The following short essay appears as part of Research and Teaching with Speculative Fiction: Transdisciplinary Readings and Methods, edited by Sarah E. Truman and available open-access from Bloomsbury. The Worker as Futurist project can be found at http://antiamazon.world.
In 2021, I initiated a project that supported thirteen frontline Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers etc.) to write short, speculative fiction about ‘The World after Amazon.’
Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer and millions of people use it every day not only to order books, which was its original business, but also everything from food to electronics to apparel to stationery. Since it was founded in 1994, Amazon has generated huge profits, which it has used to become a world leader in robotics and AI, global logistics (getting stuff from one place to another), internet services (an estimated 40 per cent of websites are hosted on Amazon servers), film, television and games (they own the streaming platform Prime and the gaming platform Twitch). This has all made its founder and current executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world. Bezos credits a lot of the inspiration for the innovative thinking behind Amazon to his obsession with science fiction, especially Star Trek (McGurl, 2021).
But if Bezos believes he is using the power of technology to create his version of utopia, it’s a dystopia for most of his workers, especially those working in the company’s warehouses (Delfanti, 2021). They toil under dangerous and exhausting conditions. While Amazon usually pays a little over the industry standard, the work is far from lucrative. The same is true of the drivers and other workers in the company’s orbit, many of whom aren’t employed by Amazon directly but by third-party companies that handle Amazon orders exclusively. Almost all workers, including those who work in offices, report a gruelling and unforgiving corporate culture where humans work to the pace set by machines. This kind of exploitation even extends to the independent authors who rely on Amazon, or small business that use Amazon, all of whom pay a massive premium to Amazon and follow its strict rules in return for access to the corporation’s hundreds of millions of customers (Giblin and Doctorow, 2022).
All this is done in the name of corporate profit. Those profits have been so massive that Bezos literally built himself his own private space program to fulfil his dream of taking humanity (or at least the wealthiest humans) to the stars.
Amazon workers are building someone else’s future, a future that will exclude them. What visions of the future do Amazon workers’ themselves have? When and how could they get a chance to express those visions? I initiated the Worker as Futurist project to find out. I had the privilege of working with my colleagues Graeme Webb, Sarah Olutola and Xenia Benivolski. In 2024, after two years of collaboration with the workers as well as writing workshops and a long editing process, we published The World after Amazon, a collection of nine speculative short stories (Benivolski et al., 2024).
Before I tell you more about the book, a bit about me.
I’m a researcher, educator and social movement organizer from Canada, where I work as a professor and the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. As a cis white man with a Canadian passport, I’ve been afforded many opportunities by the capitalist system I live in. I oppose this system and think we need to replace it with a democratic form of socialism where the world’s resources are distributed fairly and where we are all free to thrive and contribute. I was raised in a family of activists. I teach and work at a university in Canada, but in the past years, I spent a lot of time in Berlin where, among other things, I organized with ‘Berlin Verus Amazon,’ a citizen’s platform to oppose the megacorporation’s negative impacts on an amazing city that is well known for its thriving and radical arts and cultural scene.
Speculative fiction has always been a big part of my life and a constant source of inspiration. I discovered the work of Ursula K. Le Guin when I was quite young and gained a sympathy for anarchism and revolution from her book The Dispossessed (1994). Later, I was transformed by the fiction of Octavia E. Butler. More recently, I discovered the work of activist-writers who started working in Butler’s tradition, for example the Detroit-based collective that runs SF writing workshop for grassroots activists and, in 2015, published the collection Octavia’s Brood (brown and Imarisha, 2015). They inspired the Worker as Futurist project we did with Amazon workers.
We undertook the Worker as Futurist project in solidarity with a wave of worker organizing against Amazon. The recent successful unionization of an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island is a high-water mark in the struggle, but it also includes the actions of other trade unions, workers’ centres, community organizations and rank-and-file militants around the world (Benivolski et al., 2024).
Our project is much more modest, but we think it makes a small but important contribution: workers’ struggle today cannot only be about wages, working conditions and putting a check on corporate power. It must also be about exercising the imagination. Workers at Amazon are largely treated as replaceable and disposable cogs in a machine. The imagination of workers is only valued to the extent that it gives them an edge over robots in sorting or delivering boxes or doing other work that generates profits for their boss. Workers feel this deeply, and it is a major source of resentment. The reality is, it’s still cheaper to hire a worker than to build a robot to replace them.
Beyond simply exploiting its massive workforce, there is a bigger problem: Amazon and other tech firms are dramatically reshaping the future itself. They use their tremendous corporate power to make vital decisions that affect all of humanity, about everything from artificial intelligence to space travel, without any substantial democratic oversight, let alone any input from their workers (Varoufakis, 2023).
The story Amazon tells about itself is an important weapon in its arsenal. The company uses SF terms, ideas and themes to represent itself as the icon of progress itself, a materialization of an inevitable force for good that will restructure the inefficient old economy and take humanity to the stars. This story is told in annual reports to shareholders, in its media releases and when the company’s thousands of lobbyists meet with government officials to try and ensure they can continue to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The story is even motivating to workers, who often take pride in the company even if it exploits them. Just as the kings and queens of an earlier era insisted that they were chosen by God to rule, so too does Amazon claim that ‘the market’ has chosen this corporation to thrive and expand.
