Babe wake up, the #EconomicBlackout is starting
Capitalism only thrives because of YOU.
It’s your day to not be oblivious.
It’s your day to sit in discomfort, anger, boredom, fear festering as frozen inactivity, and all of the things that your super-consumerism intentionally distracts you from resolving.
Whether we crash the stock market or not, it’s a day for you to learn to participate, maybe even for the first time, in the simplest of direct action — a boycott. If doing something is too overwhelming for you, then doing nothing should be easy.
It’s your day to not pretend you don’t know what to do or where to start. It’s your day to decide if a Trump presidency is “fine” for you again, and if you want to keep personally spoiling the oligarchs and billionaire sugarbabies your overconsumption has created.
Protests are not birthday parties, and the revolution will not be introduced with a formally mailed invite requesting your attendance. You will not be getting three personal followups for your RSVP. You will not have time to sit and call your other friends to see who’s all going. You won’t be able to put it on the fridge for now and decide later, once you’ve had a chance to really think about it.
In the very near future, if it hasn’t already happened, you are going to encounter a moment where you are fully alone in your decisions, your reactions, and in your defense of yourself physically and of your values. This is a large country. Almost no one, by comparison, participates in IRL community organizing, especially under the lens of anti-fascism, anti-racism, secure housing, and equitable distribution of resources. I get that it’s easier to be online, but there’s a man sucking the feet of the President1 who wants to monopolize the very Wifi that is sending this letter into your inbox. Take advantage of the time you have to let yourself be influenced by things like the #EconomicBlackout, let it change your thinking and your own habits. Relish in this before the plugs get pulled.
For today:
Stop spending your fucking money. Sit on your hands. Take the shit out of your cart.
Shop small, but only if you need to. Visa and Mastercard are still siphoning money from small businesses.
For the future:
Curb your consumerism. You don’t need to be a super-consumer any longer.
For forever:
Remember that your returns are waste. Most don’t go back and they don’t get resold. The seller writes the loss off and it goes to the same landfill as the rest of the shit, for forever.
If something is dirty, clean it. Don’t trash it and buy another one.
As shitty and cheap as products have become, our ability to maintain them, and clean them, and to imagine a lifespan for them beyond a few months or years is equally shitty.
We used to be a country. Then Target, Joybird and Wayfair and whoever the hell Lula and Georgia are showed up. Along with the shame of appearing cheap for attempting to preserve something. This woman doesn’t seem like the type to pause a picture until she made sure her Stanley logo was facing out and she also didn’t have to build her own damn couch from a box either. If something breaks, fix it, don’t just buy another one. If a creator has a YouTube video showing you how to fix something, say thank you by subscribing to their channel and engaging with their content.
If you’re hungry and too lazy to cook, call up the Thai spot, or whatever, directly and drive to get it. More on DoorDash, et al, below.
Learn to roast a chicken. If you’re so obsessed with Costco Chicken, just make one at home (literally cooks faster than the line moves) and throw it in a plastic bag and let it sit out in the sun for a few hours, I guess.
Hug the tamale lady and let her keep the change.
Get a normal sized cup of tea at your local coffee shop instead of whatever $7 Carmel Frapp St*rbucks sells you.
Put that money you save from drinking tea into an high-yield savings account until it reaches $7,500 and roll it into an IRA.
Aggressively invest that money in high-risk investments to maximize your return.
Keep that up for approximately 187 years, and congratulations, you’ve earned as much as Elon Musk makes in about 3 hours and you also now have enough money to buy a 600 square foot fixer home in cash! Oops, I lied! Blackrock bought it for $170,000 in 2025, re-listed it for $4,000,000 within two weeks and let it sit empty for over a century instead of coming down to a purchase price someone could actually afford. We can’t be so upset, though, the BlackRock AI App overseeing the Yellowstone Labor Camp you now live on, the one you and the other homeless, priced outers, and foreclosed-upons were forcibly moved to, was so kind to accept the $200,000 you saved over 187 years as a partial downpayment for your freedom. Just another 200 years and you’ll be free, babes.
Support the creators, independent journalists, crafters, critics, and commentators you see here on Substack.
Pretend we’re DoorDash and just throw us your money.
You’ll give $5.00 to DoorDash everytime you order. Just for the privilege of using their app (“fees”). That, on top of the additional $2.00 Chipotle secretly adds to the cost of its menu items simply because they’re being purchased via DoorDash. All of this, of course, before DoorDash then asks you to tip their drivers. Well, technically, they’re not “their” drivers. A few years ago, DoorDash, along with Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Instacart, etc., spent $225,000,000 (that’s..a quarter of a billion dollars) to make sure their drivers would neverrrr be called employees. Or, have the rights employees would.
All it took was a multi-million dollar ad budget, political lobbying and a couple of paid testimonials, and the people of California and even drivers themselves voted against their rights in favor of billion dollar corporations. The greed transaction scheme stayed on track.
Anyway, consider that paid upgrade, on this, the last day… of the last ever …Black History month.
Definitely not AI.
The last day of the last block history month - damn that hit hard. Cancelled my Amazon and have done so much less passive shopping in the past few months. Working on curbing my DoorDash so I can become a paid subscriber! Appreciate you 💜💜💜
i’m going to be so honest, this economic blackout felt like another black squares on instagram initiative to me until i read your words. thank you for taking the time to write, i see so so so much purpose now :)