Success Quote by L. Neil Smith

Smith is puncturing the comforting fantasy that consumer virtue is automatically political power. The line reads like a shrug, but it’s really a rebuke: if your activism depends on mass coordination, you’re already playing a game designed to exhaust you. Boycotts feel clean and personal - don’t buy the thing, keep your hands morally unsoiled - yet he drags the spotlight onto the unglamorous mechanics: persuasion, scale, discipline, patience. That’s not a call to do nothing; it’s a reminder that collective action is labor, not a mood.

The subtext is classic libertarian impatience with “symbolic” politics. Smith, a science-fiction writer known for individualist, anti-coercive instincts, treats the boycott as an irony: an individual choice that only matters once it stops being individual. The sentence also carries a quiet cynicism about human coordination. “Thousands - maybe even millions” lands like a cold splash of reality, and “usually not successful” isn’t evidence so much as a verdict on attention spans, free-riding, and the friction of everyday life. People like the idea of pressure; they dislike the sustained inconvenience that makes pressure real.

Context matters: boycotts surged as a modern ritual of accountability, especially as brands became proxies for politics. Smith’s point is that the marketplace isn’t a magic lever; it’s a crowded room. If you want change, you don’t just opt out - you organize, and organizing is the part most people would rather outsource to a hashtag.