You should be boycotting these companies already because they support extreme right politics by their ALEC membership:
- FedEx
- UPS
- Motorola
- Anheuser Busch
- American Express
- Bose
- Chevron
- Marlboro
- Sony
- Texaco
- Boeing (fly on Airbus instead, see how to boycott Boeing)
You should be boycotting Amazon for many reasons.
If you oppose private prisons, then you already boycott these banks:
- #BankOfAmerica (#BofA)
- #FifthThird
- #JPMorgan #Chase
- #PNC Bank
- #Suntrust
- #USBank (#USBancorp)
- #WellsFargo
Don’t think they are out of reach to Europe -- many European small banks that you assume are ethical actually outsource their investments to JP Morgan. Also, BofA uses different branding outside the US.
If you like transparency with food labeling, then you endorse labeling of #GMO food, in which case you boycott companies that lobbied against GMO labeling. There are hundreds of companies that fucked us over, but these are the top ten financers of anti-labeling lobby:
- PepsiCo
- Nestlé
- General Mills
- Coca-Cola
- ConAgra
- Campbell Soup
- The Hershey Company
- J.M. Smucker
- Kellogg
- Mondelez
Some of those mushroom into many brands. See the attached infographic.
Of course it’s a failure to boycott. Every time you send email to a Microsoft recipient, you feed profitable data to the MS ad surveillance machine. You also open the door to give the recipient an email address so when they reply you effectively facilitate more food to MS to the extent that you have no control over. And worse, you also signal to the recipient that their email setup works.. that it serves them and rewards their choice.
If you boycott MS effectively, then you use snail mail (absent other channels). You feed nothing to MS and block your recipient from using you to feed MS more. You also give badly needed help to the postal service. Look what happened to Denmark. They lost the option to boycott MS. Those people will soon be entirely disempowered, forced to support whatever tech giant naive recipients choose.
Microsoft loves it that you think you can simply avoid running some of their binary code and work under the illusion that you are not supporting MS.
As a person in the tech space, let me give you my opinion on all of this.
It's not, because YOU are the one boycotting and not the other user. If you can convince everyone to ditch GMail, Microsoft Outlook, AOL, Yahoo or others, then yeah, you guys are boycotting well. But if the end user of something YOU sent doesn't boycott, they have no reason to change their client and it is not a failed boycott. Because even if one user boycotts, it is still better if no one boycotted.
The end user would be inconveniencing themselves by communicating with you, because you decided to use something else and force them to use that same thing with you. Imagine this, you use Email Client 1 but the user you sent the email to, uses Corporate Mail 1. Are you going to tell the user that in order to communicate with you they should completely ditch Corporate Mail 1 and use Email Client 1? Don't you think that is being an inconvenience?
This almost makes me think of some Vegan, animal rights activists, which will tell you how terrible you are for eating meat.
Also, unfortunately, Microsoft and Apple are the industry standards for when it comes to Personal Computing and Workstations.
Imagine using snail mail in the digital age to send important documents that need to be signed by tomorrow. Do you realize just how much time and money would take to send a letter from, say, Poland to France?
Not a chance, especially not for critical things.
Using something like Proton would definitely help make things more secure AND less money for the U.S, but how many people do you know that use Proton Mail? 2? 5? 10?
Fact of the matter is, some companies are unavoidable, especially in the workplace.
Don't inconvenience your colleagues by forcing them to use a different client than what they are used to already. Or, if you want to introduce a new provider, introduce it slowly. Give people the time they need to let it settle in better.
I will also say something that was said here earlier, this way of thinking is incredibly "purist" and too much "perfectionism"
Don't let "perfect" get in the way of "Good"
People are already struggling to boycott US companies, let alone this purist version you have here.
No you are not. As long as you feed Microsoft, you are not boycotting. It’s the opposite of boycotting.
It’s a fail because whatever you transmit to an MS user feeds MS with marketing data.
A conversation between two people with MS as an evesdropper is not a boycott. It’s two people feeding MS and helping MS profit.
And? Of course it’s an inconvenience. Boycotts are inherently inconvenient. If you prioritize convenience, that’s not activism and you’re not boycotting. You’re just doing what the normal market is designed for -- exploiting your addiction to convenience. I suggest reading Tyranny of Convenience by Tim Wu.
Yikes. You have been brainwashed. They push proprietary conventions. Calling their tech “standards” is the kind of boot licking they love you to do.
Again, you need to drop this bizarre idea that a boycott is convenient. Protests that fail to disrupt fail to be effective. If I get a complaint about an analog letter, I could not be happier. That’s the perfect opportunity to describe the problem to whoever complains.
Why did you wait until the last minute? That’s your fuckup.
Not in the slightest. MS still sees the full payload of PM msgs. Unless you use a shared key with the MS recipient, in which case MS gets the metadata. With most transactions you’ll have a hard time getting the other side to deal with a password. Try getting a bank to note down a password for such emails and see if they go along with it.
You do you. Don’t tell people what to do.
In a workplace specifically, you likely have a mandate to use the tools of the org. That’s not really an interesting scenario because politics in the workplace is not generally tolerated by bosses.
You don’t have “good”. If you are feeding MS, that’s not good. It’s not boycotting. You have perfect getting in the way of “bad”, and rightfully so.