How Resistance Can Become Part of Our Everyday Lives

Resistance noun: the refusal to accept or comply with something; the attempt to prevent something by action or argument (Oxford Languages)

Resistance through being in community and supporting local businesses (South Congress St, Austin, Texas, istockphoto.com license)

A couple of decades ago, I developed an economic vote project for students in high school economics classes that I was teaching at the time. Students researched a company and presented their argument for or against buying products or services from it. This was not something students thought much about in their daily lives. Nonetheless, they deeply engaged in learning about a company and developing their position (recognized by a teaching innovation prize for the project). The students came out of the project with clear convictions about how to exercise their economic vote, based on their research and learning from the presentations of their classmates. 

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The current moment in our nation calls for resistance. It can be hard to figure out how to do it. In the hectic pace of modern life, it can be difficult to even find a moment to think about it. Resistance also sounds risky and something that might put you in jail, especially with the increasing crackdown on dissent taking place. Yet, if we consider exercising our economic vote as a form of resistance, it can become less daunting and eventually automatic. It provides a direction and focus for how we respond in these times, and it can become part of our everyday life. 

Choosing not to buy specific products or from certain companies sends a message about the kind of world we want to live in. As an individual, it may not feel like it makes much of a difference. But contagion can start anywhere. As more of us take similar stands about what we purchase and how we live, a powerful form of resistance can emerge. 

We know that government and politics have been heavily influenced by corporations and the billionaires who sit atop them. Their power has been on prominent display in the current administration.

The disproportionate influence of “big money” on politics is nothing new. It, however, has been growing a lot. Political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson documented in Let Them Eat Tweets that campaign dollars in the US from the top one-tenth percent of donors grew from 10 percent of the total in 1982 to 46 percent by 2018, with four hundred megadonors accounting for 22 percent of political donations. 

Now, it’s gone to the extreme. The richest man in the world gave almost $300M to one political party and its presidential candidate. That spending was critical to Trump’s re-election. Musk has been rewarded with immense power to disassemble the executive branch, while the President advertises his cars on the White House grounds. With government contracts in the billions for Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX up for renewal and expansion, Musk continues to fund Trump’s political machine.

Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the second and third richest people in the world, have also made no secret of their ‘pay to play’ approach. In addition, they’ve changed policies in their companies to appease the President and claim their seat at the table with the current administration. 

A clear form of resistance is to exercise our economic vote against the three moguls’ corporations. It can start with where many of us interface with their corporations in daily life and online– Amazon, Meta, and X– and be applied to larger, less frequent purchases like a new car [Tesla]. (There are also many other reasons beyond current politics to exercise one’s economic vote in these ways that I’ll touch on briefly later in this article.)

The Tesla boycott underway provides an example. Protests at Tesla dealerships help bring awareness to resistance against Elon Musk. Ultimately, not buying Teslas is what matters. This growing economic vote has become an important factor in declining sales. The drop in stock valuation has followed (prior to the tariffs that have brought down the entire market).

Had my family bought a car a few years ago, it almost certainly would have been a Tesla. Buying an electric vehicle (EV) is a clear choice these days, given the performance, minimal maintenance, and climate benefits. And Tesla has pioneered much of this. It's understandable to have a Tesla, so we shouldn’t shame current Tesla owners. Moving forward, however, there are now many more EV choices. It will be time to replace our 18-year-old, low-mileage family vehicle soon with an EV.  We’ll use our economic vote to buy a non-Tesla vehicle (though we may have to wait, with prices expected to skyrocket from the escalating global trade war).

I’ve been concerned about Bezos’s Amazon for a long time. Its monopolistic practices and tax maneuvers have given it an unfair advantage and decimated small businesses. When I mentioned buying local and resisting Amazon in a recent newsletter, a reader wrote me that she had broken up with Amazon in December and is enjoying the journey of slowing down, stopping the immediate need to order something, and thinking creatively about how to find items elsewhere. I can attest that life without shopping at Amazon is possible and enjoyable. I went to write a book review on Amazon a couple of months ago and was denied with the following message: “You must have spent $50 on Amazon.com, using a credit or debit card, in the past 12 months, to create reviews.” Thankfully, I’ve found alternatives to Amazon through online and local brick-and-mortar stores when I need a consumer good.

I don’t miss shopping on the Amazon platform, but Amazon is hard to avoid with its tentacles everywhere. With the lack of antitrust enforcement, Amazon has been allowed to expand in ways that regularly touch many parts of our lives. Amazon’s entities include a large presence in groceries and medical care via Whole Foods and One Medical. Ever since Amazon bought Whole Foods, I’ve largely avoided it. We’ve found alternatives from the corner grocery store down the street to the worker-owned Rainbow Grocery to a local San Francisco chain, Gus’s Community Markets. I’ve been a patient at One Medical for a decade or so. I will be finding a different medical provider this year. 

Then, there’s Zuckerberg’s Meta with its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms and Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). I haven’t used X in a couple of years, so I deactivated my account. I’ve stopped using Facebook and Instagram for the most part. What makes it hard to leave social media where you have been for a while is, of course, the people and organizations you connect to there. I plan to deactivate my Facebook and Instagram accounts this year, but will take a little time to let my connections there know where to find me.

Reducing time on social media and moving off platforms that propagate disinformation and vitriol is resistance. Shopping at local businesses and not Amazon or other big corporate retailers is resistance. Driving and riding in cars less is resistance to Big Tech (Waymo [Google], Zoox [Amazon], Uber, Lyft, etc.) and  Big Oil, which is also having another heyday in the dealmaking era of the federal government. Where options to cars exist, we can use them. If you depend on cars for most trips, perhaps you can combine errands and reduce time behind the wheel. We can all find ways to resist with our economic vote in everyday life.

This type of resistance also helps us directly address our biggest challenges. Less driving, consumerism, and time on digital devices (especially now with generative AI) reduce energy and resource use underlying the climate and biodiversity loss crises. Less time on screens and in cars helps us break down social division when we instead spend time in our communities and with others in person. Buying less from corporations and more from local businesses reduces economic inequality.

We, of course, also need a government willing to take on consolidated power and not be an extension of it. To that end, protecting our rights to speak up without repercussion and participate in free, fair elections is paramount. We know that these rights are under serious threat now. We can also think about our economic vote in these ways when we aim it against the Big Money supporting a federal government taking us in this dire direction. The main tool we have in our everyday lives is our pocketbooks.

It can be hard to change consumption, screen, or transportation habits. So much of modern society has been built around consumerism, digital society, and car dependency by the corporations that profit from them. However, we can each make some changes in our lives now. We can also advocate for policies and resource flows that make it possible to live more locally and less dependent on the corporations and billionaires bending government to their benefit. (I’ve written Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Community, and Local Economies through Systems Change to show how we can change the context that dictates human behavior, allowing us to live in ways less influenced by corporate capitalism and more beneficial to ourselves, our communities, and the environment.)

At the personal level, downsizing consumerism, digital society, and car dependency in our lives can boost our well-being. The personal benefits provide the primary motivation for many people to reconsider how they live. In change efforts, we can highlight the connection among our ways of living, resistance to the current system, and personal well-being. I’ll write more about this in next month’s article.

Our ultimate ability to protect democracy, address our environmental and social crises, reduce economic inequality, and support individual well-being lies in lessening the power of those with disproportionate influence on government affairs and society. Our economic vote and changing how we live are leverage against these powers. It is the resistance we need now and going forward.