Stamps and Cybertrucks
Lessons from two object-focused protest movements
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
The Stamp Act crisis is one of the most significant and iconic episodes in America’s road to revolution. It is also one of the most misunderstood. We cannot understand the Stamp Act without the context of an overlapping controversy that began earlier– resistance to the enforcement of customs laws limiting and taxing imports. Stamps were only the latest innovation in a series of post-Seven Years’ War revenue-raising measures.
What the Stamp Act did was provide a new symbolic opportunity for political action. Americans angry about shipping disruption and impressment had to target the Royal Navy itself– an armed state institution. There is a class problem with this. Hardened sailors, desperate youths, and enslaved workers– exactly the coalition, almost verbatim, reported in many of the anti-enforcement riots– were willing to attack the navy. But merchants and professionals were much more reluctant to personally join or publicly support these protests. Generally speaking, they didn’t.
Stamps were different. The stamps themselves were a physical symbol of British authority. Keeping them from landing or being distributed was simply easier than attacking a ship, but it was also easier to stomach. The stamp collectors, meanwhile, were local individuals with strong connections who had effectively bought their posts from the state. Merchants unwilling to threaten navy captains were much more open to intimidating these men: often middle-aged, peers from the same social class, and representing but not necessarily acting as the state.
Back to the 21st century: most Americans today have an attitude toward protest and disruption that is closer to 18th-century merchants than 18th-century sailors. I’m not speaking of right-wing desires to shoot protesters here– I mean something simpler. Many people who share nearly identical liberal or left politics don’t actually participate in protests all that much. And those protests we do participate in are usually far less disruptive than the boisterous property damage of the 1760s.
This is an adaptation to changes in political conditions, including the increased legitimacy of law in democratic states and the much greater powers of surveillance and punishment that they can wield today. We don’t live in small port towns where unruly officials can be physically located and harangued. Our norms against physical violence have change significantly in the last two and a half centuries. But this does not mean our protest strategies have nothing to learn from the past.
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The Tesla protests are meant primarily to encourage a boycott, which makes them consumer activism. This is a dangerously limited form of political activity. What a consumer does is benefit from low prices– the consumer choice mechanism is a key part of capitalism’s exploitation of labor. By choosing the cheapest goods, consumers drive prices down, pushing employers to drive wages down and maximize profits from workers. While the power of the worker is to control production, the power of the consumer is to optimize consumption, and with it, exploitation. The more a worker asserts themself in the workplace, the more material power they have: unionized workers get higher wages and more leverage over bosses, both in their individual workplaces and in political conflict more broadly.
The reverse is often true for consumer activism. A national group dedicated to buying houses built only by well-paid workers and food grown only under fair working conditions is a group of people who will have less money because of that action, and they will have less money in direct proportion to how much they act. Because money is the mechanism by which boycotts work, they cannot easily target economic exploitation itself.
Given all of this, consumer activism tends to work best when it targets goods that consumers don’t need to buy and/or can easily substitute with non-boycotted goods. Relatedly, it is most effective when there are significant differences between competing firms. Boycotting something like cobalt mining to get better working conditions is difficult– going after such a notoriously exploitative industry that is part of diffuse supply chains, it is hard to reliably avoid the firm you are targeting, and difficult to find an alternative producer who isn’t doing the same things you are protesting against. Tesla, in contrast, is an ideal target. For all the problems of auto manufacturers generally, only one of them is linked to the world’s richest man and his anti-constitutional coup. General Motors and Ford have nothing to do with this.
Like other forms of protest, consumer activism also works best when it can present itself as normal. For much of the public “politics” is an electoral practice that exists outside of their lives, and bringing it into the supermarket feels like an unavoidable intrusion. This is a particular problem for progressives and the left, since by nature we are actually seeking a departure from the world as it is. In today’s cynical political environment, any protest movement on the left is susceptible to being tarred as holier-than-thou and moralizing– you think you’re better than me huh?
The Tesla protests turn that on its head. A movement to crush the wealth of the world’s richest man (for now) in order to save federal workers and the Constitution is definitionally idealistic. But the actual practice of this movement makes its targets seem like the oddballs: look at you, driving a car that would look ugly in a forgotten Nintendo ‘64 racing game. Those cars don’t even work! How much did you pay for that?
A particularly gleeful video I saw a few weeks ago is instructive: in it, a man flips off a cybertruck driver in an urban environment with a look of mocking delight on his face. Then he proceeds to run alongside the car while continuing to flip its driver the bird, until it finally accelerates enough to escape him. This protester is having fun.
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His joyous obscenity suggests the first of four lessons we can draw from the combined example of the Stamp Act and Tesla protests: an atmosphere of invitation. The Tesla protests invite the public in: by hating on these hideous vehicles, you too can be part of something bigger. And anti-Tesla protests welcome people of diverse political views and with different levels of willingness to protest. A fired federal worker willing to hold up a sign, a jokester with impressive stamina happy to run alongside a car, experienced protesters unafraid to be more disruptive– all can serve a purpose.
American proto-revolutionary activism in the 1760s, while more disruptive, was similarly inviting and collaborative. Stamp collectors and loyalists wrote with horror of joyous port-dwellers literally pouring out into the streets to join their neighbors, seemingly unprompted. Most American protests leading up to the revolution were not like the Tea Party or the Gaspee Affair– incidents in which a well-connected local elite mobilized a few dozen key supporters to do something very illegal.
