by ELRANOR J. BADER
Julio Vincent Gambuto’s “Please Unsubscribe” makes a compelling self-help case for reigning in capitalism.
In spring 2020, as COVID-19 shutdowns began, New York City-based writer-filmmaker Julio Vincent Gambuto found himself at loose ends. After years of jobs that required him to bounce between the East and West coasts, life abruptly slowed, and as he stared at this computer screen, questions bubbled up.
“It actually drove me mad,” Gambuto tells The Progressive. “Why was I getting emails from Home Depot? How did all these ads get in front of me? I have a background in marketing, and I quickly understood why the messaging, whether it came from political parties, banks, or businesses, sounded the same. They all use the same platforms and techniques.”
Gambuto found this startling realization depressing. However, in “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting,” an essay he wrote for Medium in April 2020—which has since been read by more than twenty-one million people—he offered a profoundly simple antidote: If every crisis also contains an opportunity, human beings could use the pandemic to think about their lives and exert some control over their time, money, and social engagements.
His own life was a case in point, and Gambuto began a massive campaign of unsubscribing. “I attacked my inbox,” he writes in Please Unsubscribe, severing ties to “brands, companies, gurus, influencers, groups, associations, committees, political campaigns, loyalty programs, monthly-curated clothing boxes that automatically debited my checking account and sent me plaid dress shirts I didn’t need to iron or tuck into my pants . . . Click. Goodbye.”
The resultant liberation, he explains, led him to question our country’s relentless fixation on consumption, the not-so-gentle nudge to purchase items we don’t need and can ill afford.
“We’re wiped out and have no time,” he writes in the book, “because our bodies, minds and hearts are living in real-life human time but we are stuck in a world where our subscriptions are running at the speed of light.” The lack of down-time, he continues, has pushed us to become numb: “Life is no longer full of joy punctuated by bullshit,” Gambuto declares. “It is full of bullshit punctuated by joy.”
Reversing this and restoring personal pleasure, for the author, rests with limiting our association with five Big Forces: Big Banks, Big Brands, Big Media, Big Politics, and Big Tech. He encourages readers to unsubscribe from all of them, take a break, and then decide which, if any, to allow back in.
Needless to say, this can be easier said than done. But as Gambuto tells The Progressive, unsubscribing can give us time to parse the “sticky stories”—ideas we’ve unconsciously absorbed about race, gender, economic inequality, sexuality, consumption, American exceptionalism, and even capitalism. “People’s lives are usually a collection of light-bulb moments that relate to their experiences,” he says. “When we break down what we’ve been taught, we can step away from ideas that are nonsense. This is the first step.”
The Progressive for more