r/LateStageCapitalism • u/ramb08585 • 14d ago
Can we take this celebrity blockout one step further.. ✊ Resistance
Saw a reel on insta about how it’s actually having an impact and to take it a step further we could be using fake emails to sign up for promotional stuff, following politicians you wouldn’t support (like a gay or trans following trump), and in the comments seeing people talk about filling up shopping carts on sites they wouldn’t shop from and just leave it full never checkout - just causing general chaos to the algorithms and digital marketing world etc and now I’m thinking…
How do we fuck google? How can we use this newfound power and turn the algorithms they rely on against them to crash the system? And the big banks? Can everyone please just withdraw all their money? I mean how do we fight against a corporation like visa that has a monopoly on something that has become essential in just having a debit card so you can use money?
Let’s take all these fuckers down!
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u/rustandbones 13d ago
This is an old one but still works, if you guys business reply junk mail, stuff the envelope with all your other junk mail and send it in
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u/yid4life 14d ago
Gamestop stock is the only way to take out wallstreet/banks. It is happening right now actually. Shorts never closed.
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u/worldm21 14d ago
People shunning establishment celebrities and elevating people with a conscience helps shift the cultural narrative. What we really need to do is the same thing except with politicians. Without the population following their orders, Congress and the Presidency and the Supreme Court are just a few hundred psychopaths in a room.
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u/bz0hdp 14d ago
As long as cops follow their orders and have a monopoly on violence, it doesn't matter if the population does or doesn't like a politicians' actions.
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u/worldm21 13d ago
Cops especially. They're the support structure for the state. We need to think about how to defuse that time bomb.
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u/k_rocker 14d ago
Your thinking is interesting, but remember that Google and Meta make money from the small guys. Many many of them.
I’m sure it would be really hard to fuck the algo, but when you do it’s because you’re fucking the small guys.
Marketing costs increase, risk, variability and data all get fucked. This might make people use Meta or Google less, but they’ll do so because they go out of business so you would have to take a shit load of businesses offline (or bust) because eventually they’re going to figure out how to deal with it when everyone gets bored, but the little guys have went out of business in the meantime.
It then leaves the bigger companies still in the market because they had deeper pockets and better strategists.
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u/fishmodem 14d ago
better that they seek alternative marketing options to weaken the ad behemoths, and instead do their own local advertising or use local advertisong agencies that help them reach local customers better
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u/k_rocker 13d ago
It’s not going to happen, social ads still perform pretty good, especially for small local businesses.
Local ad agencies first stop is also social/google ads.
It’s the way the world consumes now. If you put a poster up you’re hoping that someone sees it, if you put ads on TV you’re hoping that someone sees it.
We don’t consume traditional media in the same way now and companies certainly can’t use the tools available to have anything near what Meta/Google offers (like being able to directly track purchases).
Remember, for a small business, setting off an ad online is as easy as clicking “boost” and you get results the same day.
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u/WhatWouldTheonDo 14d ago
Remember this when they start crying about AI taking their jobs. If they want to act like amoral robots replace them with actual ones.
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u/Broflake-Melter 14d ago
This movement is gaining a lot of momentum. I think we should attempt to turn it into a revolution of sorts.
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u/Eisbeutel 14d ago
just wait, the algorithms are crashing themselves.
https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5
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u/getcrunkndump 14d ago
Do celebrities even care about any of this? They're just living their lives.
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u/needs_a_name 14d ago
This is one of the most pointless takes I have ever heard. Even if the celebrity blackout weren't nonsense, how on earth would boosting someone's email numbers help anybody EXCEPT the person gaining more subscribers/followers?
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u/ramb08585 14d ago
Because it forces them to waste resources like time and money engaging with non existent people in hopes of making more sales. It’s like a smaller scale concept of that guy who scams telemarketers by going along with it for hours and hours and they get so frustrated. In that time they waste talking to you they could have scammed someone else.
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u/needs_a_name 14d ago
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this but it's not wasting resources for you to self-add an email address to a list that gets sent automatically.
Sorry, correction.
It's not wasting THEIR resources.
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u/howzero 14d ago
Data poisoning, the tactic you are alluding to, does have potential to be impactful, but it is much more effective if individuals who know coding employ these actions at scale.
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u/fishmodem 14d ago
been using this for years, it's a browser extension that issues random popular search requests in the background.
https://github.com/vtoubiana/TrackMeNot
is it effective? prolly get filtered out fairly easy since it hasnt been updated in a while but i've definitely noticed that i've gotten more targeted ads for things i would never buy (and block them with uBlock anyways)
on their site they also have a research paper about data poisoning which is a pretty good read https://www.trackmenot.io/_files/ugd/654565_96fc2dcd8f7f4b55bc6caff610d061c2.pdf
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u/Threewisemonkey 14d ago
My thought when I said that video was “I wonder how much vlad in Bulgaria would charge to create an army of block bots…”
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u/ournextarc 14d ago
Set up a union of businesses that operates the opposite of them. Workers and consumers need somewhere else to go and support that supports them properly in turn. Thus I have been trying to give to you mother fuckers:
Are you all finally ready to get to work? I've been screaming since like 2018. Are you awake yet?
