Who made the last thing you bought on Amazon? You don't know. I don't either, and whoever made it has no idea you exist. It was probably made in China. Try to buy products only made in the USA--you can't.

Amazon owns the customer. Everyone else rents. When you buy from a seller on Amazon, the seller never gets your email address. Amazon swaps it for a scrambled stand-in, and its rules forbid the seller from reaching out to sell you anything else. You're Amazon's customer, not theirs.

So when that seller wants to reach you again, they buy ads from Amazon. They rent back the customer they ALREADY won. Add it all up -- Amazon's cut of each sale, the warehouse fees, the ads -- and one study of sellers' books found Amazon keeping more than half of what they take in, up from 40% five years before. Ads alone brought Amazon more than $68 billion last year. Some of that pays for warehouses and trucks. A lot of it is the toll for standing in the middle.

It's no better if you're the one buying. Search for anything and you get a wall of look-alike listings under made-up brand names, shipped from who knows where. Reviews you can't trust. No maker to call. No shop to walk into. You can't ask the farmer how the cows were raised, because there is no farmer. There's a listing. Meanwhile they know everything about you: what you buy, when, how often, and what you looked at and didn't buy. You know nothing about them.

That's backwards. We used to get this right.

Not long ago the butcher knew your name, and you knew which farm the meat came from. If something was off, you told him and he made it right, because he'd see you again next week. Both sides had skin in the game. Trust came from knowing each other, not from a star rating.

The internet was supposed to make that easier. Instead it put a toll booth in the middle and turned everyone into strangers.

So, we're building Gno.shop. Gno, as in know. Our line is "Gno your source." Know your source. Rebuild your country.

For shoppers:

• Know what you're buying. See who made it, where it comes from and how it got to you.
• Find local sources. Buy from the growers and makers near you.
• Stay in control. You choose what each shop gets to know about you. We never sell your details.

For sellers:

• A fair revenue split. Keep more of every sale, instead of handing Amazon its cut plus the ads you need to be seen.
• Know who's buying. Every order comes from a real person you can thank, help and sell to again.
• Keep the relationship. Your customers stay yours, not rented back to you through ads.

And we want the people who move the goods -- local delivery, pickup points, storage, freight -- in it as partners.

Who's behind it: I'm Jae Kwon. Some of you know me from Tendermint and Cosmos. I've spent over ten years building networks where nobody has to trust a middleman. Gno.shop is the same idea, pointed at something everyone does every day: buying stuff.

Where we are: We're not open yet. We're signing up shoppers, sellers and delivery partners now, so there's something near you on day one. Farmers, makers, small brands, the shop on your corner: tell us what you sell. Sign up and you get your own link. Every friend who joins with it moves you up the line.

Want to help build it? gno.shop/apply. Investors and everyone else: gno.shop/contact.

Made in the USA, for the world.

Gno your source. gno.shop