A sub-point here is that the "buyers" who were boycotting were making a very serious life change
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Not riding the bus anymore meant changing how you did your daily commute and how you as a non car owner traveled in general
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Which is why the economic impact mattered. They notice if you stop doing something you do every day
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Replying to @arthur_affect
If it's an occasional, luxury purchase - buying books, watching movies - the effect is far more dilute
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Replying to @arthur_affect
There's the ugly corollary of that point - it's very hard for a boycott to be effective that doesn't inflict pain on the boycotters
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Boycotts are damaging when they had a very good reason to expect your loyalty and you become disloyal anyway
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Replying to @arthur_affect
The last point is there was a very clear thing the boycotters wanted - erasing the line between the black and white sections of the bus
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Replying to @arthur_affect
A goal that was simple, easy to do and - importantly - didn't objectively cost all that much
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Replying to @arthur_affect
That was really important. It gave an obvious exit strategy to both sides
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Replying to @arthur_affect
So the bus company could say "Fuck it, we're conceding this one thing" without unconditional surrender
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And, importantly, so the boycotters had a finish line in view
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Replying to @arthur_affect
If MLK had asked people to undergo tremendous personal hardship "until systemic racism is over" most of them wouldn't have even started
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Replying to @arthur_affect
So the typical boycott on the Internet is the opposite of that boycott in all these ways
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