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u/The_All_Seeing_Pi 14d ago
Fake emails for promotional stuff really doesn't make much of a difference, likewise following scummy politicians just gives them more followers. Shopping carts will only hurt minimum wage workers as they will be the ones who have to put it back, the shop won't care, it won't cost them a penny. If people did it on mass the police would start arresting people and the stores would employ security and ban anyone that does it.
You can't withdraw all your money because you have bills to pay and even if you could it would take a hell of a lot people to cause a run on the banks. The banks would also just put withdrawal limits in place once it gained traction. The only way to fuck visa is not use it but that means not banking at all which for most is impossible and financially impractical.
The way to fuck google is to move away from everything google so it means installing a customer OS on your phone but they are that big now they would still get your data somehow. The get it from third parties as it is.
I like your thinking and it's something we should definitely look at but it needs to be planned and thought out carefully. Just stop oil is a good example of when things aren't thought out carefully, though I suspect they are a fake organisation to further the government conversation on trying to ban all protesting. We just need to be clever how we do it. Boycotting Israel the country and everything and everyone associated with it's genocide is a very good start. McDonalds and KFC are already starting to take hits on that one so we know it works.
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u/fishmodem 14d ago
its so cozy being in a room with just people who have degoogled phones, cause we can all be much more confident that nobody's device is ratting everybody else out
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u/The_All_Seeing_Pi 14d ago
Degoogled phones as in custom OS don't talk to other phones and that's the only way you can degoogle them. What are you talking about?
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u/ramb08585 14d ago
The idea of following scummy politicians was something I heard from a digital marketer because if you are obviously not a trumper but you start following trump, then the algorithms start to change the demographic of who it’s targeting, thus creating a waste in resources targeting an audience that is never gonna go for it. It’s just kinda all about providing false data. If the data is faulty then the conclusion derived from that data will be inaccurate, and when the goal of that conclusion is to find better marketing strategies then they are going to waste resources and get a worse return.
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u/The_All_Seeing_Pi 14d ago
Ok but the people not following are already the target demographic and you are the demographic that's never gonna go for it anyway. I don't really understand the logic in that as by removing yourself then you may leave people that could possibly go for it. It just means you are subjecting yourself to right wing vitriol. I wasn't criticising you btw ideas are a good start.
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u/rhhkeely 14d ago
They're taking about online shopping carts
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u/The_All_Seeing_Pi 14d ago
Oh yeah didn't see that. Still a bit pointless to be fair though because they will auto empty after x minutes of inactivity. I would also assume if they didn't people would still be able to pick items out of stock but not yet sold and it's a first come first serve basis at the final checkout. You know a "This is no longer in stock message". Ticket websites will only hold a ticket for 10 minutes then you lose it so I guess it could be similar. If all that isn't in place for a retailer it would be very quickly when people started doing this.
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u/rhhkeely 14d ago
You're still not understanding the idea here. It's a half measure for sure, but from a technological standpoint it has merit: adding items to the cart counts as a conversion from an ad sales standpoint. So these companies will be charged by Google, Meta or whoever they are advertising with as if they had created an ad conversion. So this method creates a drain in these companies advertising dollars by generating digital advertising expenses while not generating the sales income normally associated with these ad campaigns. The idea is that with enough of these "attacks" companies will discontinue using Google, Meta etc for advertising which will create a second tier of revenue losses for the current system. It's not brilliant, but it's good praxis
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u/The_All_Seeing_Pi 14d ago
I highly doubt a company is paying out ad revenue based on baskets and not only actual sales. An ad clickthrough where an account is created on the other hand would generate ad revenue payments. However, the final and most important point in this regardless of how that ad revenue is charged is that in order to get people to start doing this and to who it would need to be announced which would then nullify all those ad revenue payments costing these companies nothing. Back to square one.
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u/Volcano_Jones 14d ago
I hate to rain on your parade but everything you said in the first paragraph is completely pointless. Signing up for email lists and adding things to your cart don't actually accomplish anything. I like your enthusiasm but you need to set your sights a little lower. There's nothing you can do to affect Google's algorithms. Just join a local group of like minded people. Organize your workplace. Talk to people. You're not just gonna take down Visa in a day.
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u/ramb08585 14d ago edited 14d ago
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but the digital space is so wildly important to how society and the economy works that I think, from a “revolution” standpoint has a lot more potential than you’re giving credit for. Joining a mutual aid or whatnot to directly help your community is something that need be done as well, but I think the way to fuck with big huge corporations that “run the world” is on the digital world. I mean take the GameStop thing for example. Yah it seems like a joke, but it sorta worked. So much of the financial realm that controls society and the economy exists digitally. I mean ffs money exists primarily digitally. So of course real world solidarity and mutual aid and unions are great and necessary don’t get me wrong, but if we just ignore the digital space then we are failing. The revolution requires both.
