End all your MAGA streaming services. I’m living proof you will defeat the FOMO.

Around 2022, when we knew we were losing Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, my girlfriend at the time stressed herself out trying to divest from every evil company’s revenue stream. She did all her research, and informed me we had no possible restaurants left for dinner. I gently argued that we’d at least tip our server, who needed us out dining to make their ends meet. Well, that ex-girlfriend of mine was right and I was wrong. In the collapse era, we need to boycott as much as possible.

Boycotts don’t have to be all or nothing. Look, I’ve spent so much time in the last two years since my dreams collapsed either unemployed or underemployed that I have to eat at McDonald’s. The app is the quickest way to feel full for under five dollars. I do this knowing full well that McDonald’s pioneered a lot of the worker abuse and exploitation that permeates late-stage capitalism. I have friends who work at McDonald’s and have health insurance because of McDonald’s…

…And yet, I hope to goddess that the people who are financially privileged enough to avoid McDonald’s are actively, loudly, and vehemently boycotting it. Climate change is an extinction-level event driven by capitalism. Corporations that put profits over people must be extinguished for humanity to have a chance. According to Yahoo! Finance, McDonald’s CEO to worker pay ratio is 1,082 to 1. That is obscene and a future-minded society with an equitable government would intervene.

It’s not about punishing success, it’s about punishing consumption that harms our species. 1,450 people died last month in Nepal’s catastrophic flash floods. 6,000 people are still unaccounted for. If you’re alive, you consume, but the victims in Nepal weren’t the people consuming 1,082 times more than everybody else. Yet, extreme weather events driven by late-stage capitalism caused icy rocks and debris to smash their skulls open while they were drowning. CEOs unaffected.

Given that my above-mentioned ex-girlfriend brought herself to tears trying to guarantee she never paid a bill that funded evil, there are some no-brainers. If you are collapse-aware and hoping a blue wave sweeps over the midterms two months from now, you really can’t justify paying for streaming entertainment. The public library offers streaming so you can borrow movies and shows commercial-free from home, and the selection is quite good.

Black Friday 2023 was the last time I paid for any streaming service. I was trying to be a cool dad, and I subscribed to all the deals I could find. A whole year of Peacock for $20? I don’t know wtf is on Peacock but there must be something good. HBO Max for a quarter of the price for the next three months? OK. I’ll add a calendar event reminding me to cancel in February. I turned our Roku home screen from an app graveyard into an open bar of media options.

My son still chose drawing pictures and playing video games with his friends.

I’d sit to find a show, but rediscover the “Surf Dracula” phenomenon. Basically, if you watched a show in the late eighties or early nineties called “Surf Dracula” then you could expect to see a vampire on a surfboard fighting witches and werewolves on a beach every episode. If you watch a show called “Surf Dracula” in modern times, you’ll spend the entire season with a regular guy who doesn’t polish his surfboard or receive an infected bat bite until the last ten minutes of the finale.

But even if shows didn’t suck (I don’t like that euphemism, but I did just reference vampires), the major streaming apps are mostly complicit in the current collapse of civilization. Let’s take a cursory look.

Amazon Prime: Jeff Bezos made a $40 million donation directly to the Trump family in the form of that stupid-ass Melania documentary. His worker abuse is legendary.

Paramount Plus: David Ellison fired Stephen Colbert as a favor to Donald Trump. I never glazed Colbert, but I am a journalist and can’t stand for the assault on free speech.

HBO Max: Stakeholders are attempting a monopoly with Paramount, and Elon Musk’s name keeps floating to the top as a sought-after investor. Even if they fail, Musk should be shunned from society for his DOGE terrorism.

Disney Plus: Subscribers intervened or Jimmy Kimmel would have met the same fate as Stephen Colbert. None of these business magnates are on the side of humanity. So why are so many liberals and progressive democrats giving them money each month?

Netflix: I only want to say Netflix is aware that consumers watch TV while also scrolling on their phones, and has refined the entire production process to cater to that behavior. Which is why Netflix originals feel different and the characters re-explain the plot every so many scenes. Slop.

What is the app for sports? Something-something Sunday package? I don’t know enough about sports to fully comment, but I am aware that the business side of sports is parasitic to our nation. Local governments provide billions in tax breaks for giant stadiums, despite consensus among economists that these investments provide no economic growth in the host communities. We’re back to my original fallacy of, well, we’ll eat at the corporate restaurant chains because the local server needs our tips.

No, this is literally humanity’s last stand. If we’re all too dependent on the system to buck it with a general strike, then the least we can do is refuse subscriptions to all the MAGA streaming services. I didn’t want to debate the merits of piracy in this article, but I’ll only say you can safely assume the cast and crew have already been paid by the time you think about firing up your VPN and downloading something. Except, I’m telling you, I’m several years clean and there are no shows I miss.

If artists in the media produce a work of art that stands the test of time, it will eventually arrive at the library. Please reconsider paying for shit you don’t need. Force corporations to invest in the welfare of humanity and the planet before giving them your business. Remember those old carpool posters, “When you ride alone, you ride with Osama!”…??

When you stream alone, you stream with Trump.

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