Or, why Twitter is hard

1. The Mentions

In retrospect, maybe we should have gone for @themessage,” “@the_message,” or even “@mess_age.” But those were taken, and @messageatmedium just seemed too darn long.

Classic movie antagonists who were actually pretty much right all along

If you haven’t seen Top Gun in a while…

I strongly recommend it. It’s one of those movies — a lot of movies from the 1980s feel this way — that didn’t hold up for a long time, but now it does. People grow, times change; you gain new perspective and learn to appreciate different things about both movies and the times that produce them.

or How To Name Your Computer and Other Machines: A comparative study of how users bring the devices and networks they use every day even closer.

For me, as for so many, it began with an external hard drive. Its name was “Dante.”

My operating system may have once been content to insist I call my floppy drive A, my hard drive C, and any additional drives D, E, F, and so forth (excepting only U, which was typically reserved for the network). Cutesy Macs may have had pet names, but on a DOS or Windows PC, there was no permanent record of warm familiarity with your machine’s parts, even if you had lovingly installed, formatted, and partitioned them yourself. A device’s logical address was its only address.

With special reference to Roquel “Billy “Davis, the Black advertising legend who co-wrote and produced “I’d Like To Teach the World to Sing”

“It would be a lie to portray Sterling Cooper and Price’s world as integrated.”
— Matthew Weiner, The Charlie Rose Show

Sunday night was the series finale of Mad Men, AMC’s prestige drama about advertising executives navigating their way through the 1960s, ending in 1970. While critics and fans made bets on which characters would live and die, fall for each other or wind up alone, a guiding principle for many was the idea that the end of Mad Men would directly dovetail with an important piece of pop culture. And since the show made strong thematic use of period-specific music in each of its seasons, there were even predictions on what 1970 song might play the series out. As it turned out, Mad Men touched all the bases, ending Don Draper’s story with the 1971 Coca-Cola commercial jingle, “I’d Like to Buy the World A Coke.”

Nearly twenty-eight years after its release, the album offers the best look at the lives of writers.

When people talk about finding good writing music, they’re usually talking about music to write to. They want something ambient and ethereal, animated and propulsive, or immersive and complete. They want something to ignore, something that lets them ignore the rest of the world, or even something that lets them pretend they aren’t writing at all. Whether you’re a student hunkering down for a term paper, an aspiring novelist, or a professional nonfiction writer trying to get an assignment out the door with just a dram of art still on it — music is a tool to help you avoid the ugly, awkward gap between beginning and end.

Eric B and Rakim’s album Paid In Full is not precisely that. Their debut is too immediate, too real, to help you avoid anything. But it’s not just an album of danceable, hard-hitting, Golden Age hip-hop songs either. It’s that rarest of things: a collection of amazing writing, by a writer, for writers, about writing, that you actually enjoy. It doesn’t feel like work.

Sometimes it feels like long after our religious and national holidays have come and gone, Super Bowl Sunday will endure. Along with Black Friday — not Christmas, Black Friday — Super Bowl Sunday is one of the few true American holidays, and maybe the one that best shows us who we are as a people.

Everything about the biggest day of the world’s biggest sport makes the NFL seem invincible. Right down to the Last Days of Rome extravagances the league insists that the host cities provide.

Even the scandals, such as they are — Deflategate and continued rumors of widespread PED use hound both teams in this year’s Super Bowl—are just fuel for football’s fire. Two teams so competitive that they might turn to drugs (that wouldn’t even be illegal outside the context of football) or cheating (in an almost clownish, get-every-edge-you-can mania) just prove that reaching the Super Bowl is worth almost any price.

None of this is an existential crisis. All of it is good if it points fans toward the football field and away from the broken human beings left in football’s wake. All of it is good if it ushers in the next generation of fans — as long as it makes football continue to seem inevitable.

Each epoch dreams the one to follow.
— Jules Michelet

Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.
— Walter Benjamin

Now that it’s 2015, we have (plus or minus a few months) caught up with the farthest future shown in the Back to the Future trilogy. You almost certainly know this already, because there have been dozens of stories about it. For the past few years, there have been hoaxes proclaiming that this day is the day seen in Back to the Future II, complete with photoshopped chronometers. (Now, there’s actually an online Back to the Future hoax generator for one-stop hoaxing.) The first stories comparing our present to the movie’s imagined future hit the web before 2014 was even finished. And this is after years of revisiting and anticipating what was to come.

