Sick of hearing about LiveJournal yet? Well, tough, ’cause here’s some more.

It was gnosis who pointed out the pink elephant in the room about this whole “Good Friday Content Strike ‘08″ thing. He asked, Do strikes online really work?

And I thought about it, and I was gonna answer him there but instead I’m answering him here, because I think the answer is… complicated.

In short form, it’s “yes”; online strikes work just as well as they do in real life.

In short form, it’s “no”; online strikes work just as well as they do in real life.

Thing is, strikes and protests are, when you get right down to it, a way for an individual to up their importance relative to a powerful minority. Traditionally, strikes have been about labour. One coal miner complaining about pay is easily replaced, but a thousand coal miners complaining about pay aren’t. And a thousand coal miners refusing to work are not only hard to replace but put a big dent in the money pockets of the employer; a bigger dent, in fact, than would have been produced if the employer had simply increased pay in the first place. So employers listen — often grudgingly, these things are rarely smooth and tensions and livelihoods are on the line on both sides — to striking workers because the pain of not listening is worse. In the really real world, the strike is the primary tool of the union, and the original point of unions was to give individually replaceable workers a way of demanding fair working conditions. The employer looked out for himself and the union — which, when it came down to it, was essentially your mates on the factory floor, plus some suits from Elsewhere — looked after you. The union’s sole power came from its members, because they had the thing — labour — that the employer wanted. Withholding that resource by striking was their bargaining chip.

Protests are a similar thing but generally aimed by citizens towards governments or consumers towards corporations. Individually, the government doesn’t much care if I don’t like their policies but when three, ten, a hundred thousand people don’t like it they listen; democracies listen because their mandate for government comes from the citizenry, and non-democracies listen because a hundred thousand angry citizens is, in effect, an army.

Protesting corporations is a newer idea again and, in practice, is often fairly ineffective. For a protest against a corporation to work, such a significant slice of consumers need to be involved that it becomes almost physically impossible to organise that many people to all do that all at once. And at the end of the day, Nike still makes shoes in sweatshops (they just say they don’t).

So, ‘negative’ (avoidance) protests against corporations are historically doomed to failure and that is why, as far as I’m concerned, the Good Friday LJ Content Strike is a rubbish notion. It’s a nice bandwagon to jump on but at the end of the day you’re a noisy minority and SUP knows that. You aren’t gonna change their mind. Protests might feed you small victories — the interests list being uncensored, for example — but when it comes down to Money, they just don’t care. The ’strike’ is the functional equivalent of you deciding not to use your computer for one day because you don’t like Microsoft. Yeah, real effective.

That being said, however, as an individual consumer you are never helpless in the face of enterprise, you just gotta think different. The strike is about changing SUP, and it’s worthless. What’s really needed is for people to change themselves.

You remember how everyone really hates Internet Explorer? And how people bitched and moaned and Microsoft went, “Ha fucking ha what are you gonna do about it?” And for years and years the browser wars were considered dead until some young upstarts came along with the product that would eventually become Firefox. And the users saw it and they moved. In droves; Firefox was a superior product to IE6 and people flocked to it. It was a protest, but instead of a protest against Microsoft it was a protest for Firefox. And Microsoft’s business model suffered; just like it’s taking hits from companies like Google and Apple (remember the Zune? No-one else does, either). The monopoly is crumbling, and it’s not just because people are angry at Microsoft, it’s because they’re supporting its competitors.

And this is what it comes down to; if you don’t like LiveJournal, don’t use it.

Don’t try and dress it up in self-righteous justification about how the company ‘owes’ you change. It doesn’t. Yes, you’re a consumer and yes without consumers LJ is worthless; so what? You are not going to kill LiveJournal through direct action, just like no-one killed Microsoft through the same. The only thing you can change is yourself.

So just. Stop. Using. LiveJournal. Not for one day; forever.

Don’t bitch about how “all [your] friends are there”. If you really don’t like LJ that much, then erase your shit and get the fuck out of dodge. It’s not like they’re the only game in town; InsaneJournal, JournalFen, WordPress, Blogger, Vox, hell, your own fucking domain.

Because it’s true that if enough people go, the service fails — like MySpace is failing and like Friendster failed before it — but it’s also true you can’t force the failure. You can only force yourself.

So you wanna do something useful? Instead of the ‘content strike’ this Friday, hold an exodus. Archive your journal and just leave.

You’ll feel better afterwards, honest.

Comment?

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