I bought nothing today!

November 25, 2005 is BUY NOTHING DAY.

I did. That's anticorporate. I know.

The rationale? Take this from BND:

"For 24 hours, millions of people around the world do not participate in a doomsday economy, the marketing mindgames, and the frantic consumer-binge that's become our culture. We pause. We make a small choice not to shop. We shrink our footstep and gain some calm. Together we say: Enough is enough. And we help build this movement to rethink our unsustainable course."

And for me, I succeeded. I did not buy anything - from fastfood to cellphone load and cigarettes. I may be new to this "mental environmentalism" and "buy nothing" movements, but hey, I did it. I didn't kiss the asses of at least two money-making monkeys in the Philippines - McDonald's and Marlboro (two brands I use before joining the movement) and Smart.

McDonald's and Marlboro are perhaps the most famous brands that are dissed today, but to little of non-Filipinos' (and even Filipinos') knowledge, in the Philippines one industry that needs to be fought is the telecommunications power. Virtually there are two major remote-control-grabbers here: Globe and Smart.

Every hour in Philippine TV there are about 2-3 commercials from both telecom companies. Not counting the not-to-be-mislooked companies like Sun and Bayantel. These companies battle each other with marketing tactics that are pretty much mass brainwash for me. They generally fool the Filipino TV-watching population into a largely corrupting business.

And so every day Smart and Globe (and Sun) take over Filipino mental environment. They pollute it. There is even a popular belief that Smart steals cellphone load by sending privacy-penetrating ads through SMS. Imagine the 8 million people losing P1 in just a day. This P1 will go to the telecom company, and they earn 8 million in a jiffy. Sinister, eh?

We have to stop these telecom companies' corruption and make them pay for what they have stolen! We have to stop them from emptying our pockets!

I did not buy any cellphone load today; even there was a big deal of pressure for me to reply to the messages I received. I simply disconnected myself for 24 hours.

But it doesn't mean that I stop using Smart. In fact, my plan is, very early tomorrow morning, I am going to re-load my account and register to Smart's bandwagon "Unlimited Text" promo. I will spend P30 for 3 days of unlimited texting (damn! That doesn't include texting my Sun and Globe friends! That's another story)...

Hell I will! I estimate I can send more than 3,000 messages in 3 days! I will totally exploit Smart's "generous promo" to the point of exhaustion. I will suck them dry.

That might spoil the company for now. But wait a little bit, and they will eventually withdraw from this advertising tactic. Pesky mosquitoes we are to them, but we already have drained their blood to the moment of death. And that, my friends, is victory over the money-making monkeys of Philippine telecom industry.