Where are booze's "brotesters"?
Plus: When Bud Light first got fruity!
Editor’s note: I’m juggling a few different project deadlines that have me a little underwater at the moment, so I’m reprinting a popular lead item that I originally published two years ago this week (July 11th, 2022), when Fingers was approximately half its current readership. The piece has been lightly edited. Hope you enjoy!—Dave.
In July 2022, The Guardian published an explosive report about Uber based on 124,000 internal documents that show how it used lobbying, dark money, and cynical politics to advance its “fucking illegal” ridesharing worldwide. The upshot is that corporations with nearly limitless pools of capital and red-assed maniacs like Travis Kalanick at the helm can and do operate above the law. Shocking!
Reading through the report, I was reminded of a particular tactic that “gig economy” companies like Uber used last decade to bend bureaucrats and regulators to their will as they pushed outward into jurisdictions less amenable to Big Tech’s “move fast and break things” schtick. Basically, whenever a city council or state legislature was like “excuse me Mister Kalanick, please get the appropriate licenses for the taxi service you are currently running here illegally,” Uber would turn around and send email blasts to its riders encouraging them to take action to protect their artificially cheap, public transit-destroying private car service. Those riders acted en masse, blasting regulators with messages and petitions to help Uber secure favorable rulings.1
This hot-wired mix of corporate astroturfing, community organizing, and social media campaigning came to be known as “apptivism,” and more pejoratively in some circles2 as “brotesting,” a nod to the stereotype that those companies’ staff and customers were mostly comprised of socioeconomically stable white people who felt entitled to certain lifestyle amenities and could be incited to political action when those amenities under real or perceived threat. You know: bros.
With this in mind, let’s turn our attention to the American beverage-alcohol industry’s regulatory landscape, shall we? Midway through summer 2022, New Jersey announced it would begin enforcing an unpopular 2019 rule that severely limits how craft breweries in the Garden State conduct business. A couple weeks later, North Carolina’s state legislature put the kibosh on a promising to-go cocktail bill. Reason.com3 reported that around 150 new booze-related laws would take effect in July 2022 alone, offering a “mixed bag” of regulatory results to industry boosters and rank-and-file drinkers alike. It’s hardly an open road for Big Booze these days legislatively speaking, but I have yet to encounter a major booze industry effort to activate customers to make their voices heard in bureaucrats’ inboxes.
In other words: where are all the pro-booze brotesters?