George Hahn

Note, according to Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist and professor at Harvard who analyzed 323 nonviolent and violent mobilizations between 1900 and 2006, when at least 3.5% of a country's population actively engages in a peaceful protest movement, it has always resulted in political change.

My go-to framework for understanding the rise of fascism in America today is the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s.

The most chilling parallel between then and now is the relationship between business elites and authoritarians.

German industrialists weren't necessarily enthusiastic Nazis, Timothy Snyder told me, but they saw Hitler as a tool to crush unions and undermine democracy, the source of labor's power.

The most powerful American business leaders are making a similar bet, trading their support for tariff carve-outs, a promise not to regulate AI, and hundreds of billions in shareholder value.

I believe consumers can force a change in the incentive structure around American CEOs.

The clearest possible proof point that the incentive structure is changing would be for resist and unsubscribe to show up in earnings calls.

That would signal that business leaders feel emboldened to speak up and insist that democracy and the rule of law prevail.

That said, earnings calls aren't the only relevant metric.

According to Brayden King, a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management who studies social movements and corporate social responsibility, and Sarah A. Soule, dean of the Stanford Business School, the typical boycott doesn't have much impact on a company's market cap.

In their 2007 study of 342 boycotts against U.S.

corporations between 1962 and 1990, they found that boycotts, on average, caused a 1% decline in a company's stock price.

King said in 2017, the number one predictor of what makes a boycott effective is how much media attention it creates, not how many people sign on to a petition or how many consumers it mobilizes.

The reason media attention matters so much is that boycotts aren't a tool to permanently destroy shareholder value, but rather a vehicle to pressure leaders to change their behavior.

Some people mocked me for saying that last week I was keeping Instagram despite our boycott.

Fair, but be practical.

Infrastructure plus the distributional scale of Instagram's 3 billion monthly active users is the peanut butter and chocolate for a political movement.

Sharing screenshots of your canceled subscriptions inspires others to resist and unsubscribe.

Equally powerful, the community in the Scott Galloway subreddit is sharing tips for canceling, including how to get a refund on the unused portion of your annual Amazon Prime subscription.

Infrastructure begets infrastructure.