> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.
Not meaningful pressure, though, at least for large organizations. This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
These huge businesses and huge governments are too big for one person at the bottom of the totem pole to make a difference. Sure, they may share 1/N of the culpability for what their organization is doing, but if they rage quit, they will be immediately replaced with another body. The organization won't even notice it.
Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.
> One wallet changes nothing.
Once again, this is something I hear often and I strongly disagree. I'm lucky to be born into western civilization with the paradigm to respect the power of an individual. It seems to me it is eastern influence to speak in this dismissive way about individual actions. "No one is irreplaceable" is another common phrase. Someone says he decides to leave a community, and there's inevitably someone saying "goodbye!" with some equivalent of a mocking smirk.
I'm also lucky to have affected stuff myself in the past, e.g. I caused local government (~10 000 residents) to change. Actions of an individual very often do matter. It's just unfortunate we often don't get any feedback for our actions and it seems like they don't matter which demotivates people from any form of activism and puts them in this depressive, hopeless state of mind. Imagine how beautiful the world would have been if you had some kind of a debugging tool to inspect how your actions affected others, with a side by side comparison of your universe and some alternative universe where you haven't taken an action. This is also why I try to give feedback to people, send thanks to authors of free libraries etc.
That's a fun fantasy, but I think in my case it would lead to disappointment. I regularly imagine that I sowed the seed to cause X thing to take off in Y community, but it's going to turn out that it was just the zeitgeist operating every time, and the true role of my mind in influencing others is only that of a conduit, or sewer.
Until one day... Afroman releases a new album.
So what is the argument here? That it is irrelevant because there is no critical mass?
Do you think the French revolution happened in isolation?
The French Revolution didn't just happen spontaneously from individuals acting individually. You need leadership and coordinated action to change things. A small number of individuals acting individually, yet pushing in the same direction, will never move a needle.
Exactly my point. All that (and all the other things needed) did not just materialize out of thin air. It took decades and dozens of failed protests to get to that point.
Eh, it has an impact. It's not always obvious but it adds up over time. Use your analogy of choice: slowly building up pressure until it boils over or a small pebble starting an avalanche or whatever works for you.
I don't necessarily agree with the OPs approach. He could have filed a complaint or done any number of things that may have been better. But in the heat of the moment nobody is making perfectly rational decisions.
Regardless, we need to fight back against abusive systems on the big and on the small. We won't always get it right but the act of fighting is what matters.
Nope. It’s like thinking you can overthrow the government by littering. It’s just being lame. If you’re going to be lame to other people, don’t gloat about your lameness online. “If everybody littered, they’d have to do something about it!”
It's not littering. It shows why fax is stupid and they should accept email. Littering has no such benefit.
It's needlessly generating excessive amounts of trash and waste. It's wasting tax money. It's hurting the next blind person who won't be able to fax his documents because the machine is down/overloaded. It does not show why fax is stupid. It shows that faxing reams of unnecessary paperwork is stupid. It does not show that they should accept PDFs over email (genuinely a great way to get hacked). There is no benefit in trying to DoS the SSA office.
You kind of missed my point but that's OK. You can agree with or disagree with the action OP took, I'm not making a judgement call on that.
What I'm responding to the the notion that "no action you can take matters." Specifically this:
>Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.
I just don't believe that. Small actions do matter and are necessary because they enable the big actions later. You have to start somewhere. Even if it feels insurmountable. No major change ever just happened in isolation, it always happens when enough people have had enough and fought back enough that the change was inevitable.
What's missing is coordination. Coordinated individuals taking actions together can change things. But just relying on individuals stochastically, randomly acting doesn't work. You can't random-walk your way to political change, even if a lot of people are random-walking in one direction.
Worker rights didn't just spontaneously appear because enough people wanted them. They came about through organizing, coordinating and leading. Same for Women's suffrage, Civil rights, gay rights...
Then I'm guessing you don't vote, right? Because one vote makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.
One vote does, unlikely to be yours though.
How's Target doing? Zero impact?
They're still doing business. Every single day. With hundreds of billions in revenue and an increasing number of stores popping up all over the place. Impact can be non-zero and still be not enough to meaningfully change anything.
> This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.
It's not flawed at all. If the last five years have taught ideologues at Disney and in the video game industry anything, it's that you can waste hundreds of millions on ideology-drenched projects and get, say, 1000 concurrent players as your peak.
That's pretty vague. I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but OK.