As for 'firing a nuke', I think it's firstly unlikely. After all, we have a blackout, they see dead servers. If they then say 'okay then, fork it we'd rather just take our toys and go home', then they would be abandoning their own business wholesale, because they would have rather kept slightly more of their profit margin. It simply isn't sensible that they would do so. Of course I could imagine them claiming they would very clearly and in very unified fashion. "We're sorry but there's just no money to do that, we realize we may lose some of our beloved players but there's nothing more that can be done about it."
However, after that clear statement, they're going to be watching player activity very carefully. If the population stays low, they're going to rehire. Businesses are in this to make money, and the nuclear option would hit them where they live. With that said, people must be willing to go through with these actions. If these types of player groups get popular, SOMEONE, somewhere, sometime, is going to risk their game to see if they can't wear down the players conglomeration and retake the kind of unilateral control that it is (occasionally) considered common wisdom that they 'should' have.
As to the how? I think we should agree on simple bullet points of what we expect, and then agreed upon avenues of action. (Blackout days, mail campaigns, email campaigns, subscription lapse, etc). When we have that all in place, we'd need to structure it, we don't need a particular head of an organization, but we do need a way to vote on what's important so that the organization has cohesion and only acts to larger issues. I.e. pushing to reinvest is good, but organized blackouts in the name of the "Unified Gamers" that are demanding the inclusion of magical ponies will not have the full weight of the group even though that's where it started, and thus will not be taken seriously.
More than that, establishing a community outside of the game can be quite important, so, if we ever are forced to leave a game (or are taking a break from it for a short time to let our voices be heard) we can still find people to play with in other games, as well as finding suggestions for other games, when we can't play the one we'd like. I think the first step (and pardon being away) would be refining our expectations and establishing a potential set of protest actions.