Supporters of Palestine have called to boycott the payment platform Stripe after its CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison - an Irish-American billionaire who has advocated for Palestinians in the past - posted on social media on Wednesday about his run on the beach in Tel Aviv and how it was “great” to be back.
Many responded to his post on X by pointing out that he was only thirty minutes away from the Gaza Strip. Conservative estimates say nearly 44,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza and two million have been under constant Israeli aggression as they fight what UN experts have called “'deliberate starvation”.
Some drew comparisons to the Academy Award-winning film, Zone of Interest, which depicts the everyday lives of Germans who lived next to the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War Two.
Reminiscent of “Travellers of the Third Reich” by Julia Boyd
I don’t even know wtf Stripe is, but by all means boycott the company because you don’t like what the CEO did. Fuck the employees who might get laid off as a result, the important thing is to feel like avenging angels and lash out at a CEO. Brilliant!
Imagine a tech company laying off workers for literally any reason, must be the fault of anti-war people right.
ok. what should we use instead? paypal?
Trocador.app, Coingate, etc… They have a feature called AnonPay. Ik it’s for crypto, but still.
these only handle crypto. they’re not a replacement for stripe, and saying that it is is a very large stretch. stripe is used for handling fiat payments, and there’s a reason even Liberapay only supports that and Paypal: because all others are worse or questionable.
such services (recurring payment services) can’t really make use of crypto right now anyway, can they? they would either need to store your keys, or create a specialized wallet program and stop being a service, but the latter would also remove any possible transparency that the donation receiver may want to provide
The majority of people who use stripe probably dont even know it, good luck boycotting that.
Lol yeah. Stripe is B2B and working with billing code is the worst trifecta of difficult, boring and very important. No company is swapping out for the Palestinians.
Alright, then they’ll just have to stop consuming a lot of things they buy online. Also they can’t buy from places that use Stripe terminals. I’d like to see an entire group of people get up from their lounges and buy grocery in person because their local home grown market with home delivery uses stripe checkout.
If someone gives a shit about this, they’ll find a way to avoid Stripe. This might surprise you because you’ve presumably have never given enough of a shit about a cause to actually modify your behavior for it, but deciding to participate in a boycott does in fact mean having to sacrifice your own convenience and limiting the options available to you.
Well I’ve hardly ever seen people genuinely follow through on what they say. The people I met are mostly all bark but no bite.
As for myself? I’m an anarchist. I really don’t give a shit for either side of the argument. I’ll gladly watch the world burn :)
Boycots are not only for consumers. They can also be implemented by vendors. Stripe is a large company, but it has competitors.
A tobacco shop near us just moved from stripe to another vendor.
Guessing it was tobacco law related or something internal to their business, but I’ll let them know about this too.
(they’re Palestinian)
So, Gazan
You’re right, boycotting is difficult.
