Small economic decisions—how you spend your money—can produce big advantages both for you and the parties you interact with. While often, we're forced to use big businesses like Amazon or Walmart to take care of specialized immediate needs (e.g. getting some specific battery), many of the purchasing choices we make can facilitate building up connections with those around us as well as with people who share our more niche interests around the world.
The real local news
The real local news comes from eyewitness accounts of events. When interacting with people—of which buying/selling is an excellent opportunity to find new people—you are positioned to lend a listening ear to hear not just what news networks have to tell you, but to hear what is going on in your local neighborhood. Does what you are told through mass broadcast reflect the "on the ground" reality?
Speaking with different people is also a very good opportunity to find out about stuff you may have never thought of. For instance, suppose you were thinking of a new activity to take up to help improve your fitness. Then, you hear some people chatting about a hiking meetup. Well, either you'll be so likeable you'll get an invitation upfront or now you have the idea of something to look up.
Before there were targeted ads on Facebook, Google, and the like, this is one of the primary ways people discovered things.
Profit from stocks, shop at local businesses
Companies like Amazon and Google are here to stay with us for a while. Being aware of how they can harm local networks doesn't mean to not use them, though this choice might be a good one for some people. Rather, we should become aware of the role each of us plays in the conquest of big business so we can each do our part in "fighting back" against changes that do not have to be "inevitable".
Here's a thing many people did in the early to mid 2000s: (1) check out a produce in person in a brick and mortar store, (2) buy thing thing cheaper online.
The above practice hurt many businesses (I don't have numbers on me, but you can see how this could be harmful—the physical store locations got no profit while providing some service).
We can kind of flip around this scenario. You can read reviews for products online from big companies like Amazon who have to hire a bunch of tech nerds to support such services. Then, you can find some product elsewhere (offline, from the original vendor), making use of the Amazon services but not giving Amazon money. Touché!
Another thing to do is to "park" money in big companies via stock trading. You know these people have government contracts and other means of "guaranteeing" income in ways that smaller businesses don't. By using stocks as a means to keep up with inflation and other forces of the Establishment which are outside of your control, you can effectively take from the rich and give to the poor(er). Like... erm... Robinhood. I'm not a paid sponsor, but I do use that product!
Conclusions
You are like your own little business, whether or not you like it. You do buying and you do selling (often this means your time or services by being an employee, choosing to live with certain people to cut down expenses, and so forth).
Taking on this perspective, you can see how even your small purchasing decisions can have big effects, when added up. Consider the project of starting a web business. Your business doesn't feel like a business until you make some transactions. This could be as local as following through on asale on Facebook marketplace or Ebay or having a full, custom website—the situation is such that your "business" is just theory until you follow through and money is transferred for goods/services.
You probably can't land a contract with the government or a big corporation tomorrow. But, you might be able to sell stuff you aren't using in your home, offer some services setting up a printer or getting some mobile work station thing working, or something else "small scale".
All large corporations do is organize many more people into doing a whole bunch of small tasks, often with large centralized data stores. Realizing this, you can seize on many opportunities that fall through the cracks of the standardized products of big business and offer better, more personal goods/services through your own unique flavor of economic participation.