I sincerely hope there's less content here than Reddit, forever. I hope the UI keeps the masses out, and the technically savy are the only ones here.
I want to doomscroll less, I want to be astroturfed less. I want to interact with more humans and fewer bots, even when that means I interact less. I want fewer AI prompts, AI Art and corpo spam ads masquerading as engagement. I want less video and more text. Overall, I want to be spending less time on the internet, on my phone, and I don't want to hear about every last toxic thing Trump did to drive me crazy. Lemmy helps me control that feed better, so I deleted my reddit account and I hope to stay here until I manage to stop opening social media at all.
Lemmy right now feels like the internet before the long september. I hope it never changes.
So, some of this would occur but I can think of two reasons why it wouldn't be a linear tradeoff. I dunno why but I decided to write a scroll about it, even tho nobody is gonna read it.
"Bare Essentials" are price competitive - Basic groceries like milk, eggs, dry goods, canned goods, etc., are produced by a large arrangement of producers, and also quasi-local (big ag owns all the farms, but certain farms produce for specific regions). This means that it's hard to corner the market on these goods. Keep in mind brand-name foods collude to push against this price competition, but only to a certain extent because grocery store "value brands" can become irresistible if they're half the price. The price of kraft mac and cheese is tethered to within a couple bucks of the value brand next to it on the shelf.
The "Not Bare Essentials" products (Entertainment [incl. Tourism, Dining], durable goods, luxury items and electronics) are produced by different corporations than the bare essentials groups. Megacorps like Amazon do have some stratification across the entire goods spectrum (mostly by reselling/market tolls) but they're also exposed because the margins on the nonessentials are better because of issue #1. So a boycott of these groups would have a significant effect on all retail and retail-adjacent companies. That's like 12 out of the top 20 companies in the US, roughly 3.2 trillion in revenue that could take a 20% hit to their balance sheet. That's 2% of the US GDP out of those 20 companies alone, enough to flatten the GDP curve in a given year. That kind of effect would result in a panic among global decision-makers.
However, there are major issues with the 'buy nothing boycott' plan:
the idea of getting 10% of the people in the country to buy into the plan is pretty far-fetched. Buying things basically daily is a (bad) habit of nearly all Americans and breaking that cycle will not be easy. Not eating out, not taking vacations, not buying christmas or birthday gifts, and replacing these activities with zero or near-zero cost activities will come at an enormous social cost as compared to people not boycotting. This can be mitigated by trying to enact pacts with friends and family and entering into buy-nothing local groups, as well as focusing on a barter economy that sidesteps retail and services.
the concept of a sustained boycott will get harder and harder in the imagined scarcity, planned obsolesce environment we live in. Cars break down, clothes wear out, everything requires upkeep, etc. Obviously this can be deferred and stretched (I'm never selling my already 10 year old car, for example) but the boycott will fray. This can be counteracted by more people joining than those exiting, via media and grassroots efforts.
Overall: If 10-20% of Americans actually bought nothing (very unlikely) for a sustained (months, even more unlikely) period of time, the outlook of the GDP would be very noticeable. If that could be sustained (by more people joining than leaving) then you'd absolutely see major changes in policy. It would start with corporate layoffs, but then graduate to price cuts, sales of production facilities, drops of industrial output, and then finally decreased energy consumption and industrial inputs. That would be a national security emergency that would force bipartisan political change, because energy and industrial potential are the two primary metrics of nation-state success for both hard and soft power.