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Nintendo can disable your Switch 2 for piracy in the U.S., but not in Europe, as confirmed by its EULA (en.as.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn't a political action. Your political action is political action.

If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.

How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I'm sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the "voting with your wallet" thing doesn't stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    No, hold on, you get past the "other than get involved with politics" part very quickly there.

    You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?

    You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That's getting involved with politics. If that doesn't do it then the next recourse isn't to spend money for posturing, it's to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.

    That's what you can do.

    What you can't do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That's not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing this thing and the vast majority of people who will buy it as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don't care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.

    This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say "but what else could I do besides getting into politics" and pretend they've done something by buying some shit over some other shit.

    Nah, man, that's not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don't need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.

    But just to be clear, "voting with your wallet" is doing nothing. That's the choice you're making.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    To be clear, I agree that you don't have to be into politics. Not caring enough is fine. Social media expressions of opinion are always black and white. AI is the end of the world, Nintendo's piracy stance is a war crime, Windows is the antichrist... You're allowed to be bummed out by any of those and not do anything about it because you're not bummed out enough. That's a refreshing degree of online moderation, if anything.

    What I take issue with is confusing those sorts of market results with actual political action. A brand can decide something unpopular isn't worth pursuing for PR reasons, but they can also decide it IS worth it. To my knowledge the people I shared Netflix accounts with that were impacted by the location checks are still impacted by those. Your EA and Uber examples were barely impactful at all until regulators got into the mix, and regulators got into the mix hard about those issues. I invite you to go look up how both of them played out, because, man, is there a difference between how fast the companies reacted once there was someone in a public position going "hey, maybe we need to take a look at this".

    Mistaking how a brand manages its public perception for effective political actions is dangerous. Letting corporations appease you through those means only serves to set up a bad precedent when those brands decide the time has come to squeeze and go hard on monetization. You need public institutions that are strong and vigilant enough to put some bite behind that public displeasure.

    Can a boycott work? Sure. As a coordinated political action, the consumer-side equivalent of a strike. This takes just as much work and coordination as any other political activity.

    But spending your money based on the outrage that reaches you through social media is not a functional way to generate change. It's just you being part of the mass of consumers brand manage with their messaging tools. You're a rounding error in a stat, part of the manipulation of the market that is built into every corporate action. When you do that you're a focus group data point, not a political actor.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    We won't indeed. And that's why the neoliberal fantasy where the market self-regulates is bullshit.

    We won't because our set of incentives isn't infinitely fluid to the point where every negative, hostile or illegitimate action is unprofitable. And we shouldn't have to, because there already is a mechanism to account for that fact, and it's the law.

    We're not meant to judge our spending money in fungible commodities and entertainment based on political stances and larger considerations about long term convenience. We're not meant to weigh whether Nintendo has a right to disable our device remotely as part of the choice to play a cute racing game.

    That's not the sphere where those choices belong. We've been told it is by neoliberal capitalists who don't want a government to tell them what they can and cannot do, so they keep insisting that they can be as crappy as they want because if they do something the public won't like they will "vote with their wallet" and the market will settle in the optimal spot of profit vs service. And if it doesn't a competitor will give people what they want and they'll buy that instead.

    But that's a lie. It never worked that way, and it doesn't work anywhere close to that way in a global online oligarchy. You're meant to be able to buy whatever the hell you fancy because there is supposed to be a state regulating things to be safe, fair and protected when you engage in small commercial exchanges.

    Because you need Office, Microsoft doesn't get to be the Antichrist. Because Netflix has the show everybody wants to watch it doesn't get to be the worst. The idea is those companies are supposed to be held to the level of being-the-worst-Antichrist we all deem minimally acceptable. Market forces can play within that space, and no further.

    So you want Netlfix to not be the worst? Get a legislator to enforce it and watch Stranger Things to your heart's content. Because whether you like Stranger Things isn't supposed to be connected in any way to how Netflix conducts its business or how abusive it can be in the process of doing so.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, if noone cares, then your issue maybe just isn't that important.

    I don't think that's the case, but we have to account for the possibility that your priorities just aren't particularly good priorities that other people care about.

    I say I don't think that's the case because plenty of people do care about some of this stuff at least to some degree, or at least agree with it when asked.

    People tend to be very down on the system or on politicians or on the ability or willingness to do anything in the common interest, and that's mostly part of the liberal lie as well. There's plenty to be done and plenty of people willing to do it. Those people need the power to do it, though. Sure, getting those people to where they need to be is hard, particularly with leftie types who will immediately get discouraged the moment their politicians aren't paragons of justice with a magic wand to fix every issue, but that's not the same as saying nobody cares.

    I'd much rather have people get motivated than discouraged, and I don't need to win every fight, especially not right away. It'd rather move in the right direction than pout about it, even if the short term practical outcome is the same.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Look, I don't think anybody has an obligation towards constructive optimism.

    I do ask that those who don't at least take care to not be destructive in their pessimism, or at least not to let those who are deliberately destructive to get in a position where they can be more destructive out of being despondent.

    That's the thing, right? It may not be your turn to make things better, but if you are mindful in how you get out of the way somebody else may take things to the place where you can be. The part that worries me is how many people in that same spiral end up doing nothing when they get the chance, or so mad that they just want to tear things down without caring about what gets put in their place.

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