The mechanisms of the boycott

 The Moon is out looking for trouble.

Ah, the humble 'Boycott'; the singular line of defence that the consumer has against the grubby hungry companies that feed upon them like carrion pigeons. Morality, empathy and even legality are mere suggestions to the ears of the money makers and shakers who rule this capitalistic world, thus as lowly buyers we can't expect laws, guidelines or even basic human decency to protect us from the claws of the preying wolves that own the things we love. Instead, if ever there comes a time when the consumer needs to bite back, we have to get dirty with our stratagems and sink to the sorts of levels that our enemies wouldn't even consider. We need to attack the only thing that these people hold dear. No, not their families, the real only thing that they love in this cold dark world of ours. Their wallets. Precious, protected, pristine. You slap a executive in their face, they'll laugh it off- slap them in their wallets, and they'll be wheezing for days. Hence, the boycott.

These days the very concept of a Boycott is not quite as ambitious or socially bold as it once was in it's inception, but as with everything else these days the concept has been diluted, digested and spat out as a 'solve all' for practically any consumer to management dispute. Unless you live in America, of course, in which case you're looking as lawsuits and class actions. But can you really blame the modern consumer for trivialising and factory reproducing what was once a supremely drastic measure? We may not be backing the plight of Rosa Parks to bravely drive a wedge inside the archaic institution of normalised segregation, but we are- nope... nothing I say is going to sound worthy or even remotely relevant in the face of the Rosa Parks thing, is it? I should have just kept her name out my mouth, how the heck am I going to raise a point now?

My point is; boycotts have become something a kneejerk reaction to pretty much anything. And to be fair, they do seem to actually work. Companies are often painfully deferential to the public anytime a single misprint makes it onto one of their store menus, or a bad translations leads to a food product being labelled a German phrase that means 'Donkey Poo', or a Waffle House Worker deflects a chair flung at her by a rowdy visitor with one arm. (Justice for her, by the way.) Because they are all just absolutely scared stiff of the little upwards angled line of their graph teetering into the dreaded flat horizontal line or, god forbid, start trending the other way downwards. They would defenestrate their own grandmothers and perform the Black Sacrament with their fresh corpse if it meant they never had to see a bad financial quarter. And that's a terror that it almost feels like the moral duty of consumers to exploit in order to get their way.

Although I do wonder if it's lost its meaning in all the kerfuffle. If the public attempt to enforce morality and order in a lawless system has instead introduced an aspect of cronyism-fuelled chaos to an already broken system. But of course, I'm getting dangerous close to approaching the fire-bed topic of 'armchair activism' with this train of thought, so I better go and correct myself before we start crossing lines we can't take back. What I'm trying to lay the groundworks for here, is to talk about two very recent, very relevant, boycotts for issues that are real to some people out there, but who's target feels like it misses the mark. A boycott for the sake of boycotting just so that someone out there can feel like they're actually effecting something, making a difference, without actually having to commit personally to the work of actually changing anything. They don't even have to actually do anything at all, just not spend money. What a sacrifice! (Uh oh, I'm talking about arm-chair activism anyway! Someone hide me before the Twitter vultures catch wind!)

First off is the topic I'm spoken about before- the Harry Potter Hogwarts Mysteries 'Boycott'. Now this is more the spirit of a boycott than an actual movement, as proven by the absolute deluge of pre-orders that the game has celebrated, but even in that spirit I find this proposed 'activist move' to be asinine at best. An attempt to aim at celebrity J.K. Rowling for her conservative views on trans rights, certain former Harry Potter fans and simple LGBTQ members and supporters looking for a fight have decided they are now supremely interested in the internet ramblings of a senile writer. Enough that they want the property she created to be burnt to the ground so that she can longer make money of it and then- presumably go destitute and die on the street? I can only assume that's the end goal. None of these people seem interested in trying to teach her and change her mind, they just want everything she's ever worked on to crumble around her. Which is... fair, I guess; let your vindictivness fly, I suppose.

But as I'm mentioned before, turning Hogwarts Legacy into the keystone of that battle against old woman Rowling is a bit like trying to shoot down the moon in order to devalue your neighbour's beach front property- at the end of the day there's more people who would harmed than just Rowling. And even beyond that argument which such 'activists' have brushed away with the cultist mentality of 'Sacrifices must be made', (again, totally reasonable people here) this wouldn't even directly effect Rowling anyway because she's already been paid for the licence. She's not working on the game, everyone who is has denounced her to varying degrees, and as a show of solidarity the team even threw in transgender options into the character creator menu. But some people still want to boycott the game because, why not? It gives them something to do, doesn't it?

Even more recently there is the Wizards of the Coast dilemma against various forms of content creators which has led to two major boycotts I've heard about. The first is the boycott of DnD Beyond, fuelled by the inside leak that all Wizards management cares about is DnD Beyond subscription numbers, meaning that mass cancellations are a direct attack against their parameters for success. And the other is a proposed boycott of Baldur's Gate 3. Wait, so to protest Wizards making it harder for 3rd party content creators to make products off the DnD game, they want to boycott the game of a 3rd part content creator which they based off the DnD game? Okay, I'm being intentionally facetious there, obviously the relationship between Wizards and Larian goes far deeper than what the OGL is attacking. Baldur's Gate 3 is licenced, and therein lies the tricky conundrum.

From one perspective, Baldur's Gate 3 is a paid for directed representation of the DnD brand which projects the characters and world of DnD's most popular setting, further propelling the very centralised eco-system that Wizards of the Coast are trying to create for DnD. On the otherhand, it's an almost totally unrelated video game made by a team that has absolutely no part in any of this drama and no blame. I would raise the issue of 'collateral damage', but we've already established that internet activists never cared about 'Danger close'. I suppose such an issue would really fall down to where you mark down your priorities and moralities, and who you're willing to try and hurt in order to get at someone that you don't like. Which is really at the heart of all Boycotts, is it not? The balance of the necessary to reach the worthy in which the ends must justify the means. A question for philosophers to bludgeon each other's face in over, no doubt. I'll be sure to wake up Darwin and tell him about it, he's always up for a scrap or two!