ITHACA and NYC! I'm heading your way for a zillion events from Sept 11-17. Here's a list of open-to-all CORNELL activities including two major keynotes; a movie night with dinner and discussion; and a public event at CORNELL TECH in NYC. I'm also appearing TODAY (Sept 13) at AUTUMN LEAVES BOOKS. And I'll be at the BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL on Sept 21.

There's just TWO DAYS LEFT in the Enshittification Kickstarter, where you can pre-order the audiobook, ebook and hardcover of my next book! Help me do AN END RUN around the AMAZON/AUDIBLE AUDIOBOOK MONOPOLY and DISENSHITTIFY your audiobook experience in the process.

You cannot vote with your wallet. Or rather, you can, but you will lose that vote. Wallet-votes always go to the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that is not you.

Margaret Thatcher tried to get us to believe that "there is no such thing as society." She wanted everyday people to abandon the idea of having a shared destiny, to throw away any notion of solidarity as an answer to social problems. Despite the fact that Thatcher's own backers happily formed cartels and cabals, from the Mount Pellerin Society to the Heritage Foundation, Thatcher insisted that everyday people should fight their battles alone.

If you want higher wages, don't join a union – just go demand a higher wage from your boss. If you want lower rents, don't demand rent controls, just petition your landlord for a discount. If none of this stuff works (this stuff rarely works), then you are out of luck. "The market" exists to do "price discovery" and you've just discovered the price of your labor (less than you need to survive) and the cost of your home (more than you can afford). You voted with your wallet, and you lost. As Thatcher was fond of saying, "there is no alternative."

This has been our framework for change for the past 50 years. It's like we've had a collective lobotomy and have forgotten the way that actual change comes about. Change happens when solidaristic groups of everyday people – unions, political movements – directly confront politicians and power-brokers and demand change. Your boss won't equitably share the fruits of your labor unless they fear that all the workers on the jobsite will shut down the shop. Your politicians won't do the bidding of everyday people – who can't shower them in cash – unless they fear that they will have their offices blockaded, their homes picketed, and their seats primaried.

Rather than demanding this kind of change, we're supposed to vote with our wallets, making a fetish out of our personal consumption choices and scolding others as "lazy" or "cheap" if they don't quit Facebook or stop shopping at Walmart. This isn't just ineffective, it's counterproductive. Refusing to form solidaristic bonds with people suffering in the same way as you because they buy things you disapprove of means that you can't attain the solidarity needed to make the real change you're seeking.

Shopping harder is no way to save the planet or your neighbors. Individual actions do not provoke systemic change. For that, we need collective action. Join your local tenants' union, your local DSA chapter, your local Electronic Frontier Alliance group:

https://efa.eff.org/allies

And also! Make consumption choices that improve your life and the lives of people you love. Support your local bookstore, buy online from libro.fm and bookshop.org – not because this will break Amazon's monopoly power (for that we will need unionization, antitrust, and tax enforcement), but because when you shop at those stores, you make a difference to the lives of the people who operate those stores, who pay decent wages and don't maim their warehouse workers.

It means treating social aspects of commodities as if they're inherent in them, e.g. when we say "a fur coat is worth $5000"

« Le nouveau pouvoir consumériste et permissif a utilisé nos conquêtes mentales de sécularistes, d’illuministes et de rationalistes pour construire son échafaudage de faux sécularisme, de faux éclaircissement, de fausse rationalité. […] Il a porté à sa limite maximale sa seule sacralité possible : la sacralité de la consommation comme rite et, naturellement, de la marchandise comme fétiche. »

“The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.”

― Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Marx describes how capitalism flips life upside down. He’s saying: the more you deny yourself living, the more you accumulate wealth. The less you enjoy, feel, love, or create, the more money you can save, and in capitalism, that saving becomes your measure of success.

But this comes at a cost. You become poorer as a human being even as you become “richer” in possessions.

This section appears in Marx’s discussion of alienated labour, where he begins outlining one of his core early ideas, the concept of alienation. Marx identifies four dimensions of alienation in capitalist society:

Alienation from the product of labour.

Alienation from the process of labour.

Alienation from one’s “species-being” (human essence).

Alienation from other people.

The quote mainly illustrates the third type: alienation from one’s species-being. According to Marx, human beings are naturally creative and self-expressive; we realize ourselves through productive, conscious activity and social interaction. However, under capitalism, this creative potential is subordinated to the accumulation of capital. People no longer produce freely for their own fulfillment, but instead produce as a means of survival or profit.

In this quote, Marx is showing how capitalist logic encourages self-denial as a way to accumulate wealth. Every human act that expresses life (eating well, socialising, studying, creating) becomes seen as a cost rather than a value. The less one lives and enjoys, the more one can save; and in capitalist terms, this accumulation of savings becomes a sign of success. Marx argues that this inversion, valuing “having” over “being”, is a core symptom of alienation.

This connects to several of Marx’s later ideas. In Capital (1867), he develops the concept of commodity fetishism, where social relationships between people appear as relationships between things (commodities). Objects and money seem to possess value in themselves, detached from the human labour that created them. This process extends the alienation he described in the Manuscripts: the products of human activity gain independence and power over their creators.

The quote also anticipates the concept of reification, later developed by Marxist theorists such as Georg Lukács. Reification refers to the process by which human qualities and relationships are transformed into measurable, object-like forms. Under capitalism, time becomes quantifiable (“billable hours”), creativity becomes a “marketable skill,” and personal identity is shaped by ownership and productivity.

The moral superiority! To act like it's more moral to buy the labor of Global South workers than read out some sales copy! To decry the crimes of the US government while at the same time leaning on the empire's army to extract that labor! To brag about your connection to a "real artist" and have the artists' names listed up and down your store but never once mentioning the factory workers who actually produced it! To over and over again tell us how AI is so destructive to the environment meanwhile you have no idea where the products you sell come from, what the conditions of the laborers are, or what their environmental practices are. To pretend like you're somehow separate from other YouTube merch while having the exact same material impact.