look at your kitchen counter. look at your phone’s home screen. look at your bank account.
if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that almost every single aspect of our daily lives has been colonized by a handful of corporate giants. the soap in your bathroom, the apps tracking your every move, the bank holding your paycheck, and the industrial food systems feeding our families are all owned by the exact same class of greedy billionaires.
they've brainwashed us into believing that their plastic convenience is the key to a good life, all while hiding the destruction, exploitation, and waste behind it.
personally, i am a hobbit at heart. i want nothing more than a quiet, low waste life centered around good food, hot tea, "longbottom leaf”, tending to clean soil and, did i say good food? i just want a cozy home, a strong community, and a peaceful existence in the shire.
but, we can’t have a peaceful shire while we're actively funding mordor.
as long as we buy from their monopolies and store our money in their banks, we're handing them the power to destroy the very things we care about.
i don't know about you, but i’m done buying the bullshit. literally, and figuratively.
the entire corporate oligarchy is completely dependent on our daily cooperation. when we choose to stop participating in their destructive system, they lose their leverage and their profit margins collapse.
it’s time to leave the shire...
i'm embarking on a quest to defeat evil corporations, exploitation, and environmental destruction, and i’m looking for a fellowship to walk the road with me.
i’ll share my journey and all the tools and resources i learn along the way with you here.
meet your guide
i'm katy. i’m an eco-minimalist, a mom, and a fantasy nerd. my resistance to this garbage system started long before i had the words for it. i was the kid who never felt fully comfortable with the way things were, but like everyone else, i still got swept up in the machine. i bought the trends, the lies, and the myth that we could consume our way to happiness. it took years of painful unlearning to realize how deep the rot actually goes. once you see the trail of suffering and greed behind nearly everything we buy, eat, or throw away, you just can't unsee it.
my path here wasn't a clean, perfect line. i grew up in reston, virginia, the daughter of hard working parents, one a sicilian immigrant. i dropped out of college, built a successful pet sitting business from scratch, and then shocked my entire family by selling everything to move to santa monica completely alone. i became a yoga teacher, navigated abusive relationships, and worked whatever odd jobs i could find just to get by.
Aat the same time the pandemic hit and shut down the yoga studios, i went through a big break up. i started over from scratch and shifted my focus entirely on my other passion: earth. i founded ethikli sustainable market to prove that low waste, billionaire free living is possible. i grew it from a pile of boxes in my apartment into a real, brick and mortar, worker owned shop. then i became a single mom, stepped away from the business, and started over again.
today, i live slowly and intentionally for my son and for anyone else trying to raise decent humans in a system that makes it so damn hard. i’m not perfect. i procrastinate by aggressively reorganizing my house for fun, i enjoy good ganja, and i say no a lot. "katy imp" is where i share the raw, unfiltered truth of what's helping me live with less harm and more purpose: everything from ethical product swaps to thoughts on motherhood, healing, and burning down cycles of burnout. if you're ready to stop feeding the machine, you're in the right place. welcome to the fellowship.
the lore: why this is an epic journey
i use lord of the rings framing around here because tolkien hated industrialization and corporate style greed just as much as i do. but, you don't need to care about elves or wizards to see that our current world is broken. you just have to look at the parallels between the story and the modern corporate empire.
consider what we're actually fighting every single day:
the one ring is frictionless convenience: the ring tempted all creatures big and small. that's the modern one click consumer trap. mega corporations hook our brains on dopamine so we stay completely dependent on their networks and never question their control.
saruman’s engines are corporate extraction: saruman hacked down ancient, living forests just to feed his underground furnaces and scale his war machine. that's the exact blueprint of factory farming, fast fashion, and oil monopolies. they treat living, sentient beings and the earth as cheap, disposable inputs for next quarter's shareholder profits.
the Palantír is big tech surveillance: in the books, the seeing stones let the enemy look directly inside your head, tracking your fears and feeding you curated illusions to make you give up. the irony here is so wild it almost sounds fake, but tech billionaire peter thiel literally named his massive, multi billion dollar military surveillance and data mining corporation "palantir technologies" because that is exactly what it does. that's the smartphone in your palm right now. tech monopolies track your data to figure out exactly when your emotional defenses are down so they can flash a hyper targeted ad.
the best part of the story? the world was saved by ordinary hobbits who just wanted good soil (and herb), clean food, community, and quiet.
that's us. we are the free peoples.
we change the future through the act of daily non-participation.
our guiding compass
this space isn't for lecturing, toxic positivity, or impossible lifestyle standards. i practice imperfect eco-minimalism because ideological purity tests are a trap.
we aren't chasing perfection here. if you're exhausted and you have to panic buy something from a target on a terrible day, you didn't fail the quest. that's just real life. we don't need a few people doing sustainability perfectly: we need millions of us doing it messily and intentionally.
we don't navigate by corporate trend lines or greenwashed marketing scams. every single choice we make, swap we recommend, and system we build has to align with our four point compass. these four rules are non negotiable:
north: non-exploitation (vegan and human-first) a direct strike against factory farming and sweatshop labor. if a living, sentient being (human or animal) was abused, commodified, or exploited to create a product, it has no place in our halls. we choose total respect for life.
south: circularity ( zero to low-waste and high-utility) a direct strike against single use plastics and planned corporate obsolescence. we refuse to feed the landfills. everything we bring into our lives must either be built to last a lifetime, easily mended, or designed to safely return to the soil.
east: economic non-participation (billionaire-free and local) a direct strike against monopolies and wall street mega banks. we starve the corporate parent companies by diverting our cash to independent, human creators, local farmers, and member owned credit unions.
west: digital autonomy (privacy-first) a direct strike against surveillance capitalism and ai data scraping. we reclaim our attention, our data, and our minds by using independent, encrypted tech stacks and refusing to let predatory algorithms manipulate our behavior.
how to embark on the quest
the enemy has a massive head start and trillions of dollars, but you don't have to take the first step alone.
i've mapped out our exact entry point: the free peoples’ guide to defeating the oligarchy.
it’s a completely free guide that walks you through the actual stages of the quest. instead of trying to overhaul your entire life overnight, it breaks the journey down phase by phase. you’ll learn how to build a digital privacy wall to block predatory algorithms, how to use the 72 hour rule to break the impulse buy spell, and how to strip the corporate junk out of your cupboards without losing your mind.
when you join the fellowship (any tier), you'll get access to the free guide immediately. and, if you choose to fund the quest (the fellowship tier), you'll get access to the live anti-oligarchy product swap database so you have a place to look when your household basics actually wear out.
the corporate machine only exists because we hand over our attention, our data, and our money every single day. let's stop giving it to them.
sign up below, grab the guide, and let's start rebuilding the shire together.
