Amazon as dystopian world-builder (and its enemies) – Cyberflaneur

The Syllabus asked me to curate a selection of texts about Amazon for the Cyberflaneur section.

Preamble

Amazon is not only the world’s largest online retailer. It is a corporation that has reshaped the world, from logistics to web services, from robotics to groceries, from the shopfloor exploitation of labor to new platforms for digital serfdom.

We might think of Amazon, like all corporations, as a kind of predatory artificial lifeform adapted to thrive under capitalism. If so, it is a lifeform made, in part, of stories: the story of its founder Jeff Bezos as a maverick genius; the story of the company as a bold pioneer into a bright future of technical prowess and customer satisfaction; the story of Amazon “associates” as partner’s in the firm’s noble mission to “work hard, have fun, make history.” As cynical as these sci-fi narratives may sound, they are highly influential, securing the support of shareholders, consumers, workers, and regulators who have come to imagine Amazon’s actions as somehow both uniquely bold and also the inevitable march of progress.

More generally, the emergence of a megacorporation as a powerful storyteller poses profound questions for us as a global society of what Sylvia Wynter calls homo narrans, a self-transforming storytelling species. This is perhaps especially important when it comes to Amazon, a company that, thanks to its hegemony over book and ebook sales as well as web services (an estimated half the public-facing internet runs on Amazon servers) and streaming media is the gateway to a huge percentage of what humans read and the stories we tell.

What is the power of corporate storytelling today, especially storytelling about the future, particularly in the hands of firms like Amazon with the power to radically transform life as we know it? And what does this power imply for the struggle of workers and communities not only to defend their rights in the here-and-now, but to reclaim the right to determine the shape of the future?

Selections

Book: Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy (Sarrah Kassem)

This invaluable study compares the conditions of alienation, power and worker resistance in two parts of Amazon’s operations: its warehouses and its online “Mechanical Turk” (or MTurk) microtask platform. The conditions in the former are the stuff of legend, with workers interacting with robots to meet ever more extreme benchmarks of efficiency in taking orders, sorting items, and packing boxes. Meanwhile, those toiling on the MTurk platform aren’t even classified as workers but, rather, independent contractors, located around the world and competing with one another to perform miniscule  “Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITs) at the cheapest possible rate, often contributing to the grooming of large data sets that help train so-called artificial intelligence. The author illustrates how, in each case, workers suffer the complexities of alienation (from their time, from one another, from the thing they’re making, from their potential). Their conditions also exemplify the ways that digitally-augmented capitalist power exerts itself in new ways through Amazon’s cutting-edge use of technology. But, importantly, this book also assesses the forms that worker resistance has taken at Amazon and the strategic opportunities that exist for workers and their allies to bring the corporation to heel and build a better economy. 

Article: “Amazon’s distribution space: constructing a ‘labour fix’ through digital Taylorism and corporate Keynesianism” (Mostafa Henaway)

A gifted labor organizer and sharp critical analyst, Mostafa Henaway worked at a Montreal Amazon fulfillment center for several months, in part to see for himself the labor conditions of its significantly migrant workforce. That experience, and interviews with workers there, results in an analysis of the grueling way that human flesh is incorporated into the company’s state-of-the-art algorithmically-powered and robotized logistics machine. This cyborgian nightmare would probably horrify even the turn-of-the-century father of “scientific management,” Frederick Winslow Taylor. Cutting edge, AI-driven surveillance combines with a corporate culture dedicated to squeezing every ounce of productivity out of workers in ways that are exhausting, stressful and profoundly physically dangerous. But the author insightfully notes the ways Amazon sweetens the pill, including through what he calls “corporate Keynesianism,” a set of performance-rewarding health, education and career benefits that, in the absence of a functional welfare state, serve as a proxy for security and stability. We might take these, along with the gushing corporate narrative of technological advancement and customer satisfaction, as part of Amazon’s highly exploitative world-building project.

Report: “Amazon’s Trickle-Down Monopoly: Third-Party Sellers and the Transformation of Small Business” (Moira Weigel)

The vast majority of items sold through Amazon are actually being vended by third-party sellers, who rely on the massive corporation to list their goods, manage their relationship to customers and often to fulfill orders from their warehouses. Amazon presents this as a boon to a world of eager entrepreneurs: the corporation makes getting products to customers easy, cheap and convenient, drastically reducing the set-up costs and unleashing the capitalist spirit of ambitious people around the world. The reality is, unsurprisingly, an highly exploitative “walled garden” where these would-be entrepreneurs take almost all the risk and, in turn, surrender not only a considerable share of their revenue but also a massive amount of control to the megalithic middleman. At stake here is not simply the plight of the exploited petit bourgeoisie. (Although the anger of this subclass is nothing to sniff at, and it frequently leans fascist). Rather, this is a key example of how Amazon wields its monopsony power (the power of a single hegemonic buyer or intermediary) to essentially subvert the very “free market” it claims to champion, leading Yanis Varoufakis to apply the label of “technofeudalism” to its operations (Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin prefer the term “chokepoint capitalism”). This report makes clear that the narratives that lure so many people to starting “small businesses”–the desire to escape the control of a boss and to succeed based of effort and resourcefulness–remain compelling myths. Amazon presents itself as a friend to entrepreneurial dreamers. In fact, it is predatory.

