#consumers

Cutting Out the Middleman

I suspect that some readers might interpret this cartoon as a call for Luddism, but mostly it’s a reflection of thoughts I’ve been having lately about out-of-control data harvesting and a growing surveillance state. I find myself daydreaming about how one might go about circumventing the layer of invasive, extractive technology that comes between us and so many mundane tasks these days.

First thing I was wondering is how specific could they be? Like, can they be super popular sub genres of a fandom, or is it just one.

And then that got me wondering how things like the MCU and the marvel comics would work, are they the same consumer, or separate, same goes for multiple movies in a franchise.

(sorry if you haven't thought about this yet, this story just immediately grappled my brain)

I love your enthusiasm to know about the world but your right, I haven’t thought to much about it lol. However I’ll give you a bit of what I have now.

the consumers/readers are sort of just a representation of us. Anywhere. There may be diffrent kinds depending on the enviorment (ex: twitters may be larger or more aggresive due to the nature of Twitter and the fact that it relies more on scrolling and the short attention span of its consumers while for example AO3s are more tame because the content is longer (bc it’s fics) and orginized)

their appearance depends on what kind of consumers they are and their enviorment. Twitters would probably have a consistent one look for the consumers unless they are consumers in the fandom space, then perhaps they look more like Ao3s or Tumblrs consumers which are more unique because— if we’re saying this world has its own “stardust”, those consumers were made from a similar stardust to Ao3 or Tumblr, or one that’s like, more… related? On some level? for lack of a better word. Tumblrs stardust and tumblrs consumers stardust is like how one might think of a dog(tumblr) and a raccoon dog(tumblrs consumers)

like those definitely aren’t the same thing but their both from the family Canidae, which would be the more fandom-y stardust… I suppose.

I really haven’t thought much about this I’m making this up on the spot so all of this is up for change in the future if the lore changes.

As for things like offical comics and shows and whatnot? I’mm…. Not to sure who would like… run that whole thing. This AU was mostly made as a tagteam thing, and at most maybe just about the apphumans, but I didn’t really consider where any super offical content like that would come from and I’m not too interested in trying to explain that lol. Just cuz’ it’s mostly about Tagteam and the apps, and it’s also pretty tiring to come up with lore for this kind of universe bcuz a lot of it is kinda like… everywhere. I made it a back-roomsy world because it wasn’t really suppose to make sense and it wasn’t suppose to get as much love as it did lol.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 25, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 26, 2025

Last week, a poll conducted for Global EV Alliance, made up of electric vehicle driver associations around the world, found that 52% of Americans would avoid buying a Tesla for political reasons.

Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk pumped more than $290 million into electing President Donald J. Trump and supporting the Republicans in 2024. After taking office, Trump named Musk to head the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a group that slashed through government programs and fired civil servants.

In response, protesters organized “Tesla Takedowns,” gathering at Tesla dealerships to urge people not to buy the vehicles. The protests spread internationally. In March, Trump advertised Teslas on the South Lawn of the White House to try to help slumping sales, to no avail.

In September, consumers flexed their muscle over parent company Disney’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show on ABC after pressure from Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr over Kimmel’s comments following the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. About three million subscribers canceled Disney+ in September, while Hulu, which Disney owns, lost 4.1 million. Monthly cancellations previously had averaged 1.2 million and 1.9 million, respectively. While not all of those cancellations could be chalked up to consumer anger over Kimmel’s suspension—Disney subscription prices went up at around the same time—Kimmel was back on the air in five days.

Every day, I am struck by all the ways in which we are reliving the 1890s.

In that era too, consumers organized, using their buying power to affect politics. As the first general secretary of the National Consumers League, Florence Kelley, put it: “To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have responsibility.”

After the Civil War, an economic boom in the North combined with the loss of young men in the war to make education more accessible to young white women. By 1870, girls made up the majority of high school graduates. Fewer than 2% of college-age Americans went to college; women made up 21% of that group. Away from the confines of home, these privileged young women studied social problems and the means of addressing them while they developed friendships with like-minded classmates.

