Scott Galloway is Calling for a Big Tech Boycott — Here’s Why

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Scott Galloway, welcome back. Recently you launched a campaign to “Resist and Unsubscribe.” In your call to action you write, “First we must recognize that the president is unfazed by citizen outrage, the courts or the media. He responds to one thing, the market, the most potent weapon to resist the administration is a targeted month-long national economic strike. A coordinated campaign that attacks tech companies and firms enabling ICE to inflict maximum damage with minimal impact on consumers.” Now, look, people are going to listen to this idea and say, Well, how haven’t the people that have been protesting in the freezing cold in Minneapolis had an effect? I mean, what is your boycott trying to accomplish in addition?

SCOTT GALLOWAY: Yeah. Well, that’s — first off, Hari, it’s good to see you. That’s the operative term is, “in addition.” I think protests are really inspiring. It just feels good to do something with other people. I think labor strikes are powerful, getting people registered to vote, media coverage like you’re doing is important. But if you look specifically at where the president has walked back plans to either annex Greenland or walk back tariffs — really crisply — it’s been when either the bond market falls or the stock market falls. And what I’d like to think we’ve zeroed in on is if you were gonna find the soft tissue in the market right now, it would be 10 companies responsible for 40% of the S&P. And that those companies are not only enabling this president or sometimes providing infrastructure for ICE, but they’re especially susceptible to a slow down in subscription revenues.

So if you were to try and send a message by not shopping for groceries from Kroger, you’d have to get five families to not buy any groceries for a year for the same economic impact as canceling one ChatGPT subscription, based on the ratio of revenues to market cap. So I’m trying to figure out a way to impact and send a message to these corporate leaders who the president listens to and to the president with a minimal amount of disruption to consumers’ lives. And the free gift with purchase here is if, like me, you go on to resist and unsub, you’re gonna find out you have four AT&T accounts, three of which serving iPads — one with a Blackberry that you haven’t used in eight years. You’re gonna find you have three Apple TV+ accounts. You can find your subscriber to Amazon One Health that you didn’t even know you didn’t cancel six years ago. So in sum, this is a high impact way to send a message and you might save some money along the way.

SREENIVASAN: So, you know, you target a group of companies. You say — two categories. One is called the ground zero, and one is called the blast zone. You say, “Ground zero and blast zone businesses don’t represent the totality of complicity, but rather the jugular of American authoritarianism.” Which company — companies are in which category and how did you decide?

GALLOWAY: Well, the — what I call ground zero is big tech companies that trade for trillions of dollars in market capitalization are effectively the people sitting around the table when he prostrates them out for a photo op. And who he seems to be obsessed with, and quite frankly, have figured out that it’s a pay-for-play administration, where if they give the president enough money, they might have their deal approved, or they might be able to skirt tariffs, or they might be lining up for government backed debt financing of their data centers or chip facilities. So essentially ground zero is Big Tech platforms. And that’s Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta. And then the blast zone is companies that have much lower market caps but are enabling directly ICE, whether it’s AT&T, Hilton — there’s a variety of companies that are specifically and directly aiding ICE’s efforts.

And, but I wanna be clear, I’m not…as a guy with some economic security, I don’t feel like it’s up to me to be — or my right to be the arbiter of telling who to subscribe from what. I’m trying to make it easy for people to unsubscribe and send a message. And also, you may decide that you wanna just pause it and then resubscribe in March, or you might decide that you didn’t need this stuff and you want to keep sending a me — a message. What I’m trying to do is send a signal to consumers that a weapon hiding in plain sight — if like me, they want to send a message and they want to feel as if they’re doing something — that that weapon is the most radical act in a capitalist society, and that is non-participation. And all of us could probably afford to spend a little bit less. Similar to dry January, where a lot of people recalibrate their alcohol intake after a month. This is a chance to recalibrate your automatic renewal subscriptions where you probably are spending too much money.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you’ve called yourself a protest cynic in the past. What changed?

GALLOWAY: You know, Hari, when I, when I saw Secretary Noem describe Alex Pretti — an ICU nurse serving veterans as a domestic terrorist — and claimed that he was brandishing a weapon with intent to massacre federal agents, I was so rattled by that statement, both in terms of a lack of respect for the dead and sort of this Orwellian call to ignore our eyes and ears, that I decided I wanted to do more than just hector from the cheap seats. And one of the reasons I’ve been able to have such a nice life is when I was younger, I wasn’t that afraid of public failure. I’ve started a lot of businesses, applied for jobs I wasn’t qualified for. And I worry as I get older, I’m getting much more prone and comfortable with complaining and hectoring and not acting. So I wanted to get on the field and I wanted to do something. And like Dan Harris says, Action absorbs anxiety. This feels really good to actually be trying to do something.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I wonder if this kind of a protest works, if it’s long enough? As you’ve described, these are enormous companies. Can’t they just ride this out? Will they even notice if let’s say tens of thousands of people unsubscribe? But they have millions of customers.