When The Colbert Report premiered nine years ago, Comedy Central tried something different. It made the first week of episodes available to download and watch online. If you didn’t stay up to watch the show, or you didn’t have cable, you could still see Stephen Colbert try to turn his Daily Show character into a new kind of television show, one whose politics, format, and satirical tone were particularly suited to the mid-2000s internet.

It was a rare case of a network blessing the still-emerging practice of video sharing online. The Colbert Report had only an eight-week initial order: the combination of internet fans returning to watch the show live and the strong Daily Show lead-in helped win it a year.

It was the future. Of course, it couldn’t last.

My friend Patrick has a joke. Maybe you’ve heard it.

Everybody thinks "The Social Network" is the best movie about forming a new startup, but they are wrong. The best movie is "Ghostbusters".

— Patrick Ewing

(Patrick was an engineer at Twitter when he wrote this, so I believe him.)

It’s a great line, not least because it’s probably true. It also illustrates an important principle: most movies (and books, and maybe even companies) that make a big deal about how much they’re about technology are rarely if ever the best at actually being about technology.

Edmund Wilson’s book To the Finland Station is subtitled “A Study in the Writing and Acting of History,” and it’s a good one for his book. You could call it a history of a century of socialism (roughly 1817-1917), but Wilson is interested in intellectual revolution as much as (or really more than) political revolution. He writes at greater length about post-Revolutionary historians like Michelet and Renan than about what he sees as the minor political figures that prefigured Lenin. And his Marx and Engels are above all writers, theorists, and psychological curiosities who somewhat accidentally happened to have been involved for a brief time in political organizing. He wants to better understand the history of people who sought to better understand history, and write about them in ways they never would or could have written about themselves.

As an American writing mostly about 19th century Europeans in the 1930s, Wilson necessarily has some blind spots. Anti-semitism is not particularly one of them, although he does exhibit a philo-semitism that sometimes turns cartoonishly on its head. He is pretty thoroughly obsessed with national, religious, and ethnic origins for all of his characters: Lenin’s German mother gets credited with everything about her son that seems to disprove Russian stereotypes. But Marx’s Jewishness is turned over the most thoroughly and quasi-psychoanalytically (with an attention to physical detail that borders on the phrenological).

I got married to Karen McGrane on November 4, 2022 in a beautiful ceremony officiated by Janie Porche at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Many people know that Karen and I first got to know each other online, via a close group of mutual friends, but were never in the same physical space until the day I moved into her house. (Now our house.)

All credit goes to Karen: She slid into the DMs first. I kept finding ways to get her to come back there, but she was the one who was brave enough to openly declare her crush. She saw our whole future together while I was still trying to figure out if she liked me or like-liked me. (She was already in love with me.)

My old pal and blogging partner Robin Sloan recently published an edition of his monthly newsletter where he puts on his media critic hat, in reaction to pieces by Max Read and Kyle Chayka, who conclude that media is now a personality cult you have to cultivate in newsletter writing just like YouTubers and TikTokers. Robin writes:

Everything has always been a cult.

If you think that word has negative connotations, squelch them; make the label, for a moment, perfectly neutral. I’ve long believed that cults are central to books: their history and longevity. It is no accident that the plot of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore revolves around a secretive, long-lived organization.

Who are the scholars of a novel like Ulysses, if not a cult? Who are the readers of Marvel comics, if not a cult? What is it to claim that any work is part of a canon, if not to say, it has a formidable cult?

The error is assuming cult membership must be exclusive. All of us, preoccupied by media in all its forms, we are members of many cults — dozens, hundreds — with densely overlapping memberships.

A work of art is nothing without its cult! Literally nothing. Inert marks on pages closed to the light; derelict bits in the coldest region of the database…

[Cults] have been necessary, at all times in all places, for the long-term transmission of art of any/every kind. Maybe the difference, here and now in the short 2020s, is that you need one right from the start.

