Data Über Alles
Last week, The Berliner ran a fantastic piece on the city’s buyer’s remorse per Tesla’s gigafactory on the outskirts of the German capital. By all appearances, enthusiasm for the project now feels for most like a burning-at-the-urinal after similar shortsightedness in the dark corners of a Berghain bender. Add to that Tesla recalling all 46,000 of its cybertrucks, a staggering demand collapse, and a wave of international sabotage and vandalism – and yikes.
Who could’ve seen it coming? As the article notes straight out of the gates, it depends on who you ask. Musk wasn’t coy about his fascist affinities, nor was he a terribly impressive intellectual force. For anyone with even nominal historical literacy, he’d been peacocking it all for more than half a decade. That the adults in the room surely saw that cliff approaching and gunned the gas nonetheless tells us important things.
Namely, it tells us that every overpaid clown within 30km of Alexanderplatz who declared their full-throated “commitment to Tesla” ought to be tithing 30% of their takehome to antiracist organizers and researchers (and probably retaining them as consultants). Not just as penance and a charitable contribution toward those who’ll shoulder the cleanup – though there is that. Rather, because those organizers are likely to make far better business decisions in this climate.
How do we know that?
Well, we can start by just cross-referencing the share-price journeys of Target and Costco with their respective compliance once Trump issued legally meaningless executive orders around DEI. Until Trump started tanking the economy, gutting federal programs with the precision of a wet fart, Costco holding firm on its commitments paid steadily increasing dividends. Target, on the other hand, has suffered such losses its own shareholders are suing the company for inflating the risks of DEI programs.
[Costco (blue) vs. Target (pink), first 3 weeks of the Trump admin]
Who could’ve seen that coming? As with The Berliner story, it depends on who you ask.
Measuring Mandates
Last month, investigative journalist Greg Palast released a report on the 2024 election in the US. What it demonstrated is that the real winner was voter suppression on a scale unseen since Jim Crow. According to US Elections Assistance Commission data, 4,776,706 voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls. This included, for the first time since 1946, more than 300,000 votes challenged by vigilante vote-fraud hunters, and unprecedented voter-intimidation tactics that included bomb threats shuttering 31 polling stations in Atlanta, alone.
As Palast points out, if these exclusions were random, they wouldn’t much matter. They were, however, nothing of the sort. Per the report:
“[A]n audit by the State of Washington found that a Black voter was 400% more likely than a white voter to have their mail-in ballot rejected. Rejection of Black in-person votes, according to a US Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, ran 14.3% or one in seven ballots cast.”
If every legal voter had been allowed to vote, if all legal ballots had been counted, Trump would’ve lost Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, handing his opponent a tally of 286 delegates in the Electoral College. Rather damningly, Palast concludes:
“If not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”
This doesn’t even account for the voters who eschewed Kamala Harris over her refusal to stand against the devastation of Gaza. As a recent YouGov poll indicated, of the 19 million who voted Biden in 2020 but abandoned Harris in 2024, fully one third cited Gaza in their decision. It was the top reason provided, beating out the economy and immigration, costing Harris more than 6 million votes. In states that swung from Biden to Trump in 2024, 20% cited Gaza in their decision to abstain from voting entirely.
This final data set draws into stark relief that attempts to re-litigate the election miss the point. The state of play has fundamentally changed. Companies kissing the proverbial ring have placed a spectacularly bad bet. And Trump’s fickle good graces and penchant for petty retaliation should have been the least of their worries.
Blood in the Water
Taking Palast’s election data into account, the fact that Target’s stock is down 24% since punting its DEI programs isn’t the least bit surprising. Nor is the fact that it’s down 10% since Black religious communities baked a boycott into their observance of Lent. Turns out when you bomb-threat people into silence in one space, they can and will find ways to express themselves elsewhere. That companies caving to Trump haven’t run those numbers or gamed that out is a scorching competency assessment.
The problem brands face now is that grassroots organizing discipline is a muscle. The more you use it, the more stamina, dexterity, and credibility you accrue when it comes to things like boycotts. Target’s most organized opposition is Black and Latino – communities with world-renowned successes in boycotts and community-worker solidarity. All of which predates the light-speed knowledge-production and dissemination of platforms like TikTok — the very impetus for the recent failed US ban.
Businesses are getting blindsided by this because they’ve prided themselves on ignoring it; proselytizing an indifference to historical literacy, or any notion of selfhood that isn’t keenly entrepreneurial. That is, individual. Isolated.
Meanwhile, the studio audience of The Daily Show is collectively cheering the firebombing of Tesla dealerships the same way the world has collectively rallied around Luigi Mangione. Hustle never truly offered escape velocity from material despair. That game was always rigged. And now the bill is coming due. Class consciousness has not only entered the chat – the more billionaire state-capture hacks away at the social contract, the more extra-parliamentary methods become the only game in town.
The standard line about left-wingers camped out on the margins of popular sentiment shit the bed once Ben Shapiro’s followers dragged him for denouncing Luigi Mangione. More recently, the GOP was forced to call off town halls, increasingly humiliated by blowback from their own constituents. All of which casts a different light on Pennsylvnia Dems flipping a state senate seat this week in deep-red territory. One can ignore these indicators out of the childish belief business is somehow apolitical, but indicators they remain.
The question is: With their bottom-lines in the crosshairs, will brands adapt? Do they even know how to?
Competitive Differentiation: How Bad Do You Want it?
While major brands like Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola have eaten serious losses in recent years over similar, global boycotts (last summer, despite a change in leadership, Starbucks reported a loss on the order of Target’s, while McDonald’s reported its first decline since 2020), smaller local players around the world have stepped in as alternatives, resulting in stunning growth in market share. For some, this has necessitated expansion of their production facilities to meet growing demand. It’s a charge largely led by people of Arab and Muslim heritage – in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Egypt. More recently, a Palestinian-helmed cola company in Sweden has replicated the model, gaining traction across most major EU cities.
None of this is anomalous. The Montgomery Bus Boycott that ended racial segregation in the US was bolstered by similar shifts. Early on, Black taxi drivers provided rides at the cost of bus fare (before police enforced a minimum-fare law). The same is probably true of any successful boycott one might point to. Reason being: Boycotts are not merely protests; they are not strictly instances of negation or withholding. They’re reallocations of consumer spending. Put another way, they’re market gaps. Opportunities. The flipside of the blows boycotts are delivering at present is what that organization can deliver in terms of returns.
Will brands study or respond to that with the same zeal applied to keyword searches? Do they know how to speak that language? Judging by the lack of Western coverage given to impressive success stories on that front, my guess is –at very least– the Western business class fancies itself above taking cues from the formerly-colonized world.
The track record certainly suggests few are reading the numbers. It doesn’t have to be that way.
