Military veterans will be taking part in protests across the country in each state with the main one planned for Washington DC at noon local time on March 14th.
Economic related boycotts are ongoing; while the following calendar highlights certain plans of action, the main objective is to reduce non-essential spending and buying what is needed locally from mostly smaller businesses.
As I noted previously (for the February 28th economic blackout), I’ve already been doing this (pulling back extensively on buying unnecessary products and services). My use of Amazon now is mainly as a search engine to find items which I then purchase from elsewhere (whenever possible, directly from the company). I’ve also taken the extra step of removing payment methods from the majority of these companies (including Amazon) that I previously patronized. My Twitch wallet was funded by e-gift cards purchased on Amazon.com (thus once the funds in that wallet are depleted, I am done with all of my paid subscriptions and bits).
I do realize the “elephant in the room” is Amazon Web Services (which a lot of companies run their backends on). Amazon generates their highest margins and the bulk of their revenues from this business unit. Making a material impact here is far more difficult since part of this effort requires “touching grass” more often by reducing ones online usage as much as possible (besides AWS, there are other cloud service providers including Alibaba, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Salesforce Cloud, Tencent Cloud to name just a few); AWS, Azure, and GCP account for over 67% of the global cloud infrastructure. As part of this economic boycott, I’ve already been pulling back on the amount of time spent on Twitch for example (2024 simply marked a drastic increase after being offline from it for several years).
Google is another that I am only partially out of (this blog is obviously a Google product aka Blogger) along with whatever YouTube accounts I still have (though none of them are monetized, YouTube will still run their ads on videos). I look at this part with YouTube a little differently though. Since I’m not looking for views/monetization, the main part of my occupying space on the platform is just that; consuming storage (plus the initial processing checks and machine learning audio transcription). In short, chewing up resources is how I plan to utilize YouTube as a form of protest (I do the same on Instagram when uploading long videos). The real big one I have stopped using is Google Search (switched to DuckDuckGo) along with Google Maps (using Apple Maps or OpenStreetMaps).
As for payment processor PayPal, while the company has long been separated from the original principals of Musk, Sacks, and Thiel (they are no longer associated with the company), the company did roll back their language on diversity, equality, and inclusiveness in their 10-K shareholder filing in early February 2025. Most of my use of PayPal is via a business account (to support a few content creators with their goals) which provides a personal information shield compared to directly using ones credit card. This one I’ve been on the fence with (since I don’t use it often) but as a matter of principle (by doing my part of making an impact on the corporate bottomline), it is something that I will likely stop using as part of this blackout. I will make this determination whenever the real shit hits the fan on what is happening in the US with this hostile takeover (as I can then use that particular catalyst/event to explain to those content creators why this pull back needs to be done).
I’ve also begun using a paid VPN more often now along with more secured messaging. Basically, it’s little steps that one person alone won’t make a huge dent, but when more start doing these little things, the impacts from “strength in numbers”can really be felt.