But what futures do the workers envision and wish for? Our project aims to resource and capacitate Amazon’s workers to reclaim the power of the imagination and tell their own stories. Against a corporation that turns most workers into fleshy cogs in a machine that goes faster and faster for someone else’s profit, our project insists that workers have a right to determine their collective future. We try to honour the dignity of workers as bearers of the imagination.
At the beginning of this project, in 2022, we posted advertisements on the internet inviting current or former Amazon workers to fill in an application and send us a short piece or writing. We selected thirteen people, all of whom had worked for Amazon in North America, and invited them to join us for six learning and writing skills workshops, followed by several months of drafting and editing their stories. For this, we paid them, first because we want to dignify writing as a job that produces something useful for society and deserves to be remunerated, second because many worker/writers needed to be paid to take time off work or hire child minders or other caregivers. The money came from a grant from the Social Sciences a Humanities Research Council of Canada, an independent public research organization. After many months of editing, in 2024 we published their short stories in the book The World after Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers. We also produced a podcast about the project, The Workers’ Speculative Society, featuring interviews with experts on activism, labour organizers and SF authors.
A lot of the stories the workers wrote were dystopian: they take inspiration from the present day to envision a dark future where Amazon and other corporations’ power is extended over all of life. Many presented apocalyptic scenarios (the breakdown of civilization, alien attacks, ecological ruin) as the only ‘way out’ of the form of capitalism we live under today. Like all of us, the workers’ imaginations have been shaped by Hollywood narratives that celebrate the individual hero or cash in on violence, and this is reflected in many of the short stories in our collection. But underneath that, many of the stories showed us the power of everyday acts of solidarity. We read about workers banding together and, through friendship and strong principles, surviving or overcoming challenges, or building new communities in the ruins left by Amazon.
I believe that SF is more important today than it has ever been. In part, this is because we need bold visions of other ways of being (Vint, 2021). As capitalism and billionaires condemn our planet and its people to the disastrous impacts of climate change, and as global inequalities get worse and worse, we need to imagine other futures so we can, together, fight for them.
But my research into the radical imagination has also convinced me that we don’t always need a perfect vision of the utopian society we want in order to act here and now (Haiven and Khasnabish, 2014). Anyway, it’s unlikely that all 8 billion humans on our planet could agree on a single utopia. And, indeed, motivating visions of a better world don’t just appear from nowhere; they emerge from struggle. When workers and other exploited or oppressed people join together to fight for their rights and dignity, something powerful and positive emerges, even if all they can say together is ‘no!’ A collective refusal of the status quo can open a space for different visions of the future to emerge, not based on wild fantasy but inspired by everyday acts of solidarity and care. Hopeful visions, if they are meaningful, are built on the real relationships, feelings and collective power regular people build between themselves as they fight for what’s right.
But this doesn’t mean we don’t need visionary artists, thinkers and writers: we do. And we also need to take time and care to create spaces where writers and workers and other people can come together and practice the imagination (Olufemi, 2021). This is what we tried to model in the Worker as Futurist project. Because as we come together to oppose Amazon and the world it is trying to build, we also need to take time to imagine and share the world we want to build instead.
What world could we build if we had democratic power over the massive wealth and powerful technology that is, today, monopolized by companies like Amazon and billionaires like Bezos? What form of democracy could we 8 billion humans use to make fair and good decisions? What system do we need to ensure care for the ecosystems of which we are all a part? How could we also, at the same time, liberate our imaginations and unleash our creative powers so that we could, indeed, explore the cosmos and learn from the wider universe, while at the same time creating a world where everyone can contribute and thrive?
Today, the answers to all these questions are being monopolized by capitalist billionaires who will gladly leave most of us to die on a ruined planet once they’ve used us up. It doesn’t need to be this way.
Thinking prompts
Imagine you and your classmates or colleagues were, magically, made into the senior executives at Amazon. How would you use the company’s money and power to create a better world?
Our imaginations are shaped by our experiences and all science fiction writers take inspiration from their everyday life. Think about your workplace or your school and how it’s organized. Who has power? What kinds of behaviour are valued or forbidden? What are the spoken and unspoken rules? Now imagine that a whole future or alien society was organized like your workplace or school. Write a ‘flash fiction’ story about what it would be like to live in that society.
References
- Alimahomed-Wilson, J. and Reese, E. (Eds.) (2020) The Cost of Free Shipping Amazon in the Global Economy. London and New York: Pluto.
- Benivolski, X., Haiven, M., Olutola, S. and Webb, G. (Eds.) (2024) The World after Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers. Thunder Bay: RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab. Available at:
http://afteramazon.world - brown, a. m. and Imarisha, W. (Eds.) (2015) Octavia’s Brood. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
- Delfanti, A. (2021) The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon. London and New York: Pluto.
- Giblin, R. and Doctorow, C. (2022) Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
- Haiven, M. and Khasnabish, A. (2014) The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity. London and New York: Zed Books.
- Le Guin, U. K. (1994) The Dispossessed. New York: Harper Voyager.28
- McGurl, M. (2021) Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. London and New York: Verso.
- Olufemi, L. (2021) Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. Maidstone: Hajar Press.
- Varoufakis, Y. (2023) Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. London and New York: Bodley Head.
- Vint, S. (2021) Science Fiction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (The MIT Press essential knowledge series).