Article: “Battling the Behemoth: Amazon and The Rise of America’s New Working Class.” (Charmaine Chua and Spencer Cox)

This chapter, written by two scholars who are also labor organizers, takes a geographical approach to the way Amazon is at the forefront of the recomposition of the working class in the United States. In short: e-commerce is a significant factor in the processes known as gentrification, which sees wealthier, “better” educated young would-be professionals move into the core of cities, driving up rents. Amazon facilitates this way of life, bringing a world of commodities and services to their hip urban doorstep. Meanwhile, Amazon relies on precariously employed working class warehouse and logistics workers living in poorer suburban and exurban areas, who often spend hours commuting thanks in part to atrocious public transit. This has significant and predictable racialized and gendered dimensions. An invaluable part of this paper is that it offers important strategic lessons for those who would challenge Amazon’s power. The first is to take seriously the way Amazon is reorganizing the geography of class struggle, with some of the most important sites being warehouses in suburban and exurban locales like Bessmer, Alabama, New York City’s Staten Island and the broader Chicago or Los Angeles areas, where Amazon union efforts have been most successful. The second is to realize that race and racism are key elements of these struggles, at the cutting edge of what oppresses workers and divides communities. Beyond liberal pleas for tolerance and cynical corporate multiculturalism (including Amazon’s own saccharine efforts), worker-to-worker solidarity is the real basis of an anti-racist politics of liberation. The third is that, in this context, some of the most important aspects of workers’ struggles are happening outside the workplace, for instance over housing, transit, or immigration. Finally, all of these have a fundamental gendered dimension, with reproductive justice, childcare, intimate partner violence and schooling as key issues. The authors advocate and are part of a movement that turns away from traditional “business unionism” and returns to a form of worker organizing that is built on and that builds grassroots, worker-to-worker solidarity and militancy.

Article: “Toward Degrowth: Worker Power, Surveillance Abolition, and Climate Justice at Amazon” (Nantina Vgontzas)

Amazon’s power and reach is so deep and broad that it can seem impossible to stop. And even if it were to be tamed, what would prevent the same system of rapacious tech-driven hypercapitalism from generating an even worse replacement or successor? Nonetheless, this article takes inspiration from the vast number of labor and civil society organizations fighting back against Amazon and tries to suggest a common platform. Rejecting the argument that Amazon is simply responding to market pressures, the author argues that its dominance and profound internal coordination might make it possible to transform it into a democratic organization that benefits, rather than exploits, workers. If so, a seized Amazon could be a flagship in the effort to end consumerism and move towards a degrowth economy. This approach does not entirely satisfy me in its ambitions or strategy, but it does reflect the wishes of many Amazon workers and has the advantage of beginning to think through the thorny problem of how to make a just transition from capitalism with the infrastructures we actually have, like Amazon itself. That company is, perhaps, the most impressive logistics operation humanity has ever built, capable of moving goods around the world in ways that allowed it to play hero during the Covid-19 pandemic, delivering essential commodities way faster and more reliably than most states. This article might be said to be social science as pragmatic, militant speculative fiction. We need more scholarly work like this that helps workers and communities envision real alternatives, even if those alternatives have their limits.

Book: Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (Mark McGurl)

Amazon may be one of the most significant phenomena to happen to the novel since the genre emerged in the 18th century as a (at the time fairly controversial) pastime for the rising bourgeoisie. Today, this one corporation controls a whopping 80% of the ebook market (most of it through its exclusive proprietary Amazon Kindle Direct) and 50% of the total book market. If we add to that the fact that an estimated 50% of the public-facing internet runs on Amazon’s servers, including several social media platforms, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the lion’s share of the words that pass before human eyes today are mediated on some level by Amazon. McGurl’s brilliant book is an investigation of what all this implies for the novel and for society at large, especially in an era when most people read not for enlightenment or the challenge of new ideas, but for comfort. This comfort is increasingly found in the sameness of the writing that a new generation of genre fiction authors pen for the largest and most lucrative literary market ever: Kindle readers. Here, Amazon appears in many forms: a content empire the likes of which the world has never known; an employer pioneering new heights of worker exploitation and surveillance; a storytelling corporation that profits from and organizes itself around its own self-aggrandizing narratives; and a proxy marketplace that has terminally “disrupted” the market for fiction in ways that promise upstart writers and publishing industry outsiders a chance at fame and success. But at what cost for creativity, and for the imagination?

