Most boycotts these days seem to have little effect.
After all, the eponymous event was a 'powerless local many' versus the 'locally powerful few', rather than the 'small socially conscious' vs the 'powerful, global few' which is today's version. The Peoples Republic of China, for instance, may be a festering hell, but we can't convince enough people to stop purchasing their trade goods to actually make an impact.*
At best, a small percentage of our population will function as Conscientious Objectors, and in the end have as little impact as Conscientious Objectors ever have.
So lets consider a possible leverage.
Trade goods are not bought and sold overnight. The backbone of global trade is the humble steel containers, stacked on cargo ships crawling across the oceans: 5152 vessels devoted to containers alone. (Another 16,000 'general cargo' ships are also registered.)
The number of containers isn't really tracked, but its something on the order of 20,000,000 units at any time.
To fill, move and unload these containers take time.
The ocean crossing (Hong Kong to North America) takes about 20 days. Add five days at each side to clear customs and get off the docks. Another couple of days in transit to warehouse, and then an unknown warehouse period until it reaches the actual retail shelves.
The delay is interesting, because this means product is ordered for sales in the future. One to three months, depending on the product.
Feedback is an really cool thing, especially when its being manipulated. In this case, we want negative feedback. The trick is to embargo goods briefly, in short periods, at a frequency that interferes with the purchase-ship-sell-next purchase based on sales loop.
I am calling this the 90-Day Punch.
Stop buying a product for 90 days. That is not too hard. Anybody can defer the pleasure of consumption for a little while.
Then relax for a month or so. Don't stockpile, but enjoy your purchasing. Its important to not buy enough to make up for the last 90 days: one of the advantages here is that this is acting like skipping junk food. Good for wallet and waistline alike!
Not to mention with the money saved, you should be able to easily afford the more expensive goods from local manufacturers and trusted trading partners.
Then do it again!
And again!
Again!
Its just like rocking a canoe: sooner or later the water comes over the side.
Orders drop as retail sales slide in a given quarter. Credit notes come due: factories note the falling sales and scale back production. Perhaps they try to diversify, which absorbs capital and interferes with procedures and schedules. Funds are pumped in to stabilize the situation, but the Cold Hand of Failure claws away the weaker companies.
PRC wage-slaves, already unhappy, edge closer to the boiling point of revolution as jobs are lost and the promise of good things fade.**
The weakness of the PRC economy is its control structure. By grafting capitalist decision-trees onto the fundamental top-down Marxist economy, they have avoided the ponderous shortfalls of the Soviet Union, but they still can't flex fast enough when faced with a grassroots economic modification.
Think about it: if our Governments tried an embargo, they would merely trigger a trade war and be forced to back down. But if we just institute stop-and-go buying, there is an excellent chance that this would work with a very small percentage of the population behind it.
How small? Ten percent? Twenty? Five?
I would have liked to close this by a Mao Zedong quote, but unfortunately, he is best summed up by his remark that reading too many books was harmful.
*Trite argument: if the Soviet Union was defeated by Capitalism, Capitalism stands close to being defeated by Consumerist Marxism.
**Governments never fall when things are good. This should be obvious to anyone in British politics, and a warning to the house-carls of the King in Orange.
Showing posts with label feedback. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feedback. Show all posts
Only 10 kinds of people...
“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.”
This defines my interaction with the Internet these days., and I can't be alone. Its funny how Big Data has tailored its interfaces to keep us pawing at their interfaces so they can scrape as much information from our interactions as possible; but that very modification has made our interactions that less meaningful.
If in 2002 someone visited ten websites in a day, and one of them was a stuffed animal fan-site, that's a significant marketing datum. If today that person clicks on sixty Youtube videos and one of them is Meg Myer's Curbstomp and another is Radioactive Dragons Imagine, stuffed animals are not significant.
Stop filling my 'Recommended Feed' with this sort of gibberish.
(And if you auto-playlist feed my Katy Perry and I don't notice, it does not mean that I want to listen to more Katy Perry. Absence of protest is not presence of approval*)
There is a similar problem in attributing authorial ideation: if a writer writes a character with certain mindsets, does this mean the author approves of these mindsets? The better the writer, the better the writer's ability to adopt foreign mindsets, and the less this should tell about the writer's beliefs. Not to mention that writing has masturbatory overtones, and what someone gets off on may not be the same as what they believe is proper behavior.
Am I still talking about stuffed animals here? **
No, but I may be thinking of Stephanie Meyer.
..Here too is a interesting test of authorial complexity. A one dimensional writer -- Meyer, Spillane, Fisher, to pick a random few -- has nearly identical ideation between books, and it would be hard to quote their works to support cross-purpose ideas. A good writer displays ideational depth; quotes can be taken out of context with relative ease.
When you add the subtlety of sarcasm or irony to the mix, deriving good information becomes extremely difficult: practically the same as the Translation Accuracy Problem.
Exercise for the reader: quote Gunga Din to support and then to deride racism.
Consider that Heinlein has become the go-too SF author for the right-wing; compare it to his books that support public nudity, free sex, atheism, trans-sexuality, mate-swapping, incest, and anarchy.***
Heinlein wrote to sell; the algorithms write to maximize their own inhuman returns.
Where Heinlein got direct and complex feedback from his fan base and his editors that modified what he wanted to actually write, complex feedbacks, leading to complex results, the algorithms that 'Recommend' for us get a simplified 'file streamed/link clicked' feedback for their actions. Its not surprising that the Facebook News Trending bot serves so many crap stories...but it may be surprising that it can find so much crap in the first place.
People like crap. Simple, direct bullshit: its easy to argue about and easy to enjoy. If the broad strokes of your opinions can be crayoned in, than your personal color of crap can be served in steaming handfuls. And if all you see is grass, you start to think you're on a lawn...
So here's the vicious cycle: we provide trivial actions in feedback to the trivial pleasures they supply to provoke more trivial feedback. Our complexity is much greater than the algorithms...our interactions with them simplify the interaction but the simplifications are readily observable. Our internal simplifications must be subtler, and harder to notice...
Would it be worthwhile to point out that this software is written and designed by young people, who have largely led sheltered lives characterized by lack of complex interaction with other people and the universe?
(As opposed to old people with fossilized mindsets and outdated ways of thinking, I suppose.)
*An endlessly difficult problem covering all ranges of human expression from sex to music.
** See what I did there?
***Just read Stranger in a Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil, Time Enough For Love, Number of the Beast, or pretty much any story with Lazarus Long in it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