In response, I wrote Robin a very dense email (I write a lot of dense emails), which I will cite in full (with added links) in italics below, then expand on here.

TIME FOR SOME WEBERIAN THEORY

The Writers Guild of America is on strike, bringing movie and television production to a halt. This affects media companies across the board, but one of them is Amazon, which is not exactly like other media companies. It's primarily a retailer as well as a technology and infrastructure company. However, it's undeniable that the strike is happening in large part because of companies like Amazon and what they represent: the transformation of media by digital technologies like streaming video and artificial intelligence, and the further transformation of the media business model these technological innovations have introduced.

Many of the WGA's demands are about changing the pay rate for streaming video: getting a higher percentage of residuals for overseas streaming, and establishing a viewership-based streaming residual in addition to a fixed residual. The idea is to partially account for the substantially greater amount of time spent and revenue earned via streaming and the creation of new global video markets since the last time the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) came to an agreement. The AMPTP wants to pay a lower overall rate and a carve-out for streaming services with smaller overseas viewership.

Another demand is about the potential use of AI in script production. The WGA is looking for a targeted ban: no AI-written source material, writing or rewriting text, and not using writers' scripts to train AI. The AMPTP countered this position by offering “annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology.”

I've been arguing that Amazon's heroic phase is over. To which you might be asking, "what 'heroic phase'? Amazon's always been a destroyer of industries, values, and communities, an exploiter of underpaid labor and infrastructure it didn't earn." Wow, harsh, imaginary reader! Let's just stipulate that along with all that, there was also an implicit promise that if you had a problem, Amazon had the technical and logistical wherewithal to solve it. It also had the money and the ambition to spend whatever resources and energy were necessary to take on virtually any challenge, and iterate quickly if needed. They might have put your local bookstore (or bookstore chain) out of business, but it wasn't like they didn't replace it with something new, different, and cheaper for the customer. It wasn't just that interest rates were low and growth was easy to invest in: Amazon was a company with revolutionary potential, maybe uniquely so.

You can see the dimming of this potential everywhere in the last few weeks — another massive round of layoffs, the company taking a wait-and-see approach on consumer-facing AI (which might after all be prudent), scaling back customer-friendly benefits like free returns (and even free shipping!), and halting construction on its much-hyped HQ2 project, among others. There are probably over a thousand different cost-cutting measures that suggest Amazon is focused more on near-term profitability and keeping its powder dry rather than investing in cornering new markets or building up capacity.

To pick one example, let's look at the grocery business.

When Amazon purchased Whole Foods in 2017, it seemed prime to disrupt the grocery business like it began to do with books two decades before. Online ordering and same-day delivery were nascent at best: Amazon seemed like the best candidate to change all that.

Welcome back to the Amazon Chronicles, a newsletter about Amazon and the companies, communities, and technologies in its shadow.

First, some housekeeping: I had expected to send this newsletter out more than a week ago, but I managed to contract a non-COVID illness that briefly put me out of commission. No problem, I thought, I'll put the newsletter out midweek and everything will be fine. Then we got a telephone call from a dog breeder letting us know that, contrary to our expectations when we joined the queue, a new Boston Terrier puppy would be available for us as soon as the next week.

So instead of putting out a newsletter on Tuesday, I drove from Philadelphia to central Pennsylvania and picked up the puppy now known as Orzo.

There has been so much Amazon news piling up over the holiday break that I figured it would be best to take a short break from my essays on Amazon, the tech industry, and late capitalism. So instead we'll focus on… the immediate fallout of late capitalism on the tech industry, specifically Amazon. There will just be a lot more links (and a lot fewer Hungarian philosophers).

The biggest story is that Amazon's 2023 layoffs have begun, and they're nearly twice as large as was initially projected: approximately 18,000 people will be let go from the company. 18,000 people is hard to wrap your head around, so I tried to come up with some comparable figures:

A typical freshman class at my alma mater, Michigan State University, a very large public university, has about 9000 students. So twice that number of people will be losing their jobs in this round of layoffs at Amazon.

There were also about 9000 homicides in the United States in 2022. (This was one of the higher murder rates in the last twenty years.) So more than twice as many people as were murdered in the entire US will lose a job at Amazon.

