At first, it was a lark, an experiment. What if you start printing stickers with phrases like, “Healthcare for profit is a crime against humanity.” Or, “The only minority destroying this country are the billionaires.” These are simple sentences that I formatted simply in white text on a black surface.

These sold very quickly. I knew they would. Most Americans are starving for meaningful content that isn’t sanded down to fit “brand safety” parameters.

So we did it, we sold like a few hundred of these stickers. It never earned enough revenue to brag about, not really. We barely break even after costs. But listen–what if profit wasn’t the point?

Because here’s what happened. We sold a few–then Chinese dropshippers stole our designs and ran with them. They flooded the marketplace with the exact same phrases. They slapped it on mocked up mugs, garden flags, t-shirts, and car magnets. Literally thousands and thousands of listings on Etsy now reproduce these phrases. They’ve become inescabably entangled with the word “leftist,” with what it means to be “progressive.”

If we were just trying to get these messages “out there” into socety by ourselves, we’d never be able to do it. After all, we’re a stupid merch shop. We don’t have influence. We’re not very large. We’re obviously low-energy punks. But powered by the anticipated greed of others? We’re unstoppable.

So we’ve watched as our designs become trend. We’ve repopulated the soulless political landscape of Etsy with new ideas.

But here’s the rub! Alas. The rub is this: because so many copyshops have ripped off these ideas and duplicated them across thousands of listings, Etsy can no longer surface anything from our shop like it once did when few people were making left-leaning political merchandise. There are just too many listings and too few people searching for them. There are literally dozens Temu shops stealing our designs and shipping them out of China which is hilarious to think about.

Because of the site’s short-sighted capitalist incentives to encourage copyshops to upload as much garbage as they can under popular tags, Etsy is now filled with thousands of knockoffs of our designs tagged with political language. We won’t ever see a dime from any of it. That’s just how it is now.

But the consequence is the signal to noise ratio. Actual activists cannot break through that wall of noise. These professional copyshops operate multiple storefronts and pay literally hundreds of dollars a day in advertising fees to keep their listings visible. It’s simply not cost-effective or viable for a small shop of cheeky weirdos to play that game.

Obviously, we could make a website. We have a website. This is that website. But the trick here is that driving traffic to this website is equally as futile. Either way, we’re going to end up spending more money than we earn on advertising. SEO is fundamentally broken. Attention is broken. There is virtually no “organic” reach for a small shop like ours. Why? Because we’ll be the first to admit it: there is no leftist community.

The “Leftist” more often than not exists as a consumer audience. We know this, despite years and years of trying to change it. Building community is extremely hard. Selling crap to an audience is easy. That’s why there are so many political podcasts and so few people running for office. Liberals living in cities have pretty much abandoned everyone outside of cities to the fascist creep. They won’t help support their declining civic institutions but they’ll sell them mattresses via podcasts.

So there’s really where we’re at this year. We’re excited to know how popular our designs really are. We know they sell. We’ve always known these ideas move. But though we are not planning on closing up our shop, we’re not particularly motivated to keep going under these conditions. We sort of proved our point: these ideas are extremely attractive and popular. So popular, in fact, that Etsy has to recalibate its algorithms around these words because so many copyshops have flooded the language pool.

While it’s not “shadowbanning” leftist thought, what this is doing is discouraging any actual American activists from trying to sell anything on Etsy. You simply cannot compete with massive copy farms in countries where the minimum wage is less than $8 a day. It’s a globalized race to the bottom to supply Americans with protest discourse and political designs. The irony is amazing but you’ll never hear about it.

Once they figure out how to use AI to make podcasts, it’s probably over for them, too. And then where will the liberals be?

Who knows. Maybe we’ll actually have communities again instead of living our lives entirely online.