Rather, most protests combined a range of actors and coordination levels. Newport’s August 1765 Stamp Act riots began with wealthy merchants William Ellery and Samuel Vernon organizing a respectable enough protest anyone could participate in– a demonstration mocking the ‘Stamp Man’. That action provided an opportunity for a number of dedicated partisans and opportunists to gather manpower and act in more specific ways: a man named Samuel Crandall, who was friendly with the businessmen, provoked a street confrontation with local loyalists and then with customs officials. Unorganized neighbors joined in, and took their own actions against pro-Stamp Act elites, including by attacking their homes and running them out of town.
Second, the diverse and fractious nature of these coalitions makes it all the more important for protests like this to have and build a shared moral narrative. This does not need to be completely shared. Ask 100 anti-Musk protesters about their political views and you will likely get nearly 100 answers. But liberal capitalists, constitutional conservatives, and committed socialists can offer similar answers about the protest itself: Elon Musk is destroying the government. His cars suck. He’s a Nazi.
This shared narrative allows a diverse array of political actors to get along, but also to work together even when they don’t. People with different views, and especially people who believe in different tactics, can’t always collaborate openly. But a newspaper publisher who felt the Stamp Act was wrong but was sympathetic to the collectors themselves, or a 21st-century writer who says Elon Musk is destroying the Constitution and must be stopped, does not need to endorse or even desire Tesla dealership arson (something I do not endorse or desire) in order to benefit from whatever political utility that might have if it occurred. The coalition works regardless. Protests today must take into account profoundly different political conditions, laws, and attitudes toward disruption, but the underlying utility of flexible, coalition-based action is true across time.
Third, anti-Tesla and anti-Stamp Act protests both succeed because they have concrete targets. Stamps and Cybertrucks give us something to attack, a sort of political effigy. A common illusion I have to correct in early American history classes concerns King George: students have learned from 250 years of national narrative that he was the villain of the revolution. This is wrong. George had limited power, and many colonists actually hoped to expand it and wield it against Parliament. Rather, as the monarch, George was a metonym for the state. It’s much easier to say that the King is oppressing you than outline the complicated trajectory of British state power and the institutional nexus that was responsible for America’s situation in the 1760s-70s.
In today’s yet more impersonal world of power, we need similar metonyms that capture our grievances– ICE detention facilities, the Qatari jet, munitions meant for Israel, Elon Musk himself. Like stamps and Cybetrucks, our choices here should be neither purely symbolic nor purely practical. Targeting each of the examples I gave would simultaneously build political consciousness on relevant issues and practically restrict harm in the world right now.
Fourth and finally, the revolutionary era makes clear the importance of specific goals with a path to victory. Political organizing requires you to ask how questions: by what means will this action lead to changes we want? For the Stamp Act crisis, the answers were clear: by disrupting the enforcement of unjust laws, we directly improve people’s lives now. In so doing, we also build a coalition that can change political conditions and not just symptoms. In time, this became the germ for the revolution itself.
Likewise, the answer for the Tesla protests begins with direct material politics: “the man who is hurting us will lose billions of dollars.” In the process he loses some of his ability to fund Republican candidates, becomes an anchor dragging Republican approval down, and is hopefully pushed from government. Tesla’s stock price also, in effect, becomes a billboard for liberal and left political discontent. We win by limiting Musk’s power, removing him from government, and/or materially and politically weakening the right. Finally, the groups, experiences, and justifications built in the course of this protest can be foundations for a renewed progressive movement in the US.
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Since I first drafted this a few weeks (months?) ago, Tesla’s stock price has begun a curious and irritating rebound. Despite the fact that the firm’s revenue is small and shrinking, the brand is toxic, and the cars will kill you, investors are returning to buy TSLA. I suspect this is temporary, but it is impossible to know how long this state of affairs will last– the investor class’s appetite for self-delusion is nearly bottomless. And financial markets enable– for a while– a kind of rational madness. Since everyone else is acting like TSLA is a good buy, it makes sense to join them… for a while anyway.
The protests have partially succeeded in their key goal, but that success has painful limits. Elon Musk’s role in the federal government appears sharply reduced. Shareholder demands for him to actually run the company instead of playing President appear to have helped make that happen. But he isn’t out of the picture. Musk was at the White House today for a farcical “white genocide” allegation against South Africa. DOGE is continuing its malign work within the bowels of the federal government, and its illegal impoundment of funds has largely held as policy. Millions of people will die from USAID cuts alone.
No amount of consumer protest will restore that funding. This and the stock rebound should be a warning about the limits of market-based activism. I’ve heard it said that a lot of writers only ever actually have one idea they elaborate on over a career. I think I have at least two, but the pertinent one here is something longtime readers will be familiar with: markets are an architecture that is hostile to collective intention.
You can use architecture and infrastructure for purposes it’s not intended. A stadium can become a shelter; a mill can become an apartment complex. But that temporary shelter might not protect inhabitants properly; those new apartments might be drafty without modern insulation. The Tesla protests are a great strategic opportunity to wield market pressure for political ends. But they leverage a form of power— consumer choice— and a set of institutions— financial markets— that are at odds with our more general goals. Protests like this can only be one part of a broader strategy.
A final lesson from the Stamp Act: revolutionary change is a long road. There was a decade between the events I’ve gestured at here and the revolution proper. Many Stamp Act protesters did not live to see their eventual victory. Many others would have trouble even calling it a victory, with the direction the new republic took. Our current political moment demands both the urgency to act dramatically and the patience to act consistently.