The end of the heroic age of the tech giants does not imply that tech giants are in decline, but confusing the two is natural. Observers and analysts usually talk that way about companies, especially tech companies and the platforms they enable: they grow, mature, then decline (in relevance if not in revenue).

In general, what characterizes this phase of the tech giants' development is a shift from unlocking user creativity and customer value to doubling down on surveillance, usually augmented by AI. Mass surveillance was always an important emergent part of the tech giants’ strategy, but was arguably secondary to delighting users and giving them greater capabilities. Now surveillance and nonhuman solutions are dominant, and the creative possibilities are now almost all residual.

(Yes, this "emergent/dominant/residual" schema is a Raymond Williams reference.)

The stock market is one measure of growth and decline, and it's fair to say the stock market is worried about Big Tech. Last month, The New York Times wrote about tech losses and their drag on the overall stock market:

What does it mean to say "the heroic phase of the tech giants is over?"

The phrase "heroic phase" has some history. It's from Marxist history and cultural theory. The idea was formulated by Marx himself, but popularized (for a certain value of "popular") by the Hungarian thinker Georg (or György) Lukács. It's part of a theory of history that states that every group that comes to power has to struggle against the dominant group that preceded it, and is in turn supplanted by another group after collapsing under its own contradictions.

The idea of a "heroic phase" is usually applied to the bourgeoisie, roughly from the Renaissance to the mid-19th century. The period was the age of the great middle-class revolutions against the church, against monarchs, against the aristocracy, in the name of political and economic liberty, reason, and constitutional republics. Scientific and literary revolutions in these centuries also helped usher in humanism, empiricism, and realism. Global colonialism by European agents helped make all of these achievements possible.

The bourgeoisie and their allies were fighting for their own interests, but their revolution took the shape of greater freedom for everyone (or at least men in the non-colonized parts of the world), and they mostly formulated their political and scientific ideas in terms of universal laws.

Welcome back to Amazon Chronicles, your admittedly irregular blog/newsletter about all things Amazon – plus the users, customers, workers, and industries in its shadow.

It's been two weeks since my last newsletter – I took a break for the US's Thanksgiving holiday, and very sadly, our beloved Boston Terrier Beedie passed away.

In that time, Twitter (the company and the platform) further deteriorated under the already-infamous leadership of Elon Musk. I'm still reading and posting there [@tcarmody], but I've also moved to Mastodon and Post.news.

I also concluded that I should get my newsletter off of the Twitter-owned Revue platform as quickly as possible. So this newsletter is coming to you from Ghost, my fourth newsletter platform (Tinyletter => Substack => Revue => Ghost, which isn't counting my time using Mailchimp to write Kottke.org's newsletter), and my third in a little more than a year. Here's hoping it sticks: I certainly would rather not move house again.

This is Amazon Chronicles, a brand new site (well, a version of two old sites) by Tim Carmody that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published!

Why shuttering Amazon's Devices group may be a mistake

Welcome back. It's been a busy few months for me, albeit not a busy few months on the newsletter. I got married! Do you have any idea how much work it is to plan a wedding? Because I did not. I had no plan for that much planning. My then-fiancée/now-wife is great at it. I struggled to keep my head above water. But it's over now, and we're delighted with how it turned out. And since part of our courtship was her subscription to and reading of this newsletter at its old home on Substack — yes, including the one where I posted a photo of my giant hand that I captioned "Ladies" — it seems only fitting that I return to it.

Yesterday, the New York Times confirmed an earlier report by the Wall Street Journal that Amazon is planning to lay off approximately 10,000 employees, making deep cuts in its devices group, as well as retail and HR. The mandate from CEO Andy Jassy is to boost overall profits by cutting in divisions that are unprofitable.

Amazon has a viral problem with its e-book return program

Here's what the kids are doing with e-book returns

Amazon has made crucial missteps in understanding its employees' future, from the distribution floor to the C-suite.

Two Amazon stories this week caught my attention (and maybe yours too!). Both have to do with Amazon's workforce — rarely major news unless there's something straightforwardly political happening, like a union election or a hearing about workplace injuries — and both involve a crucial misjudgment by Amazon in assuming that the company's successes can save it from its own shortcomings. (This is a kind of hubris that's far from unique to Amazon, but let's say it's not uncommon at the company either.)