GALLOWAY: Oh, a hundred percent. But, you know, death by a thousand cuts, if there’s enough cuts, you do have an impact. I’m very analytical. I’m getting between 60 and 100,000 — or we’re getting between 60 and a 100,000 — unique visitors to the site: resistantandunsub.com. I’ve loaded both all the site analytics, my email inbox, my social media platforms, screenshots to both ChatGPT and Claude, the free versions, and asked it to estimate the pers — the number of unsubscribes we’re on track for in February. And right now it’s saying we’re gonna do somewhere between a 100 and 200,000 unsubs. I feel like that — my math is, that’ll take out somewhere between 150 and 200 million in market cap outta these companies. My goal is to take a billion. That is not enough. 

And what I’m finding — I’ve heard from 20% of the CEOs, and the way it’s been described to me is the product management teams and management, middle management’s talking about it, but it’s not a discussion at the board level yet. (08:34): But I feel this is just another action in addition to protests, in addition to getting people to register to vote in addition to media coverage that, and, you know, the great people of Minneapolis, what they’re doing. You know, I want to be a small hair in the horse’s tail that people notice. But you’re right, I’m not — I’m not so far, I gotta be honest, the administration hasn’t backed down in these companies, I’m not sure I’ve noticed. But that, I don’t think that’s a reason to stop. I think every, I think every effort counts for something.

SREENIVASAN: You know, when you hear from these CEOs, when you hear from these different companies, a lot of them will probably tell you, Look, nothing that we’re doing is illegal. And some of them might use the rationale that, Look, my responsibility is to the shareholders of this company and the pension funds and everybody else to make sure that the stock stays up. And it’s also a slippery slope if I decide to back away from this administration or the next one, what am I gonna do? How do I keep track? What’s your response to them?

GALLOWAY: I try to tell them that I think history has pretty blunt and clear around this, and I’m remiss to compare this administration to the Third Reich. I think that’s unfair. But I think we can draw analogies from late-stage Weimar Republic where there was a loss, there was inflation, there was a loss of cultural and economic standing of middle class men. And also you had industrial captains of industry who basically made a deal with some of the fascists, including Hitler himself, that said, If you crush the unions we’ll ignore this slow burn towards fascism because you’re gonna make us much richer. And what I hear from these CEOs privately when they text message me, is that they’re very upset about what’s going on. But nobody wants to go first for fear that they’re gonna be smack down hard. A good autocrat punishes whoever goes first. So what I’m trying to encourage ’em to do is to take collective action. 

But Hari, on a more personal level, what I say to them is, what’s the point of having all this money and building such an amazing company if you don’t have some fidelity to the rule of law, competitiveness, basic rights? A lot of these folks are immigrants themselves of these companies. You know, what do you wanna be remembered for? And at a minimum, stop using the term stakeholders, which everyone was using, and just use the term shareholders because it feels as if you’re ignoring stakeholders — including the U.S., immigrants, gen — the Constitution. 

But I do have empathy for the fact that unless it’s collective action, it’s gonna be very difficult for any one firm to go first. But I am shocked and disappointed that more of these individuals have not spoken out when they are speaking out privately to each other, but they don’t wanna speak out publicly. So I, you know, again, I go back to the notion, how do you wanna be remembered? What’s the point of having all this money if you can’t be at least nod to some of the principles that have given you so much wealth and built, helped you build, such an amazing company?

SREENIVASAN: Yeah. I wonder if, you know, we have seen examples of protests that work and protests that don’t, I mean, there were calls for people to boycott Tesla while Elon Musk was, you know, taking a chainsaw through different government agencies. You had a significant response to Disney, for example, when Jimmy Kimmel was canceled for a few days. You know, is this, is it the actual protest or is it the visibility? Is it you and I talking about it that makes a difference?

