Today is international Buy Nothing Day. Go ahead and try to buy nothing! If you are reading this today you most probably already failed. The electricity that powers your terminal, the Internet connectivity, the gas that heats up your room, today’s share of your health insurance – you buy all this from someone. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but one should be aware of the fact of constant consumption, and reflect on the consequences of each single intake.
The use of fossil fuel for heating is an obvious one, with climate change being discussed everywhere these days, but who supplies your Internet? Is there a big monopoly consortium behind the provider, are there maybe smaller, more ethical companies that can supply the same service? Can you switch your home or office to green electricity? What does your insurance company invest your money in? Find out!
So if every Euro/Dollar/whatever is a vote for a certain part of the economy, please be aware what or who you are voting for.
Here in Ankara I was encouraging people to take part in a small action, but I assume the late notice and the concept of culture jamming being somewhat unknown around here caused the lack of willing participants. So my host Gulnur (thank you for having me!) and I will go to the centre of town now to print some flyers and stickers and spam alternative meeting points with them. And hopefully right after today people will start to gather in large groups to prepare massive actions for next year’s Buy Nothing Day. 😉
As a nerdy sidenote: I just realised that Adbuster’s BND wiki is running on a Micro$oft powered webserver, see this error page. Not very revolutionary, dear Adbusters tech team. Please follow these instructions and apt-get install apache2. Or ask Ecobytes to host your wiki entirely on FLOSS. For free of course. 😛