Here's the first thing: Jason Del Ray at Vox/Recode obtained a year-old Amazon internal memo warning that the company could run out of workers to hire for its US-based warehouse locations as soon as 2024.

It was an accelerated growth cycle, not an accelerating one

(Why won't you let me add alt text to images, Revue? That… that is really stupid.)

It's always foolish to post a newsletter just before a big quarterly earnings statement is coming (tomorrow, if you didn't know). But there is so much going on, I wanted to try to make some sense of it all before it gets drowned out in the post-quarterly tsunami of Amazon news and speculation.

First, as a matter of housekeeping, something I genuinely thought would probably not happen (Elon Musk buying Twitter, and therefore Revue) now looks like it probably will happen, and I frankly don't know yet what that means for this newsletter. I've already been pretty outspoken that I don't plan to leave Twitter — the place just means too much to me, and I think it is much more a function of what the community makes of it than any input from the owners or executives in charge — but building a renewed business on that foundation is a different kettle of fish. My main worry, as I mentioned before, is that the tenor of Revue itself radically changes: I've already been on one so-called "free speech" newsletter platform and it just got me associated with a bunch of people I didn't want to be standing next to in a subway car, let alone a masthead. So just like I'm firing up my old Writer's Room Slack and making sure my other social network logins still work, I am looking at newsletter alternatives and will keep you posted.

Musk paying a price a fair bit above trading is actually close to the only good news for shareholders in digital media this week. (If you're an employee in digital media, it's bad all over.) Netflix announced a downturn in subscribers and even more pessimistic guidances going forward, and is looking into hacking away costs and adding an advertising-supported tier, things that seemed wildly improbably even a year ago. A lot of companies, maybe especially Netflix, convinced themselves that the negative data they were seeing was part of the pandemic bubble of economic uncertainty, when it turned out that the pandemic-driven urge for people to entertain themselves was actually keeping them afloat. A bubble that cuts both ways!

Plus a quick roundup of the week's Amazon news

Andy Jassy's first annual letter as Amazon CEO appeared last week, along with a related interview he did on CNBC's Squawk Box. I was sad to see this exchange (there's a little more but this is the core of it) turn into a fleet of breathless stories about Amazon maybe selling NFTs:

SORKIN: Could you see yourself selling NFTs?

Dear Amazon Chronicles Members,

Some of you have read (or have in your inboxes right now), the first Amazon Chronicles newsletter entry since December. That’s right, I am back at the steering wheel, with an update on the newsletter’s future and a short roundup of the best Amazon news from this week.

But this will likely be the last newsletter I write for Substack. I’ve decided to migrate the archives and the mailing list over to Revue.

I did this for a number of reasons. First, my agreement to publish on Substack had ended right about the time I put the site back on hiatus. I had to debate shuttering the newsletter altogether, restarting it under a different mandate, and/or changing newsletter platforms. Continuing it as it was on Substack was not a live option.

Dear readers,

When I last wrote in December, I said that I hoped I would have a chance to bring back this newsletter, and behold! Here it is, once again. This is the third extended hiatus this newsletter has taken in the 3+ years since it began, but I can assure you: all three were unavoidable.

In this case, I took off time to work on other projects and to find a new platform from which to publish. I looked hard at just about every email option out there: Buttondown, Ghost, Mailchimp, you name it. I even thought about taking the whole show over to Patreon, which has been a good home for me for years, but I wanted something that would still give me options to write in the hybrid supported-by-members-but-free-to-the-public model I outlined a long time ago in my essay "Unlocking the Commons."

Ultimately, I liked Revue for making its import options easy, for its integration with Twitter (still my favorite social platform and the source of most of my subscribers, free and paid), its low overhead costs, and even (surprisingly) its limited design palette. Maybe that design part will change! That would be great — I have ideas! But for now it's useful not to have to make so many decisions.

Dear Readers,

I wanted to let you know that I’m putting Amazon Chronicles on indefinite hiatus. Paid subscribers should have billing paused as of Wednesday, December 8th. Free readers will have to suffer the charm of even fewer emails about Amazon for awhile.

