Commercial Disobedience (Why have I never heard of it?)

I know, google's first page or so would have you believe that this phrase has been uttered maybe twice in the past decade. First, in 2002, by a guy named Grimmelman at the Laboratorium, who used it to describe the time an RFID security tag fell out of a book while he was shopping, and he set off the alarm a couple times just to irritate the bookstore, then set to dreaming that if a million people did this, bookstores would stop putting the damn things in books.

More recently, Mark Cassello wrote about it in Huffington post, explaining that mass retreats from Netflix and Bank of America qualify as nothing more than collective consumer action, falling short of actual commercial disobedience. Then he goes off on a tangent about Apple's evilness, I guess because Steve Jobs was barely cold, as if a collective consumer decision to not buy ipads would qualify.

I'm not buying that any more than I believe that occupying public space is civil disobedience. Commercial disobedience involves asserting oneself outside the seller-consumer relationship, at least until such time as purchases are made compulsory. I guess you can get partial credit for resisting peer pressure to buy all the latest crap, but that's only the mildest form.

To disobey would be more along the lines of people who refuse to be foreclosed and ousted, who sit tight in their homes, maybe even force the bank to rove in court that it owns the mortgage (not so easy, given the slicing and dicing that occurred). Pickets and protests on corporate grounds, that's disobedience. The 1% want to have it all, and exclude us, so why are we not sitting in at their lunch counter, moving to the front of the jet? That's commercial disobedience.

I'm too big a wimp to crash a board meeting or an exclusive golf resort, so I satisfy myself with smaller disobediences. One great thing I read about lately was to take credit card offers and other postage-paid return envelopes and stuff them with whatever will fit: plastic, other junk mail, and messages to the mail-room staff like "Unionize!" or "Your CEO golfs and calls it work." My sister said she's enclosing stacks of coupons that arrive in her mailbox, since the people who open it may benefit.

Then there's the kind of disobedience that amount to dismissal, turn your back on commerce, drop out. Doing so completely is so rare that I bet you don't even know anyone who's done it. Short of pemmican in a pit house, you can pick and choose divestments, from ditching an IRA that leans on big bad companies to non-cash exchanges of food with friends.

Finally, there's armchair disobedience. Like sitting here and advising people to occupy foreclosures and walmart, peppering my prose with improvised sarcastic devices. So few people have ever seen this stuff that I can confidently state that no actual disobedience has come of it.

No doubt there's more. Somebody must have been thinking about this before. Civil disobedience brought and end to Vietnam and legalized racism, and the term is something that is still widely taught today. But our anger at the savage capitalism that is to blame for so many of our social and economic woes remains inchoate (behold the aimless occupiers), marginalized (Ralph Nader's accurate but bland blandishments), or plain old stupid and dangerous (tea partiers who think the government is the problem).


Already, some have the support of their local sheriff, maybe even their congressional rep.