Chad Dickerson's Field Notes

Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson says he conceived the idea after reading a news article about the dire financial straits of Michigan cities which turned to private “emergency financial managers” to reduce crippling deficits at the expense of local autonomy.

“I thought, ‘why can’t that happen in Portland?’” Dickerson said. “Aside from the zipcode of our office building, Portland has been the bedrock of our customer base for years. Etsy practically invented bird-on-apparel technology, so this is our way of saying ‘thank you’ to a city that literally helped put us on the map by making feather hair-clips and steampunk goggles socially acceptable articles of clothing.”

Dickerson says the first phase of the Etsy Plan will consist of the construction of dozens of LEED-certified, solar-powered arts-and-crafts studios throughout the city, and will employ tens of thousands of the city’s underutilized creative class to design cutting-edge versions of the clothes they’re already wearing.

“By empowering marginalized art school dropouts, bloggers and bass guitarists in the creation of quality goods, we’re lifting them out of poverty, and that’s a wonderful thing,” Dickerson said. “And if they decide to spend their newfound income on our rejuvenating placenta-and-agave body butter, well, that’s even better.”

Subsequent phases of the plan call for outfitting Portland’s homes with knitted “sweaters” to reduce heating costs, designing a rotating seasonal wardrobe for the city’s signature 34-foot-tall Portlandia statue, and reverse-engineering brick-and-mortar restaurants into hemp-powered food trucks.

Thank you Etsy.com, for bringing this issue to our attention. Yes, let’s all act to block SOPA/PIPA as an expression of our right to freedom and creativity. And let’s be responsible as a group by not plagiarizing or stealing each other’s ideas. It’s our birthright to be prosperous and creative. We don’t have to blatantly steal or copy another artist’s work, like Charles Schultz’ Peanuts, for example. Let’s not feed the government’s perceived need to police by blatantly infringing on known copyrighted material especially. There are plenty of public domain ideas and an infinite amount of new material waiting to be manifested through our imaginations and hands. When artists are given obstacles like lack of money or resources, they pull something beautiful out of a tangle of used yarn or cardboard, or write a song from a dream, or a play from an overheard snippet of conversation. Truly, artists are masters of stewardship and resourcefulness - the “re-sourcing” of “etheric” genius grounded in new art that the public doesn’t even know it has been waiting for, yet finds refreshing, honest and essential.

We - Connie and Andrew - our company (and our actual names) - commit to paying attention to this issue and honoring the creativity of ourselves and others.