I’ve never had an easy time keeping this newsletter to a regular schedule. And this month, something always seemed to be getting in the way of a new edition: an emergency, an illness, a holiday, a dentist’s or doctor’s appointment, you name it. Plus, there is all the behind-the-scenes maintenance of the site, weighing business demands, delivery, subscribers, and other opportunities. There’s also the tug of other projects, some of which were conceived or even promised before this newsletter was a thing.

Finally, I felt like the most responsible thing I could do was to close up the doors and pause billing indefinitely until I could figure out what to do next.

A weekly, reported newsletter about Amazon was and remains a great idea, and I hope to come back to it when the circumstances permit.

Until then, or for whatever’s next, the best places to find me are on Twitter, at my Patreon, or via my Tinyletter.

Amazon’s latest quarterly earnings report was its most dour in some time: the company missed Wall Street expectations and was accordingly conservative in its guidance for the usually blockbuster holiday quarter coming up (“Operating income is expected to be between $0 and $3.0 billion, compared with $6.9 billion in fourth quarter 2020”). It’s a bumpy start for new CEO Andy Jassy, but also a chance to set expectations that Amazon isn’t going to slow down its investments because of a bumpy quarter or two just to give shareholders a sunnier bottom-line view.

Jassy emphasized continuity, both for customers and leadership: “We’ve always said that when confronted with the choice between optimizing for short-term profits versus what’s best for customers over the long term, we will choose the latter—and you can see that during every phase of this pandemic.” But what, exactly, are the long-term investments that Amazon is making right now?

We’ve nearly doubled the size of our fulfillment network since the pandemic began. In the fourth quarter, we expect to incur several billion dollars of additional costs in our Consumer business as we manage through labor supply shortages, increased wage costs, global supply chain issues, and increased freight and shipping costs—all while doing whatever it takes to minimize the impact on customers and selling partners this holiday season. It’ll be expensive for us in the short term, but it’s the right prioritization for our customers and partners. — Andy Jassy

The cost that jumped out to me on a quick read of the quarterly report was property. Purchases of property were up from about $11B in the corresponding quarter in 2020 to almost $16B in this quarter, and $31B to $57B in the corresponding year. That’s the difference between a record quarter and a modest one, and a reminder that compared to most of its cloud counterparts, Amazon owns and operates a tremendous amount of property and equipment. It’s constantly building and planning to build new facilities, and in a turbulent real estate market, that costs real money (even with Amazon using its political connections and the hunger for jobs to help pull some strings).

One way to read a good chunk of the last week or so of news stories about Amazon is as a complex push and pull between Amazon and the third-party sellers that make up its marketplace. On the one hand, Amazon wants to present itself as absolutely essential to those third-party sellers’ businesses, with all other options looking like shabby second-best choices; on the other, in order to actually be essential, Amazon needs to sweeten its arrangements with its sellers to actually make it substantially better than its competition.

Let’s start with a story that seemed a little silly when I first saw it: the Online Merchants Guild told David Dayen at The American Prospect that Amazon had sent emails threatening its third-party sellers that government regulation of Amazon’s marketplace could force it to shut down entirely.

The emails pushed sellers to register at an in-house website, supportsmallsellers.us, to “stay informed and involved on legislation that could impact your business”… The website asks for emails and physical addresses from sellers, and says that signing up will “afford you opportunities to communicate directly with your elected officials.” With physical addresses, Amazon could target messages from potentially thousands of seller constituents directly to their own members of Congress. This amounts to building a large lobbying army out of its seller partners, by asserting that their livelihoods are at grave risk from the legislative effort.

On the one hand, this makes sense; raise the specter of a worst-case scenario for your sellers, and then position yourself as the champion of small businesses, rather than be painted as their exploiter, especially before what could be a costly showdown with Congress and another unionization showdown (this time in a major media market that’s more labor-friendly.)

At The Verge, my old colleague/boss Nilay Patel has a new Decoder interview with Dave Limp, SVP of the devices group at Amazon. It’s available as a podcast or lovingly transcribed, and is well worth listening to / reading — I’ll be referring to the transcript throughout here.

As others have pointed out, this interview is about as candid as Limp has been about how he and the Devices group work within Amazon. But what caught my attention were Limp’s continual references to a well-known part of Amazon office culture: the six-page memo.

