not originated by, though dramatically worsened through, Donald Trump), boycotts have been deployed by activists on both ends of the political spectrum to mixed results. Turns out it is really hard to get enough Americans to give up convenience in acquiring the real-world products they need such that you can make a meaningful political statement to the intended recipient.
This month, however, podcast host, author, and marketing professor Scott Galloway has been waging a unique campaign to strike back in the face of ICE’s lawless operations. Called Resist and Unsubscribe, Galloway’s initiative “targets tech and AI companies and inflicts maximum damage with minimum impact on consumers.”
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Resist and Unsubscribe is premised on the idea that the president is unfazed by citizen outrage, the courts, or the media. Rather, Trump responds to only one thing: the market.
Galloway correctly recognizes that boycotting, say, certain retailers is unlikely to have a significant enough effect on the broader stock market to move the president. On the other hand, seven tech companies alone account for more than a third of the S&P 500 index, many of them propped up by massive spending on AI of late.
Hurting the bottom line of the largest tech firms, as well as the sycophantic CEOs running them in accordance with Trump’s whims, would actually be noticed. Tech companies also have the unique flaw (or in this case, advantage) of often being highly reliant on speculative measures of future potential revenues, like number of subscribers, as opposed to companies selling tangible goods that are valued on more established metrics. Forgoing a few of many available subscriptions is also a relatively easy sacrifice to ask of the individual consumer.
All this means that consumers like ourselves can have a much bigger influence on market capitalization by canceling Amazon Prime than we can by skipping a few trips to Target. It also means that the market is uniquely vulnerable to consumers who are willing to shun AI products.
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The first step, according to Galloway, is unsubscribing from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude (if you are among these platforms’ few paying users). The next line of attack consists of unsubscribing from other tech services provided by companies that have “outsized influence over the national economy and our president” — including the services offered by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Paramount+, Meta, Uber, Netflix, and Twitter (X). Lastly, Galloway identifies a number of consumer-facing companies as “active enablers of ICE” which may not be susceptible to the standard tech industry subscription revenue multiplier of 10x in calculating the implied market capitalization effect, but are, nonetheless, also obviously worth avoiding (I will provide a link directly to Galloway’s website in the final paragraph so you can easily access the full list of companies along with convenient “unsubscribe” links).
Well, I’m a little late to this party. I also don’t have many services that I can unsubscribe from to begin with (two, to be precise). Nevertheless, in the spirit of solidarity, I just jettisoned 50% of my subscriptions. Goodbye Netflix, and, hopefully, hello to a future where we all have something more concrete to look forward to than the next season of “3 Body Problem.”
The Resist and Unsubscribe campaign runs (at least) through the end of February. If this is the first you’re hearing of it, let me be the first to welcome you aboard. I have friends everywhere (if you need something to watch now that you’ve completed your unsubscribing mission, check out “Andor” on Disney+, that one’s not on Galloway’s list). As to whether or not this is working, well, all I can say for now is that as of market close on February 24, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 are definitely down for the month.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].