This post is somewhat inspired by a recent post in this same community called “Is anyone else having trouble giving up Reddit due to content?”
I imagine “Reddit” will be a common answer. (And it’s one of my answers.)
Another of my answers is “Hasbro.” First Wizards of the Coast (a Hasbro subsidiary) tried to revoke an irrevokable license and screw over basically all 3rd-party publishers of D&D content, then they sent literal mercinaries to threaten one of their customers over an order mixup that wasn’t even the customer’s fault. D&D: Honor Among Thieves and the latest Transformers look really good, but those are within the scope of my boycott, so I won’t be seeing those any time soon.
Third, Microsoft. (Apple too, but then I’ve never bought any Apple devices in my life, so it hardly qualifies as a boycott.) Just because of their penchant for using devices I own against me in every way they can imagine. And for really predatory business practices.
One boycott that I’ve ended was a boycott of Nintendo. I was pissed that they started marketing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (though it didn’t have a name at the time) before the WiiU came out, prompting me to be an early adopter of the WiiU, and then when they actually released BotW, they dual-released it on WiiU and Switch. I slightly eased my boycott when the unpatchable Fusee Gilee vulnerability for the first batch of Switches was discovered. I wanted to get one of the ones I could hack and run homebrew on before they came out with a model that lacked the vulnerability.
Nestlé, wherever I can. They are a particularly evil multinational corporation.
Also won’t work for companies that profit on human misery.
🤔 So they primarily make chocolate and bottled water, right?
What if someone else came along and set up a company that sold chocolate and bottled water obtained a lot more ethically. How would you all feel about that?
Better. There are plenty of companies that aren’t Nestle that provide both I’m sure.
But Nestle’s tentacles are into many more products than just those two, which makes them challenging to ignore 100%. From Wikipedia:
Nestlé owns over 2000 brands in 186 countries
🤔🤔🤔
I imagine a world where bottled water is sold in chilled aluminum bottles instead of shitty, non-reuseable plastic. That is bottled from desalinated seawater whose excess brine is flash-boiled and the sea salt sold instead of ripped off from innocent cities’ aquifers.
I imagine a world where chocolate is primarily grown either in the southern U.S., like Louisiana and Florida, where workers would have at least some rudimentary labor protection instead of African and South American countries whose people are treated like chattel slaves, or greenhouses.
I imagine a world like this, and the profits it could bear. And I say, yes, internets, let’s do this