Jeff Bezos instituted the no slide decks / narrative memo requirement in an email to Amazon’s S Team back in 2004, and described it in an interview with Charlie Rose about a decade ago:

Maybe we’re just fools, but one reason why tech PR events announcing a new set of products and services have caught on as quasi-pop culture is that they offer a chance to see a vision of the future. We’re chasing that feeling we had the first time we saw the iPhone, or the MacIntosh, or even something as now mundane as Gmail. We want the experience of having someone open the lids to our heads again.

Amazon’s events rarely offer that feeling. It’s not that the company doesn’t have big ideas; it’s that they only occasionally come in the scale of a gadget. There’s the Kindle, there’s the various Alexa portals, and then there’s a lot of iterating around the edges, new variations on popular things we’ve seen before, either from Amazon or someone else.

As The Verge’s Dieter Bohn writes, “We expected AI to look like HAL 9000. Instead, it looks a lot more like a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.” Or as Shira Ovide writes for the New York Times, “Amazon is America’s silliest inventor. It’s Ron Popeil without a filter, plus Alexa. Amazon seems to be making any doodad it can dream up and seeing what people do with it.” This does not sound like a company whose vision of the future seems radically compelling.

A California law signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday aims to regulate and make more transparent warehouses run by Amazon and other employers. Here is Suhauna Hussain’s summary in the Los Angeles Times:

The first-of-its-kind legislation, AB 701, gives Amazon and other warehouse workers new power to fight quotas, which critics say have fostered dangerous conditions by pressuring workers to skip bathroom breaks and skirt safety measures… The measure requires warehouses to disclose quotas and work-speed metrics to employees and government agencies and prohibits penalties for stopping work to use the bathroom and other activities that affect health and safety. It also prohibits retaliation against workers who complain.

What strikes me about this new law is that while the bill regulates and prohibits some workroom practices (e.g., being fired for bathroom breaks or as retaliation for complaints), in other cases, the law simply asks that certain work quotas be disclosed to workers and the public, rather than kept hidden. In too many cases, advocates say, employees only learn about the work rule’s hidden quota (whether it’s for “time off task” or for a productivity metric) after they’ve been terminated for failing to meet it.

The law would also require companies that run warehouses to report to the government—and their own employees—the quotas and speed metrics they mandate for workers. “Right now, it’s very secretive,” said Christian Castro, communications director for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, which sponsored the bill. “E-commerce has been growing exponentially, it’s gotten even more popular during the pandemic…. Workers are telling us about an increase in quotas, not even knowing their quotas.”

A small news story slid in over the weekend, but I think it’s noteworthy enough to take a second look. It’s an interview with Bookshop.org’s Andy Hunter by Techcrunch’s Danny Crichton. There’s a lot of data here. For example:

• Bookshop’s sales are in 2021 are about even with where they were in the site’s annus mirabilis of 2020, when the site took off as physical bookstore sales dipped. This year, bookstore sales are largely back, but Bookshop’s sales remain strong.
• Bookshop is working (and helping its partner stores) to invest in human-curated book recommendations, rather than wrapping both arms around an algorithmic model. This could be a good differentiator going forward, both for Bookshop and between different bookstore partners.
• This ia also (we hope, and Hunter hopes) good for midlist books and ones by less established authors, which often get crowded out by blockbuster-driven algorithms and media hype.

All this is good. But here’s one item in particular that I wish had gotten more attention:

(This is the second part of an interview I did with reporter Alec MacGillis, author of the book Fulfillment, in the spring about Amazon and the evolution of mostly blue-collar work across the United States; see here for the first part of the interview.)

Tim Carmody: I wanted to ask about the relationship between Amazon and its workers and politics and politicians, whether it’s local or national politicians. I know that a complex relationship between politicians and a big employer and its workforce is nothing new. But despite a few high profile blow ups, like in New York City with HQ2, Amazon has been very savvy in terms of how they’ve courted local politicians, and the kinds of appeals they’ve offered.

