🫤n Voting With Yr Dollar/Eyeballs
I flipped to the news last night to just “catch up on things” and was smacked in the face with ELECTION NEWS and then also randomly Biden finally decided to forgive some student loans to like clinch the win for the Ds
anyways all that stressed me out and made me feel a bit disconnected. really the races I’m focused on are in Oregon. the gubernatorial race is honestly a bit of a nail biter between
- an established democrat
- an established republican
- a former established democrat who went independent and has her own agenda
also! some v interesting ballot measures to shake up our weird ass city commissioner structure of local government.
and in those times when the news makes me feel like -
I tryyyyy to find something to ground, center, and connect me to something I can do or that is in my sphere of “control”.
which brings me to voting with your dollar/eyeballs - the idea that change can start with you and your pocketbook (or in the case of 👀 where you spend your Screen Time)
there’s much ink spilled and pixels filled about pursuing the illusion of conscious consumption under capitalism but its not like our only two choices are:
- analyze and buy ONLY the upmost ethical choices in the market or DIY/barter
- sink into nihilism and spend money wherever and give it to whatever company
the middle ground I keep coming back to is →
- doing proactive research to find companies (mostly smaller tbh) that reflect my values and add them to Pinboard under my “Shopping” tag
- dropping subscriptions at shitty tech companies when possible (e.g. Amazon Prime, Instacart)
- plugging into Craigslist and other local marketplaces and keeping saved searches for things I’m looking for
- learning how to buy with an eye for quality and how to maintain and fix things I’ve already got
- if a company is shitty but makes good products can I get them on consignment/second hand? cough cough TheRealReal.com
like I sarcastically put in the subtitle - I did this 2y ago and yeah Amazon is still going strong, I wasn’t even A BLIP on their subscription charts, Bezos did not shed 1 bead of sweat over losing my 5 year account.
the engine of the economy at least for tech feels like its accelerated into this hellscape where The Platform is venerated
to be clear…I truly love paying for software, I strongly believe in paying people for their work, what can I say?
What I loathe is when a perfectly fine software with a well-defined use case and simple design gets bloated as the company bolts on feature after feature no one asked for until there’s a Frankenstein of a system that has drifted far far from serving its users and core market.
When checking out to complete a transaction it takes more than 1 or 2 clicks I want to rage throw my machine out the window. Instacart had me click through 5 FUCKING PAGES before being able to confirm my order and process it.
5.
anyways in light of all that I wanted to share a few places where I do spend my hard earned dollars that match this middle ground
🦙 LlamaLife.co → watching this business blossom is a joy. this is a very adhd friendly task tracker - think pomodoro + to do list… follow her business journey on twitter @threehourcoffee
👕 Clothing:
Nooworks → bright patterns, rotating designs from new artists, size up! CA based
Big Bud Press → LA based bright colors, basics, hear the jumpsuit is v room for bigger bodies which is RARE!!
Solstice Intimates → based in my homestate AZ! small shop that does quality work
Elizabeth Whibley → is everything to me
📚 Publishers:
enjoy!
TGIT (can we be happy its thursday? thursday is basically Friday Lite)
CAT TAX
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