"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal" - Emma Goldman
Let's be honest. Traditional voting in a democracy has very little individual benefit. This was loudly echoed by Russel Brand in his BBC interview that went viral recently. http://youtu.be/...
But that does not mean that your vote can not have an impact - it actually can ... if you redefine what a vote is.
In a capitalist market economy you actually vote every day. Every dollar you spend is implicitly a vote for the company or individual that you are purchasing from. So if you spend $100 at WalMart, you have given them 100 votes. These votes have real value - and DO make a difference. They are the real currency of our democracy.
So ... it is time that we as consumers and engaged individuals started giving more thought to our votes, and giving more of an effort to building voting blocks to push our views.
Now what I have written so far is pretty obvious to most engaged folks. But what I would like to suggest is that there are ways in our economic system to actually vote negatively, in an economic sense, to effectively throw a little sand into the gears.
Here are two examples:
1. Google has done a very thorough job of building up its advertising platform (AdWords) to allow companies to target their advertising. It really is a great system ... but if you understand how it works, you as a voter could conceivably use it to your advantage.
Advertisers pay per click. So every time you click on an ad, the company pays a fee to Google. So let's say you don't like WalMart. One option you could use, instead of just avoiding their ads, is to actually click on their ad. By doing so you are effectively sending a bill to WalMart, at virtually no cost to yourself. Done on a large scale it can cost the company a fair amount of their marketing budget (essentially you are helping them waste it), with a direct loss to the bottom line.
2. If you are tired of the NSA snooping, try gumming up the works a bit. Use an add on to your browser called Flagger (http://flagger.io/). Flagger automatically adds random key words to your browser search like terrorism, ricin .... (you select the words you want to allow). This add on, if used by enough people would effectively overload the NSA's filtering system, rendering it useless.
In a world run for and by the 1%, in a world where we have lost almost all privacy, and in a world where our democracy has been bought and paid for well before the actual voting ... its time to use alternate strategies .. to use the system against itself.
Do something at least marginally productive today .. try a little negative voting for your least favorite corporation.