So now we want to participate in this Buy Nothing Day, but we can't because we haven't BOUGHT the right software.
We're now visiting
http://adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd/toolbox/downloads/clipart.html
It's telling us to use (i.e. to BUY) Mac or Windows PRODUCTS.
As if those are the only two choices (i.e. it doesn't suggest Free Source such as GNU Linux which is what any reasonable BUY NOTHING proponent would use and advocate).
Clearly they live in the consumerist society of overconsumption and bloatware of Mac and Windows.
Clearly they're excluding those of us who don't BUY software.
Funny how the "BUY NOTHING" campaign excludes those who actually BUY NOTHING.
Let's delve a little deeper.
So I download their clip art, and it's in Proprietary Document Format (PDF).
But is it a high level description that requires PDF? No!
It's actually just a black and white bitmap image.
But instead of just presenting it as an image file, using a standard
image encoding, they've converted it first into a full color CMYK
(Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK).
That turns each bit into four bytes.
This is to make the image 32 times larger than it needs to be.
See an excerpt of the image file in BuyNothingDayClipart.htm
(I decoded this using pdf2ps on a GNU Linux system, against their advice
to use only Mac or Windows).
After they made the image 24 times larger than it needed to be, they proprietarized it by embedding it in a Proprietary Document Format (PDF) file, and then Consumerized their presentation of it by suggesting we use Mac or Windows to read it.