Drawing Lines

I boycotted Yahoo in the mid-2000s. The reason was specific: Yahoo had identified a Chinese blogger named Jiang Lijun to the police, and he got four years in prison for writing pro-democracy posts. Reporters Without Borders got hold of the case. It was concrete—a name, a sentence, a company’s complicity.

Microsoft was doing the same thing at scale, filtering the internet for the Chinese government, blocking posts with freedom and democracy, selling them the tools to do it. So I stopped using Microsoft products. I couldn’t afford to boycott Google (I needed search), but Yahoo and Microsoft felt like places I could actually refuse.

Whether it mattered is the obvious question. It didn’t. Both companies kept operating. The thing about boycotts is you can’t opt out of these systems entirely—you just choose which ones you’ll decline. At the time it felt like clarity. Now it looks more like theater. I was right that it was wrong, but I overestimated the power of my refusal.