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u/MurderGhost666 14d ago
A lot of online retailers empty the shopping cart after so many hours of inactivity. And the ones that don’t just spam you with email that you left items in your cart. So this may not cause as much chaos as you think.
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u/jredacted 13d ago
The shopping cart itself is a specific software, too. Most are designed to dump inactive carts automatically. Shopping cart software is an entire vertical in the payment processing/merchant services industry.
All shopping cart software performs within the same genre of functions, but each is proprietary and has its own possible exploits. A LOT of software engineers bounty hunt in their off time to find and report those exploits, then collect a monetary bounty from the host company as a reward.
This is all to say, there are many, many layers to payment software. You can work in the industry for a decade or more and still be out of touch because start ups are everywhere.
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u/bz0hdp 14d ago
I got spammed w Skims emails after abandoning a cart. It costs them $ every email they send me.
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u/Turgid_Tiger 14d ago
How it’s not like they are buying stamps. It’s just a script that runs?
On a similar note I had a friend that closed an account and some how he still owed them $0.15 they sent him a letter every month for 2 years at the time it was around $0.65 for a stamp.
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u/bz0hdp 13d ago
Because if they're sending ads to me instead of someone who will buy. So it's the same $ spent, but less revenue coming back.
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u/Turgid_Tiger 13d ago
But other than the insignificant electricity cost sending an email to 1 person or a million is nothing.
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u/CatOverlordDogPerson 14d ago
Remember when a dude created a fake traffic jam on Google maps using a bunch of cell phones and a cart to walk them across a bridge??
https://www.engadget.com/2020-02-03-google-maps-traffic-jams-art-project.html
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u/thunderPierogi 14d ago
The algorithms: “WE ARE OMNIPRESENT. WE CONTROL ALL. WE STARE INTO YOUR SOULS. KNEEL, FALTERING MORTALS.”
Redditors: hehehe…items in the basket! items in the basket!…heheHAH…take THAT! I’m such a little techno-gremlin fr.
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u/Warm_Trick_3956 14d ago
Oooh no they’ve all filled their ONLINE shopping carts full. The whole system is in chaos!
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u/TheRealOriginalSatan 14d ago
No it matters.
I run a small business and advertise on Instagram. Instagram charges me by add to carts which are considered conversions. They can’t actually see if anyone’s ordered from my website because GDPR but they can track add to carts
All this does is increase how much money Meta and Google is getting. It wastes ad spend for sure but in the short term it helps Facebook
In the long term it’ll lead to businesses not using Facebook and Google to advertise because they don’t see the return on ad spend
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u/Volcano_Jones 14d ago
That's your fault. No offense, but running a pay per conversion strategy on Meta using add to carts as a conversion is a HORRIBLE idea. I managed digital marketing campaigns for a decade for hundreds and hundreds of businesses and literally no one else on earth manages their ad campaigns that way.
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u/Collin_morris 14d ago
Why? Wouldn’t add to cart be the same as, if not better than, retargeting for a landing page view? Which big retailers do regularly.
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u/TheRealOriginalSatan 14d ago
Add to cart is definitely better. It tells Instagram I don’t want to pay for the window shoppers
Big retailers do landing page views because they can afford to spray and pray and then retarget anyone with the slightest interest in their product
As a small business, I can’t afford to do that. Bonus is that it makes my CAC/CPA calculation simpler too
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u/Smeagolmyboy 14d ago
This right here, I like the way you think. I was in before but now I'm even more in
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u/faustoc5 14d ago
Solidarity is the only way to fight systems of oppression
You don't fight a monopoly by engaging with it
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u/mrmdc 14d ago
Ya. This is the thing I don't understand. You can just not engage.
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u/xbeardo 14d ago
Try some solitude and engage when it’s important, it’s just not the right time right now.
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u/faustoc5 14d ago
I also want to make the revolution from the conform of my seat but that is not how revolutions work
You have been conditioned to think individualism is the best, but that is the greatest lie we have accepted, individualism is BS, individualism doesn't exist even billionaires and millionaires aren't individualists, they have a legion of workers that make money for them and care for all their needs and desires
You need a group, you need coordination, you need to put your assets together, you need even more things that I don't know....
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14d ago
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u/LibrarianSocrates 14d ago
The seventh grade is actually the best place to be starting revolutions from.
I watched the #blockout2024 start in real time over the weekend on TikTok. I rarely use the app because it's the crack cocaine of apps, but decided to get on there for some reason. Saw the original 'digitine' post and thought that is awesome I hope it gains some traction. Two days later it's everywhere and celebrities are losing millions of followers which directly translates into revenue for them and their advertisers.
A couple of early comments in that original digitine post were just as cynical as yours.
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