This all comes back to a bigger point: you (and Doug) want to whip the individual into submission, when all that's really required is to force the producers of the Evil Items to prouce a better alternative. See the difference there? I'll spell it out:
- You want to coerce the individual - I want to coerce the corporation
[WS:] I disagree - I think that the real difference is that you want to coerce the corporation while refusing to act on the individual end, whereas I (Doug can speak for himself) want to coerce both, the corporation AND the individual.
I think this is based on your view that the SUV fad was totally manufactured by the marketing machine. I disagree. I think that there was a great deal of manufacturing, to be sure, but at the end the SUV marketing appealed to atavistic and "reptilian" instincts already existing in the human subconscious. Marketing researchers merely discovered it and used it to their advantage, but they did not manufacture it - it was already there (my source on this is Keith Bradsher, _ High and Mighty: SUVs--The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way_).
There something atavistic, especially in the male psyche, to own a big and powerful vehicle, the bigger, the better. Due to that atavistic desire, the efforts to popularize a wimpy Prius would not get nearly as afar as the effort to popularize SUVs. This holds for other aspect of the US pop-culture as well - it is much easier to attract people to shock-jock shows appealing to prejudice than to wimpy, "politically correct" all-inclusive ones. The crap that you see is not totally made up - it is manufactured with ingredients found in abundance in human psyche. In other words, the marketers actively promoted SUV craze (and other crazes,) all right, but they did not have to twist people's arms, they found very willing followers - which btw surprised even the marketers themselves (according to Bradsher.)
With that in mind, your argument to coerce only corporations but not individuals simply does not hold water. You need to change the individuals as well, because they are us guilty of the hummer/SUV craze as the corporations.
Wojtek