Edit: Jesus Christ, people. If you buy a $150 Thinkpad made by slave labor instead of a $1,200 MacBook made by slave labor, you're still supporting a capitalist economy based on slave labor. We all do. We have no choice. The number of smug liberals in the comments saying "well I buy a cheap used laptop" or "well I buy coffee beans and make my own coffee" are completely missing the fucking point.
Don't tell yourself your consumption is moral. All of us make unethical choices every day because there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Accept your shame and guilt and let it drive you to do better.
Nope sorry, there are many much less capitalistically aggressive alternatives to starbucks and apple. Slaves on the other hand literally (and not figuratively as in here) needed to keep slaving to stay alive. I would seriously feel cramps in my stomach if I walked into a starbucks with that sticker.
apple and Starbucks are capitalists. Using their products and services is not "capitalism" but "consumerism"
spending a wage you earned is the opposite of capitalism
I mean not exactly. I am not sayin the person in the photo is but excessive consumerism is what capitalism needs to stand on.
well of course not "exactly." To get to "exactly" we would both have to write hundreds of thousands of words.
My point is that a lot of people who are proponents of capitalism aren't actually leveraging their capital as an investment to further expand it.
For example, I just bought a house. I "leveraged" 5% of the property price from my savings (earned by a wage, by the way, not by leveraging other capital) and the bank carried the rest (which it does by leveraging capital). It's the banks' house for the next 30 years. I can leverage my equity in the house as that equity grows (which would be a bad idea), but even when the house is paid off, I now have an asset, not capital. Were I to sell the house - now I have capital - but I can't do anything with, really, practically, except buy another house, again from which lawyers, banks, realtors, etc will all extract capital but I will not.
The second point is that - you need a phone and laptop to survive in modern society, just like you needed a horse in days gone. People love to gloat that people who say "those who do no work but own methods of extracting wealth from those who do should profit less" are then buying something unavoidable from those who extract capital, and point out that they should have budgeted for a slightly lower price point in order to give the wealth extractors slightly less.
And honestly, they are welcome to that opinion. It doesn't change my opinions at all. We just disagree. They believe people (often other than themselves) are entitled to more of a share in the profit they generated than I believe they should be, either for myself or for anyone.
Anyone is welcome to disagree I just don't understand why they want to give up their own money. Especially as such people are usually desperately against taxation, which is the same mechanism except it benefits many instead of the few.
Sure, but it's the fact that out of any other choice to pick, she chose to still give her money to the most aggressively capitalist companies. You can say it's consumerism, but what point is she even making then? She sat down at a Starbucks to get her overpriced coffee, on a $1200 Macbook with a sticker on it that says "SMASH CAPITALISM", it's blatantly hyprocritcal.
maybe she's there with a gift card she got given and a laptop that was also a gift?
Also my work computer is a Mac, now, and was also when I worked for a print and design company years ago.
maybe she's an artist and Macs are often considered de rigueur for image and movie editing
maybe she's not very technical, grew up using a Mac and is sticking to what she knows, who are we to criticise someone for not being skilled at tech, when we are not skilled at javelin throwing, or glass blowing or pointilism or whatever.
There are alternatives out there. That's all. If you want to say 'SMASH CAPITALISM', then don't pick the most garbage possible way to make your point. At the end of the day, your still buying/using them, especially from the most aggressively capitalist companies such as Apple and Starbucks. You could always sell off the laptop and gift card and support your local businesses instead. There are still local computer shops out there that sell off used hardware.
Also, I mean, you don't even need to be an expert to use Linux, it's rather simple actually, especially with AI at our fingertips. It's just the fact that they keep supporting the exact thing they despise, hence why it looks hypocritical. Do your part and stick to what you preach. It's like a person that eats at a all-meat resturaunt with a t-shirt on that says "Vegan".
how do we know it's not used? I'm just saying we're putting a lot into this image. Not done a massive deep dive but off the top of my head Apple isn't really that much worse than Samsung, Sony, NVIDIA, ASUS... Maybe there's a few percentage points in it - but by any metric: revenue, employee corps, emissions, corruption, e-waste, personal politics or private lives of key figures... are they vastly different?
Ehhhhh. I think you're vastly over estimating how good people are at tech. Even young people. I reflect on trying to teach my grandmother how to text. Probably around 2004? She could use a VHS and DVD player, land line phone with caller ID, a microwave, set the time on the oven - but pressing keys on a phone to spell was beyond her and she got really frustrated. I also reflect on how someone I know in their early 30s was really annoyed by some old printer software they had from a printer they don't own any more, and I said "why don't you just uninstall it" and they didn't know how.
The average user on lemmy can probably write a Hello world in some language, or at least create Hello worldHello world ... but I don't know if the average person on the street can.
The average person on the street probably can't install windows from scratch let alone dual boot Linux, let alone from a Mac OS.
I dont mean that to be snooty, I mean it to highlight you are taking a massive leap of faith in how good at computers most people are.
Sure you're right. But, I'm still going to take my chances and say that she probably spent her own money lol
Buying anything in a capitalist country makes you a consumer.
And no one has the choice not to be.
Yep used thinkpad and some kind of Linux sounds more like it.
How’s Lenovo’s sustainability versus Apple’s?
if it has linux installed, then much better at least from a software standpoint
All your options are "capitalistically aggressive". It's a sign of immaturity to me that people think they're above it all while still being totally and utterly dependent on capitalist economics. Acting like buying a fair phone makes you better than others is just laughable. It's a drop in the bucket compared to all your other unavoidable contributions to capitalists.
Not to mention that many of these "better" options are only available to people with money, which makes the entire claim even more ironic. Many of us going this "alternate" less aggressive route can only do so because we benefit from inequality in the first place.
Your argument in no way refutes the point the comic makes.
nope, there is for instance a ton of difference between someone who buys a used phone and uses it for 5 years vs someone who buys a new phone each time a new model comes out. Similarly there is a difference to how much you enable or enhance this system when you make conscious choices about which brands to use (ones that are a part of it or ones that actively redefine and make things worse).
I would agree however that it really makes no sense to of course try to infer all of these from a single photo, maybe this person is super anti consumerism in all other aspects, maybe she is repairing someone else's computer etc. Nevertheless apple is the last brand you should be using if you want to put a smash capitalism sticker on your laptop, you can at least show the will to have your os open source. Otherwise it is like going to a steak house to eat steak with a "stop animal slaughter" shirt. It is the exact definition for me of acting like you are above it all without showing the effort to be.