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Scott Galloway can pinpoint the moment\u2014the straw that, in his words, \u201cbroke the camel\u2019s back.\u201d The New York University professor and podcast host remembers watching in horror in January as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse and U.S. citizen shot and killed by immigration agents, as a \u201cdomestic terrorist.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt it was so depraved\u2026 and it was so offensive to me,\u201d said Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU\u2019s Stern School of Business. \u201cI was so anxious about it. And one of my favorite sayings is, \u2018Action absorbs anxiety.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
So he got to work. Fueled by anger at the Trump administration\u2019s immigration policies, he thought about what would get the president\u2019s attention. Galloway, who co-hosts the Pivot<\/em> podcast with veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher and routinely speaks with top Silicon Valley executives, decided to zero in on those Big Tech leaders who are often seen hobnobbing at the White House and Mar a Lago.<\/p>\n What he came up with was a targeted boycott\u2014\u201da temporary, coordinated pullback from consumer discretionary spending,\u201d as he puts it, and one that seeks to do maximum damage in the industries that seem to call the most shots in Trump administration policy: tech and AI. <\/p>\n Resist and Unsubscribe, Galloway\u2019s online campaign, doesn\u2019t involve marches or picket lines. Instead, it asks consumers to each make a small, personal sacrifice: Cancel their subscriptions or delete the apps of the ten consumer tech companies he has identified as having \u201coutsized influence\u201d over the national economy and President Trump: Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Paramount+, Meta, Uber, Netflix, OpenAI, and X. The site links to the \u201cunsubscribe\u201d pages of each company.<\/p>\n In a world where the platforms these companies have created have become so ingrained in society and daily life, Galloway is also asking consumers to reflect upon giving up convenience for a higher purpose. Do people really need to use two ride hailing apps, he asks, or to subscribe to the paid versions of both ChatGPT and Anthropic?<\/p>\n \u201cJust as with dry January, this is an opportunity to rethink or recalibrate,\u201d he says. \u201cI think this is, at a minimum, an opportunity to reduce your spend\u2026 It\u2019s also to recalibrate how you feel about these companies, how they acquit themselves in terms of who they support and why, and whether or not you need to be spending this money with them.\u201d<\/p>\n He also singled out eight other companies\u2014AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Dell, FedEx, Home Depot, Marriot, and UPS\u2014claiming that they enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and is asking consumers to withhold business from them, too.<\/p>\n Galloway says he has heard directly from several board members or CEOs of the companies he singled out\u2014with most saying that they understand what he\u2019s doing. But many say they are stuck navigating a very turbulent situation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe president and administration have done a very good job of creating incentives for the most powerful business leaders to go along with his policies, keep quiet if they disagree with them, and maybe even enable them through direct support of the infrastructure,\u201d Galloway says, referring to companies that work with ICE. \u201cAnd then they text me and other people I know saying that they are nauseous at this\u2014which doesn\u2019t do anyone any good, to complain about him behind his back.\u201d<\/p>\n Galloway says he has empathy for business leaders who are staying silent despite qualms about the Trump administration\u2019s actions. Most are afraid of speaking out, he says, \u201cbecause the president will do everything in his power to make that person and that company pay for it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n His hope is to create a new incentive for these timid business leaders, by wiping out a quarter billion or more from their combined market cap. Galloway estimates the financial impact of the movement by looking at the Resist and Unsubscribe sites\u2019 page views and calculating a 5% conversion rate, with each converted visitor canceling an average of two subscriptions that result in $30 in monthly revenue lost. A ticker on the site estimates that this number, annualized, adds up to some $248 million that has been divested at publication time. (This estimate has not been verified by Fortune<\/em>.)<\/p>\n To be sure, a quarter billion in combined impact isn\u2019t a big blow to companies worth hundreds of billions\u2014or even into the trillions. And Galloway is aware that he\u2019s facing an uphill battle, especially in an era where social media-fueled boycotts and strikes are increasingly common. \u201cSince starting this, I\u2019ve become a pretty serious student of economic strikes; most don\u2019t work,\u201d Galloway said. \u201cOne-day strikes are more cinematic than they are effective. They\u2019re more of an annoyance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n There are some examples of collective action by consumers leading to success, though. Galloway points to the global economic boycotts of South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s that pressured the government to end Apartheid, or the more recent movement to unsubscribe from Disney after Jimmy Kimmel\u2019s late-night show was suspended following criticism from the Trump administration of the comedian\u2019s comments about Charlie Kirk\u2019s assassination. Jimmy Kimmel Live!<\/em> was reinstated.<\/p>\n But just because very few work, doesn\u2019t mean they can\u2019t work, Galloway says. \u201cWhat I\u2019m trying to do is send a signal that you have more power than you think, and you have a weapon hiding in plain sight, and that is your spend,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n So far, Galloway says he thinks his movement is a \u201cmodest-to-tangible success.\u201d \u201cWhat I have heard from these companies is [Resist and Unsubscribe] is a discussion in product management meetings and in the cafeteria, but it isn\u2019t a discussion yet at a board level,\u201d he said. \u201cSo the reality is I still have some work to do on creating enough of a signal, enough awareness, enough unsubscriptions, such that the CEOs and boards of these companies feel that the incentives have changed.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, he points out, it\u2019s still growing. \u201cMy mom used to say, \u2018How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time,\u2019\u201d Galloway said. \u201cSo I wouldn\u2019t be cynical or I wouldn\u2019t be discouraged thinking you can\u2019t have an impact. I think collectively, we can all have a huge impact.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He likens this moment in history to the U.S. Civil War, the World Wars, or the Civil Rights movement\u2014real inflection points. And he wants to have a clear answer if he\u2019s ever asked, \u201cWhat did you do in the war?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt just feels good to be doing something,\u201d he says. \u201cIt feels really good to be doing something with other people.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Scott #Galloways #Resist #Unsubscribe #movement #asks #ditch #Amazon #Apple #Netflix<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Scott Galloway can pinpoint th… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[374,2132,445,724,4417,761,14747,14745,4111,461,8256,13107,6110,13712,14746],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25993"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}