In April 2022, more than fourteen thousand Etsy sellers switched off their shops for a week. Not for a holiday — as a strike. The company had raised its cut of every sale, and the people who’d built the place into what it was decided they’d had enough of being repriced by a company that no longer seemed to see them (TIME, NPR).
That strike is the whole story of the modern economy in miniature. So let’s talk about what your money is actually doing.
The short answer
Every dollar you spend is a vote. It funds a way of doing business… and right now, a lot of the biggest players have stopped voting for you. As companies scale and answer to shareholders, the person on either end of the transaction — the buyer, the maker, the small seller — becomes a number to optimise rather than someone to look after. Choosing small, independent and human isn’t nostalgia; it’s a small act of resistance, and it matters more when money is tight for everyone. Building your own business, on your own terms, is one of the most radical things you can do.
This has a name: enshittification
The writer Cory Doctorow gave the pattern a rude and perfect name: enshittification. It’s not a rant; it was a dictionary word of the year, and it describes a predictable life-cycle. A platform is lovely to users to win them over. Then it squeezes those users to please its business customers. Then it squeezes the business customers to please its shareholders. Then it’s a husk. Extracting from everyone, loyal to no one (Wikipedia; Doctorow’s own essay).
The important part, and the fair part: this usually isn’t cartoon villainy. It’s incentives. Once a company is big and publicly traded, growth has to be fed every quarter, and the maths stops being about people. That’s not an excuse; it’s the reason it keeps happening, to companies that started out good.
What happened to Etsy
Etsy was a village of makers. Then it went public in 2015, and even at the time people asked out loud whether the IPO would hollow out its handmade soul (Wharton). Fast-forward to 2022: it lifted its transaction fee to 6.5%, and tens of thousands of sellers — the actual product — walked out (CBS News). Etsy said the extra money would fund marketing and support. Maybe so. But the sellers had learned the lesson that matters here: on someone else’s platform, the rent can go up overnight, and nobody asks your permission.
What scale does to people
Look at the other end of the size scale and you see the same logic wearing different clothes. A December 2024 US Senate committee investigation found Amazon ignored its own internal warnings that punishing speed quotas were injuring warehouse workers, with injury rates above the industry average and Prime Day flagged as a major spike (CNN, Forbes). Amazon rejects the findings as “wrong on the facts,” and you should weigh that too. But the pattern is hard to unsee: at a certain size, the human on the line — worker, seller, customer — becomes a variable to be optimised, not a person to be cared for.
You’re a number on both sides of the counter
Here’s the bit that catches everyone, because it cuts both ways.
As a buyer, you’re wading through aisles stuffed with AI-generated images and AI-written reviews, often with barely any vetting — so you spend money you can’t spare on something that isn’t what it claimed to be, then get the runaround chasing a refund. This got bad enough that regulators stepped in: the US Federal Trade Commission now bans fake and AI-generated reviews and testimonials outright. When a market needs a law to make “don’t invent your reviews” official, the trust has already gone.
As a seller, you get the mirror image: a platform that reflexively sides with whoever complains loudest, so good-faith sellers eat bogus “never arrived” claims and chargebacks and simply wear the loss. The payments industry has a whole category for it — “friendly fraud” and refund abuse — precisely because it’s so common (Visa, Ravelin).
Two opposite failures, one root cause. When you’re one of millions, the system optimises for its own volume and its own liability — never for you.
To be fair to the platforms
None of this means the big players are worthless, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of nonsense. Platforms give you reach on day one, a ready-made audience, and a near-zero barrier to starting — real gifts, especially at the very beginning. If you’re on Etsy or selling through Amazon right now, you haven’t done anything wrong; you made a sensible choice with the tools in front of you. This isn’t about guilt. It’s about knowing you have another option, and that the option has power.
Every dollar is a vote. So vote like it
Money is the truest ballot most of us cast, and we cast it every single day. Spend it with a giant and you’re funding the share buyback. Spend it with a real person — the maker, the local shop, the independent business run by someone whose name you know — and it stays in the world you actually live in. It pays a mortgage, funds a school run, keeps a main street lit. In a decade where wealth keeps pooling at the very top, where it lands is not a small thing.
And it works the same when you’re the business. Building something small and independent — something human-scale, on your own patch of the internet — is how you opt out of being a number and let other people opt out too. Underneath all of it, the line is simple: scale-at-all-costs keeps forgetting that people exist, and choosing small, and human, is how we insist otherwise.
The alternative: build your own place
We think of a website as a tiny house; your own plot in the digital neighbourhood, not a rented stall in someone else’s marketplace. When you own the place, the rent can’t triple overnight. You set the terms. You stand behind what you sell with your own name. You build a real relationship with the people who buy from you, and you earn real reviews instead of manufacturing them. That’s not just better business; it’s the protest itself, made concrete.
It’s also the practical thread running through everything we write — from moving your shop off a platform you’ve outgrown to owning your customer relationship end to end. Small, intentional, yours. That’s the whole idea.
This isn’t burn-it-all-down
And to be clear, none of this means “delete your Etsy shop tomorrow.” The smart play is a foot in each camp: own your home base, then be in as many places as make sense for you — the marketplace, the socials, the market stall on a Saturday — and use each for the reach it gives. The difference is direction. Let the platforms be front doors that lead people home to the place you own, rather than the place that owns you. Spread yourself wisely and anchor it all to your own patch, and no single platform can reprice you, bury you, or switch you off… because you were never standing on only their ground.
