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Scott Galloway can pinpoint the moment—the straw that, in his words, “broke the camel’s back.” The New York University professor and podcast host remembers watching in horror in January as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse and U.S. citizen shot and killed by immigration agents, as a “domestic terrorist.”
“I felt it was so depraved… and it was so offensive to me,” said Galloway, a professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “I was so anxious about it. And one of my favorite sayings is, ‘Action absorbs anxiety.’”
So he got to work. Fueled by anger at the Trump administration’s immigration policies, he thought about what would get the president’s attention. Galloway, who co-hosts the Pivot podcast with veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher and routinely speaks with top Silicon Valley executives, decided to zero in on those Big Tech leaders who are often seen hobnobbing at the White House and Mar a Lago.
What he came up with was a targeted boycott—”a temporary, coordinated pullback from consumer discretionary spending,” as he puts it, and one that seeks to do maximum damage in the industries that seem to call the most shots in Trump administration policy: tech and AI.
Resist and Unsubscribe, Galloway’s online campaign, doesn’t involve marches or picket lines. Instead, it asks consumers to each make a small, personal sacrifice: Cancel their subscriptions or delete the apps of the ten consumer tech companies he has identified as having “outsized influence” over the national economy and President Trump: Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Paramount+, Meta, Uber, Netflix, OpenAI, and X. The site links to the “unsubscribe” pages of each company.
In a world where the platforms these companies have created have become so ingrained in society and daily life, Galloway is also asking consumers to reflect upon giving up convenience for a higher purpose. Do people really need to use two ride hailing apps, he asks, or to subscribe to the paid versions of both ChatGPT and Anthropic?
“Just as with dry January, this is an opportunity to rethink or recalibrate,” he says. “I think this is, at a minimum, an opportunity to reduce your spend… It’s also to recalibrate how you feel about these companies, how they acquit themselves in terms of who they support and why, and whether or not you need to be spending this money with them.”
He also singled out eight other companies—AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Dell, FedEx, Home Depot, Marriot, and UPS—claiming that they enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and is asking consumers to withhold business from them, too.
Galloway says he has heard directly from several board members or CEOs of the companies he singled out—with most saying that they understand what he’s doing. But many say they are stuck navigating a very turbulent situation.
“The president and administration have done a very good job of creating incentives for the most powerful business leaders to go along with his policies, keep quiet if they disagree with them, and maybe even enable them through direct support of the infrastructure,” Galloway says, referring to companies that work with ICE. “And then they text me and other people I know saying that they are nauseous at this—which doesn’t do anyone any good, to complain about him behind his back.”
Galloway says he has empathy for business leaders who are staying silent despite qualms about the Trump administration’s actions. Most are afraid of speaking out, he says, “because the president will do everything in his power to make that person and that company pay for it.”
His hope is to create a new incentive for these timid business leaders, by wiping out a quarter billion or more from their combined market cap. Galloway estimates the financial impact of the movement by looking at the Resist and Unsubscribe sites’ page views and calculating a 5% conversion rate, with each converted visitor canceling an average of two subscriptions that result in $30 in monthly revenue lost. A ticker on the site estimates that this number, annualized, adds up to some $248 million that has been divested at publication time. (This estimate has not been verified by Fortune.)
To be sure, a quarter billion in combined impact isn’t a big blow to companies worth hundreds of billions—or even into the trillions. And Galloway is aware that he’s facing an uphill battle, especially in an era where social media-fueled boycotts and strikes are increasingly common. “Since starting this, I’ve become a pretty serious student of economic strikes; most don’t work,” Galloway said. “One-day strikes are more cinematic than they are effective. They’re more of an annoyance.”
There are some examples of collective action by consumers leading to success, though. Galloway points to the global economic boycotts of South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s that pressured the government to end Apartheid, or the more recent movement to unsubscribe from Disney after Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was suspended following criticism from the Trump administration of the comedian’s comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Jimmy Kimmel Live! was reinstated.
But just because very few work, doesn’t mean they can’t work, Galloway says. “What I’m trying to do is send a signal that you have more power than you think, and you have a weapon hiding in plain sight, and that is your spend,” he said.
So far, Galloway says he thinks his movement is a “modest-to-tangible success.” “What I have heard from these companies is [Resist and Unsubscribe] is a discussion in product management meetings and in the cafeteria, but it isn’t a discussion yet at a board level,” he said. “So the reality is I still have some work to do on creating enough of a signal, enough awareness, enough unsubscriptions, such that the CEOs and boards of these companies feel that the incentives have changed.”
For now, he points out, it’s still growing. “My mom used to say, ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time,’” Galloway said. “So I wouldn’t be cynical or I wouldn’t be discouraged thinking you can’t have an impact. I think collectively, we can all have a huge impact.”
He likens this moment in history to the U.S. Civil War, the World Wars, or the Civil Rights movement—real inflection points. And he wants to have a clear answer if he’s ever asked, “What did you do in the war?”
“It just feels good to be doing something,” he says. “It feels really good to be doing something with other people.”
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