A Plea to Shop In-Person

The internet is not a good place to sell or post things anymore. 

The social media platform Cara was scraped a week ago for all the imagery and posts on it to train AI. It was started by a professional photographer who was desperate to create a space that was anti-AI and protected posts from being used for training. She built Cara and used as many tools as she could to prevent the art shared there from being used without the artists' permission. 

And her efforts failed. A very prideful, very selfish, very small-minded tech bro stole all the work of over 1 million users and bragged about it. Terabytes and terabytes of imagery. All for AI training. He has since come to understand the error of his ways and tried to mitigate the damage he did, but not until others tried to exploit the resources he’d stolen.

I share stuff on Cara. I love it. And I'm beyond angry and frustrated.

There is literally no where an artist can share their work without it being scraped and stolen. Even when tools are used to prevent it, scum human beings will go out of their way to steal it and use it selfishly just on principle. The hacker was lauded for his theft by AI tech bros and celebrated. People came out of the woodwork to justify it, providing all kinds of warped reasoning to say the scraping was a good thing. They pointed out that scrapers don’t have to comply with requests by platforms or website owners to refrain from stealing content. There’s nothing to stop them, and laws haven’t caught up.

I remember a time when Torrent users were sued for illegally stealing content. But I guess nowadays when tech bros have wants, they can do whatever they care to.

At the same time, there is also an increase in postal rates for any package less than 3lbs shipped to any zip code deemed "rural" by the USPS that hit in mid-July 2026. Apparently that's 20% of the US population. Shipping paper products (or anything weighing less than 3lbs)is now cost prohibitive. And postal rates for practically everything had already increased previously to all this happening in the first place.

Additionally, Amazon has declared it would start using all the streaming done on their Twitch platform for AI training unless streamers opt-out. This is supposedly "good" because YouTube doesn't even allow you that choice.

We all know algorithms on Meta's platforms throttle posts they determine won't get traction, preventing users from seeing the people they're following while burying them in suggested profiles and ads they don't want. Same with TikTok, X... Pick your social media walled garden...

And all of them use your posts and imagery for AI-training.

Not surprisingly, small businesses are losing traffic because AI summaries and ChatGPT are allowing users to completely bypass the necessity of visiting their sites. Search Engine Optimization is a thing of the past, as Google has decided they can simply scrape info from websites and present that content themselves instead of directing traffic to the actual providers. Large companies are considering blocking Google altogether because they don't need it anymore, and continuing to make their content available to it is siphoning off and destroying their businesses. It's too expensive to allow Google to take their informational services from them, their book publishing, their shops... 

Google has already determined it's better to provide ineffective search results because it keeps people searching and staying on their page. Efficiency is unprofitable.

All this on top of the fact it has been proven that 57% of internet traffic is now bots.

The internet in general sucks right now. It's not a good place for artists. Or small business. Or business at all. And it's not good for users either, who can't actually find what they want, and can't rely upon generated answers to actually be accurate.

So I am making a personal plea for you to shop in-person as much as you can. To attend those events where artisans and craftspeople make pieces too small to ship at reasonable rates. To support those small businesses with local goods. To take the time to find locally available alternatives instead of using Amazon. To stop using Google Chrome and Gmail and Meta. 

I know it's hard. I know it's scary. I know it's uncomfortable sometimes. Change is hard. And I know it's a lot of work to get yourself out there.

But seriously, the alternative is to live in a cave of willing denial. And I do harbor resentment toward those who make no steps to change their internet-user behavior or explore alternative platforms or take even the smallest step outside of their bubbles of familiarity. It gets hard to make space for their “convenience”.

I walked away from 500+ followers on Facebook and another 700+ on Instagram. I left Twitter before it became whatever it thinks it is now. I never joined Threads. I left family members and long-time friends behind, and learned a lot of them would rather spam life events using a megaphone than actually personally share them with those they care about. I learned convenience, intransigence, inertia, and fear drive most of our concerns about trying new things. I now understand that a lot of people would rather signal virtue than actually have integrity. 

It has taken a lot for me to claw back my faith in humanity. It took relocating and starting a new life in a new home that I'm proud to call my own now. It took making new friends and welcoming new people into my life on my own terms.

It meant spending less time online, and doing things that bring me joy in real life. It meant getting out of my head and into real places where I felt I was doing some good and contributing. It meant finding people to care about that wanted to chat with me in real life and spend time with me. 

None of that is possible if we defer everything to the internet. 

And we can't let it swallow the efforts of our artists and small businesses. We can't let bad actors step between us because it’s hard to step around them. We instead value things badly enough that we make an effort to seek them out. 

So I urge you: shop in person.