Review: “The Stories Corporations Tell: Two new histories of American capitalism reveal how alluring narratives have nurtured corporate power” (Adam M. Lowenstein)

In offering a review of two recent books, something important but submerged comes into focus: Forms like Amazon are not just dangerous, “psychopathic” mobilizations of self-perpetuating capital, as Joel Bakan illustrated decades ago in his influent book and film The Corporation. They are also, like all narcissists, excellent storytellers. Corporations became legal “persons” decades before European empires afforded most humans that designation. As these organizations emerge as the most powerful beings in earth history (what is Napoleon next to Exxon?) we can and should ask: how did the fiction of the limited liability corporation make itself so deadly real? Beyond the advertising or propaganda of this or that corporation, beyond the smarmy “corporate culture” that builds itself around just-so tales of the founder’s wisdom, beyond even the power of companies like Amazon or Penguin Random House LLC or Netflix have over the stories our society tells itself, we are faced with the importance of narrative to the corporate-financial form of capitalism. 

Essay: “The Fake Nerd Boys of Silicon Valley” (Lyta Gold)

It’s Revenge of the Nerds, suicidal capitalism edition. Somehow, science fiction moved from the disreputable hinterland of popular entertainment to arguably the most influential genre on the planet. It’s not simply that beloved blockbuster franchises have raked in billions of dollars in revenues for film, TV and publishing giants. It’s also that a new generation of “big tech” plutocrats have appropriated unimaginable wealth and unrivaled power to shape the future of humanity and the planet with copies of Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick and an assortment of Star Trek fanzines under their arms. These (typically macho) sci-fi classics have inspired these tech overlords to plough their ill-got profits into private space programs and other dangerously absurd projects (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ massive 10,000 year clock is a harmless trinket compared to Elon Musk’s efforts Neuralink to hack the human brain, or next to Bill Gates’ tinkering with geoengineering). These tycoons have parlayed sci-fi ideas, rhetoric and enthusiasm into a hype machine that presents their corporations’ products as both revolutionary and inevitable, representing the unstoppable march of progress, enchanting investors, regulators and the public. Most of these personalities seem to resemble the villains rather than the heroes of classic science fiction dystopias. Nonetheless, their dedication to the genre is not just an ideological but an important part of how capitalism reconciles some thorny contradictions in the 21st century, notably tensions between the tech and financial sectors, who can both agree that speculating on the future is big business, especially if that future looks a lot like the present, but with more gadgets and, as Gil Scott Heron famously put it, “whitey on the moon” (or Mars). 

(book) Octavia’s Brood : Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha, editors)

When it was published in 2015, this collection of short stories from racial and economic justice activists represented a high water mark of a growing turn towards speculative creative writing as a reflex or companion to grassroots organizing. Since its inception with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein through to its unique role in the Soviet Union, the literary genre of speculative fiction has been a platform for social critique. Octavia Butler, after whom this collection is named, was among the first Black SF writers to rise to prominence, a reputation that has grown since her death in 2006 given her uncanny anticipation of the rise of white supremacist clown-led fascism in an ecologically and economically ravagedUnited States. The editors of this book, brown and Imarisha, convened workshops with grassroots organizers, asking them to use creative speculative writing to explore their hopes and fears and to reflect on their radical community work anew. The stories are not all inspiring, but the most important feature of the book is the model it offers for speculative creative writing as a form of activism. At the 15 October 2024 London launch of The World After Amazon, for example, we’ll be joined by several author-activists who are doing similar work: Lola Olufemi, who uses specualtive fiction writing to radicalize the imagination around racial and gender justice; Phil Crockett Thomas, who has worked with incarcerated people to write abolitionist science fiction; Sarah Truman, who does SF-writing workshops with young people in (post-)extractive zones, and Jamie Woodcock who, in addition to being a scholar and protagonist of Workers’ Inquiry methods is also a catalyst behind Red Futures, a platform for radical SF writing.  

Book: Social Poetics (Mark Nowak)

For over 25 years, Mark Nowak has been hosting poetry workshops for working people, including most recently and famously the New York City-based Worker Workers School. Importantly, Nowak champions the radical politics of liberation that emerge when working people dignify their everyday lives and struggles in verse. There have been plenty of left-wing poets who have dwelled on their experiences as workers, or on the struggles of the working class; Nowak is, in his other work, a sterling example. But there is also a long history (that the author elaborates) of the writing workshop as a space for a radical class consciousness to arise, not out of Marxist propaganda (as important as that is) but from workers recognizing their own value in the collective experience of finding and developing their voice. Such workshops are, as Nowak explains, especially important as the nature of class changes under platform capitalism, of which Amazon is at the vanguard.