Do Nothing to Become an InActivist!

It sounds pretty easy, go a whole day without making any sort of transaction, but when you think about it, about all the transactions you make in a day, it’s actually quite hard. Every time I swipe or show my metro card that’s a transaction, paying my bills and even sending a text, which is buying communication. Can I go an entire day without buying anything? I honestly don’t think I could. Not right now at least with so much going on. I can, however, respect Buy Nothing Day. Ted Dave had an amazing idea when he created Buy Nothing Day.

Ted Dave started Buy Nothing Day in 1992 but it has since been taken over by Adbusters (Canada’s largest export magazine). It has grown into a huge event filled with large and small scale actions, rallies, protests, performances, street parties, donations, fasts, workshops and much more in twenty nine countries. Ted Dave says Buy Nothing Day was “designed to remind the consumer and the retailer of the true power of buying public… It is an avenue of expression for people who feel that their lives and dreams have been marketed back to them, people who all to often feel frustrated with how much things cost, the way advertising panders to them.” (Dave) He wanted people to “participate by not participating”.

In Free Culture Lawrence Lessig explains “we come from a tradition of “free culture”—not “free” as in “free beer”…but “free” as in “free speech”, “free markets”, “free trade”, “free enterprise”, “free will”, and “free elections”…A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free” (Lessig XIV). If we can have “free speech” and “free will” why can’t we have a literal “free market”? We have so much “free culture”, freedom of speech and will, it makes sense to have free market. Personally, most of my stress is from budgeting; worrying about whether or not I’ll have enough money for this and that. It would lift a lot of stress from people.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: The Penguin Group, 1972. Book.

Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture. New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 2004.