In the mid-1880s, those women began to experiment with using their talents and newfound friendships to repair the nation’s social fabric that had been torn by urbanization and industrialization. To recreate a web of social responsibility in the growing industrial cities, young middle-class women moved into ethnic working-class neighborhoods to minister to the people living there. Jane Addams, who opened Chicago’s Hull-House with Ellen Gates Starr in 1889, rejected the idea of a nation divided by haves and have-nots. She believed that all individuals were fundamentally interconnected. “Hull-House was soberly opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal,” Addams later wrote.

The people who lived in these “settlement houses” dedicated themselves to filing down the sharp edges of industrialization, with its tenement housing, low wages, long hours, child labor, and disease, along with polluted air and water and unregulated food. They turned their education to addressing the immediate problems in front of them, collecting statistics to build a larger picture of the social costs of industrialization, and lobbying government officials and businessmen to improve the condition of workers, especially women and children.

They soon discovered a different lever for change.

In the midterm election of 1890, politicians recognized the power of women to swing the vote for or against a political party. When Republicans got shellacked, their leaders blamed women, who were increasingly the family shoppers, for urging their husbands to vote against the party that had forced through the McKinley Tariff of that year, raising tariff rates and thus raising consumer prices. Thomas Reed, the Republican speaker of the House, complained the party had been defeated by “the Shopping Woman.”

Historian Kathy Peiss notes that between 1885 and 1910, the six women’s magazines known as the “big six” were founded, including Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, and Good Housekeeping. By 1895, advertisements were strategically placed near recipes throughout the magazines, and brand names were scattered through their stories, a recognition of women’s role as shoppers.

Increasingly, reform-minded women were turning to women’s roles as consumers to reshape American industrialism. They came to believe that the “ultimate responsibility” for poor conditions “lodge[s] in the consumer.” Leveraging the power of consumption could force employers to pay higher wages, establish better conditions, and protect workers. In 1891, Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose brother Robert Gould Shaw had commanded Black soldiers in the Massachusetts 54th in the 1863 Second Battle of Fort Wagner, helped to form the Consumer’s League of the City of New York (CLCNY), patterned after a similar English organization, to rally consumers to support better conditions for the workers who made the goods they bought.

In 1899, Lowell and Jane Addams founded the National Consumers League, with Florence Kelley at its head. The organization worked to combat child labor and poor working conditions and, in an era when milk was commonly adulterated with chalk and formaldehyde and candies were decorated with lead paint, lobbied for government regulation of food and drugs.

Today, the relationship between consumption and reform has taken on heightened meaning after the Tesla and the Disney boycotts. The day after Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday shopping season, and like their predecessors of a century ago, reformers are focusing on consumers’ power to push back on the policies of the Trump administration, launching a campaign they call “We Ain’t Buying It.” “We aren’t just consumers; we’re community builders,” their website says. “We’re driving the change we want to see, and demanding respect.”

As Joy-Ann Reid put it in an Instagram video: “Dear retailers who’ve decided you don’t like diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you really love ICE and you have no problem with them busting into your establishments to drag people away: Here’s the thing. We ain’t buying it. I mean, for real, for real, we ain’t buyin’ it.”

She explained: “We’re gonna spend our money with businesses who actually respect our dollars, respect our communities, and respect our diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are going to buy from people who respect immigrants, who respect immigrants’ rights, and respect freedom and liberty. We are going to buy from establishments that respect our right to vote and our right to live in a free society. And if you ain’t that, we ain’t buying it.”

“Let’s show them our power,” she told listeners. “Let’s show them what we can do together.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Hi folks,

I was wondering if anyone over the age of 18 would be able to answer the following questionnaire of how fandoms became so powerful. it would be really great if yous participated as it counts as primary research for my dissertation :)))