Shop your politics

Headline:

MapQuest Sees 1.5 Million Downloads After Defying Trump's 'Lake America'

I downloaded MapQuest to my phone. 

MapQuest Icon

Google and Apple changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America on their maps. MapQuest did not. 

I wanted to send a signal to the marketplace that I liked what MapQuest did.

I try to do business with people and brands that represent my values and politics. I own Lilly stock because I thought the company might do well, and I liked their GLP-1 product, Ro. I buy Bounty rather than Brawny paper towels because the Koch Brothers own the Brawny brand. I try not to shop at Home Depot because Home Depot's owner is a big Republican donor. I liked Amazon and Jeff Bezos better when he was the nonpolitical owner of The Washington Post, leaving it alone and letting democracy live in the light, rather than cowering in fear of Trump. 

Last year I bought a Chevrolet Blazer electric vehicle rather than a Tesla. Damned if I was going to send Elon Musk an extra nickel. I want to feel good about my car, and I wouldn't feel good about a Tesla. I would feel like I sold out, that I tolerated Musk's White-supremacy racism, and cavalier chainsaw cuts to government. 

Politically-influenced shopping is complicated by crosscurrents. I bought the Blazer from a local dealership, TC Chevy, owned, by a Republican, Alan DeBoer. I like the fact that DeBoer has been civic-minded and philanthropic locally, without being a showoff about it. He had been a Republican state Senator, in the Oregon 3rd district Senate seat I write about frequently. Public campaign reports show that he donates to Republican candidates in amounts befitting his business success, but he isn't Trumpy or an election denier, and I consider that a positive. I perceive his political motivation to be mostly frustration with Democratic groupthink in Salem. He isn't wrong. I have urged the Democratic candidate for state Senate, Denise Krause -- the Democratic alternative to Republican Brad Hicks, who I have described in posts to being tethered to Trump -- to do her own untethering from the Portland-centric Democratic consensus.

I am not embarrassed to be driving a Chevy with a license plate holder that says TC Chevy.

I buy Hoka athletic shoes now, and not Nikes. The Hokas are more comfortable, with a slightly wider toe box and softer cushion than the soft Pegasus variety of Nikes I formerly bought. I feel bad abandoning the Oregon-headquartered Nike, but I am conflicted. Phil Knight gave $2 billion to Oregon's Health Sciences University. That gets him some latitude. He has given millions of dollars this cycle to elect Republicans to state offices, and that is a negative. I am also conflicted because I own Nike stock. I bought the stock before Knight became locally famous for big contributions to Republicans. Maybe Republicans with narrow feet will buy Nike's shoes. I hope so.

I like shopping at Costco. They pay their employees well and they treat their vendors fairly. They demanded that Trump return the tariff money that courts determined was charged illegally. Good. I have an indirect personal interest in Costco. Valley View Vineyards makes and sells some excellent premium wines, and I hope they buy grapes from me that end up in their $25, $35, and $50 bottles of wine. They also sell award-winning inexpensive wine of blended varieties, Rogue Red. Costco carries it. The owners of Valley View tell me that Costco is very fair to deal with. 

The surge in MapQuest downloads shows that I am not alone in doing politics-influenced shopping. The discussion around artificial intelligence reveals the value of location-tracking data. That data gets sold to advertisers. I am no longer offended by my lack of privacy. I expect it. I assume that my car, my phone, and every app I have ever added to my phone tracks me. Google knows what is in my emails. My browsers track what I type. AI reads my blog, and reports as fact that pumice soils create excellent wines based on the micronutrients available to the capillary roots of grape plants in the extremely fine-grained pumice. I trained AI.

We are constantly sending signals into the great collection of available data in the mysterious cloud. The cloud is omnipresent and is striving to be omniscient. It knows what we buy and consider buying. There is no hiding. All we can be is a tiny bit intentional. 

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