GALLOWAY: That’s a great question. So I’ve done a deep dive around — first off, let’s be clear, the majority of economic protests don’t work. They come and go and have no impact. And it’s like a tree falling in the forest. And I’ll give you two examples. The most recent Disney and Jimmy Kimmel. When Disney decided to put Kimmel back on the air, the number of unsubscriptions was actually declining. It was media coverage and the impact of their brand that they were worried about. And if you go back to the Montgomery, Alabama strike that people point to as kind of the example of a successful strike, history likes to depict it, or most people think of it as a brave woman refusing to give up her seat. It was actually a 12-month sustained boycott where Dr. King organized carpools. And over the course of a year, the municipal transportation authority was losing a quarter of a million dollars a month. And then after a year, they decided to desegregate the buses. So the reason I’m not calling for a one-day strike, I’m calling it for the month of February, and I may leave the site up if I can get enough momentum, maybe we continue it, add companies, take companies off. But generally speaking, the economic strikes that work are cumulative. They build over time. And it’s more about, interestingly enough, not only media coverage, but traditional media coverage.

SREENIVASAN: Right now it seems like it’s really hard for the average American family to extricate themselves from the companies on your list. You know, 83% of U.S. households are shopping with Amazon, which is 40% of all the U.S. e-commerce in the country, right? And when you look at the platform of Amazon where there are thousands of small retailers who really need Amazon to survive, I mean, this seems so inextricably, inextricably linked that, I mean, we don’t have kind of a fair marketplace where we can just say, Well, I’m not gonna use Amazon. I’m gonna use this other one that’s just as good.

GALLOWAY: You’re exactly right. When industries are allowed to consolidate to the point where there’s just basically oligopolies of non-monopolies, they’re able to extract greater rents, not only in terms of price, but in terms of a lack of options. So my home, one of my homes in America — I don’t like coal fire plants, but I’m still gonna turn on my lights. And that’s the only electricity that’s offered, comes from a coal fire plant. And when there’s a small number of tech platforms who basically control the media, control e-commerce, control search, it gets increasingly difficult to unsubscribe.
Now, fortunately, a lot of the subscription revenues, I think people are gonna find, they have duplicates of, that they can go to one LLM, they can go from six streaming media platforms, they can go from —
I found out I was taking 350 Ubers a year, and because Uber has consolidated the ride hailing market, they have raised their prices seven to 10% a year versus inflation. (17:57) And I’m paying literally double what I was paying just seven years ago. And so it’s been a chance for me to say ; alright, I’m gonna take the tube more. I’m gonna take the subway more, but the consolidation of these – of industry across pharma, across chicken – creates higher rents, including a lack of substitutes or a lack of options and the big discussion around our politics has been around affordability and unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet. Affordability means one, in my view, free trade. This tariff nonsense is nonsense. But also a breakup in antitrust.

I think we need a trust buster here to ensure that there are choices which ultimately create a re-transfer back of capital and power from shareholders and organizations to labor and to consumers. But the reason why it’s so hard to unsubscribe from Amazon Prime is what you said, there’s just very little choice and very few substitutes, and you find that across all these big tech platforms. So in sum, a concentration of industry and monopoly power extracts rents across a variety of dimensions.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think there’s something that’s changed in the DNA of, kind of, who we are as a country? I mean, you know, famously from Boston Tea Party on, I mean, our founding was really out of protest. And while we do see people standing in sub-zero weather in Minneapolis and in Los Angeles and in Portland when ICE comes to town, I wonder, you know, the rest of the country seems to be watching.

GALLOWAY: I think we do suffer from an idolatry of innovators and an idolatry of the dollar where our heroes are now billionaires and captains of industry as opposed to elected officials or athletes or people who lead, you know, collect, you know, civil rights actions. So there is sort of an obsession, I think, or for lack of a better term, idolatry of a do — of the dollar. However, I am hopeful because if you look at…it’s so easy to become bereft and think that the nation has never faced challenges like this. 1% of the population who owned slaves controlled the government in the 19th century. We were interning Japanese families — many of whom had kids serving in the European theater because we saw them as a threat — and basically put them behind barbed wire. We have faced tests of our democracy before, and each time our democracy has come back, you know, stronger and healthier.

And I like to think this is one of those moments where maybe we’re recognizing the rule of law competitive markets, the respect for immigrants, that we shouldn’t be sending people to black sites outside of their home country where they have no rights, which is the definition of a concentration camp, where we need co-equal branches of government, where we should not have federal officials who wear masks. 

I’d like to think that this is helping a lot of us understand that a lot of the wonderful things about America have been taken for granted and that they require a continued investment. And I’d like to think — and I see a lot of this in terms of the protests — that people are being activated and that there’s a lot of people who are very committed to making America, America again. So I’m actually quite hopeful that this has been a wake up, a wake up call for many of us, Hari–

SREENIVASAN: Scott Galloway, professor, podcaster, and now activist at resistandunsubscribe.com. Thanks so much for your time.

GALLOWAY: Thank you, Hari. It’s always good to see you.