Using a Glitch App to Support a Movement

If you’re online often enough, chances are you’ll see news about workers unionizing or boycotts against large corporations. As Glitch software engineer Sarah Zinger writes, it can be difficult to remember all the movements, let alone support them. So instead of having to keep track yourself, why not let technology do the heavy lifting?

Not that long ago I was thinking about how I should probably be more selective in where I give my dollars on the internet. But turning every single routine website visit into an ethical question is sort of exhausting and probably not that effective so I made an app on Glitch to help.

I go through a few phases: I hear about the latest atrocity happening at Big Tech Company, how they are supporting ICE, or refusing to recognize a labor union, or are poisoning our air and water, or whatever, and I feel the urge to do something about it. So I will stop using their services for at least a time.

The trouble with this approach is that I’m something of a cynic and a bit lazy, and have historically relied on Twitter as my news source. Which leads to questions in my brain like: Does it really matter if I don’t visit Amazon.com today if I rely on their AWS services? Yes, I wanted to support the Vox Unionizing efforts—congrats by the way—but they run like... a lot of websites. Am I supposed to just like remember not to click on all of them? That seems hard. Did I mention I’m lazy?

And in truth boycotts work best when they’re run by an organized effort that has strategically identified an opportunity for change, not just the random half-hearted-fact-finding of an individual who has (surprise!) discovered a less than savory outcome from a capitalist organization. So I decided to prototype a boycotting browser extension on glitch to see if that would be a good idea.

Here’s how it works:

I like it for a few reasons. For starters, it turns out this kind of thing takes very little time to build a small version of, which is immensely satisfying to me. It also gives power to organizers to know how many people are participating in a boycott, rather than little old me who is channeling my inner Chidi from The Good Place wondering if buying Almond Milk today could land me a ticket to the Bad Place tomorrow.

Plus, it's empowering if I know I’m part of a whole bunch of people doing the same boycott. I like the idea that we could move away from “Is this company evil?” (I’ve heard there may not be any kind of ethical consumption under capitalism?) and towards: “Hey, we won’t support this specific business practice so stop it or else.”

I reached out to one of my favorite community organizing groups here in the city and they weren’t particularly interested in working on it with me, so I suspect this like all of my side projects will continue to fizzle out before it really takes off. But just building out the prototype has been a lot of fun and a great reminder that we all have control over our own browsers to some degree. If you want to build your own extension feel free to remix it and see where it (doesn’t) take you!