Alec MacGillis: It starts with jobs and job turnover. Amazon does offer a lot of entry-level jobs, especially at the warehouses, even if it’s often for a short period of time, and often for a younger, blue-collar, blacker part of the workforce. And there’s a strong sense of, well, at least it’s something. That’s why area officials are so eager to get them in there, and often just shower them with tax credits, just being so incredibly obsequious in their overtures.

Back in the spring, I interviewed Alec MacGillis, author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. This was while union elections were taking place at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemmer, Alabama; I was just starting to think about a series on how Amazon was transforming work worldwide, and lo and behold, that’s what MacGillis’s book was/is all about.

Even now, months later, the transcript still pops. Here are some selections of what we talked about; there will probably be another installment later this week.

Alec MacGillis: To be quite honest, the book didn't even start as an Amazon book. I don't even really think of it entirely as an Amazon book, although, of course, it makes sense to shorthand it that way I really started out wanting to do a book about inequality in America and regional inequality, to come at it from the perspective of place, not just the income ladder that we usually talk about. Traveling all around with my reporting and just being so disheartened, depressed, and kind of alarmed by the rising levels of inequality between places. For years now being struck by this, and it's getting worse and worse and worse, to the point where you travel between some of these places now, and you get vertigo, because they're so crazily different.

This will be (I hope) a brief coda to my earlier post, “Tolkien and Amazon’s Fight for a Franchise.” In that post, I claim that J.R.R. Tolkien’s First Age stories, collected in The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, Beren and Luthien, and The Fall of Gondolin present a more coherent set of fuller-developed stories than the Second Age material on the forging of the Rings of Power and the rise and fall of Numenor Amazon chose to make the basis of its forthcoming television series.

Amazon’s creative problem is a difficult one, but its reasoning is fairly straightforward: it’s buying into the least developed, least zealously guarded material where it has the most room to make up whatever stories it chooses so long as they are broadly coherent with the published texts. Essentially, Amazon has the right to make Númenorean fan fiction. The main problem here is that you actually have to develop coherent characters and stories viewers want to follow along with, which is no easy task, whether your background mythology is a rich or a murky one (in this case, it’s both).

The Tolkien Estate’s reasoning, however, is less obvious. Apart from the already published, already popular books of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, whose TV and movie rights were already sold during J.R.R. Tolkien’s lifetime, the stories of the First Age were seen as central to the legendarium, so much so that J.R.R. Tolkien strongly desired The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings to be published together, perhaps as a single volume. (Then, largely as now, nobody wanted anything to do with The Silmarillion; it was weird, it wasn’t entirely finished, it wasn’t a sequel to The Hobbit, and it didn’t even have any hobbits in it.)

Tolkien knew there were problems with updating his older stories and making them suitable for publication, but he also thought the two books were incoherent without each other. As he wrote in a letter to his publisher at the time, he believed that The Lord of the Rings, far from being a simple sequel to The Hobbit, had actually become a sequel to the unpublished Silmarillion.

Amazon is spending a huge amount of money on its new multi-season television series set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy universe: an estimated 250 million USD for the rights and 465 million USD just for the first season, making it quite likely the most expensive television series in history. This raises the question: just what is Amazon buying with all that money, or rather, what does it expect in return?

If the new Lord of the Rings-verse series is a tentpole, it’s a tentpole of a different kind: it’s not necessarily driving subscription numbers like an HBO series, and it’s certainly not anchoring an evening of programming like a network TV series. In 2019, Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke outlined Amazon’s strategy this way:

We have a very unique business in the sense that our entire north star is to entertain and delight Prime customers all over the world, so there’s a different strategy there… We will curate shows to bring to that global, diverse audience. We’re not in the volume business. We’re in the curated business… I came from the network business, as did all of us, where you’re used to being able to go out and talk about success in viewership numbers. Our company doesn’t embrace that strategy.

I’m trying something a little different here: a forum-style post where I pose a question or problem, usually after describing it at some length, and ask for your comments and feedback. To be honest, I’m stealing this format for my own purposes from Helena Fitzgerald’s excellent newsletter griefbacon, but where her newsletter (including subscriber contributions) is personal and literary, this one is embarrassingly analytic. So I’m fishing a little bit here, and hoping to pull up something good.

Since January, I’ve been working on a story about Amazon Web Services. It was motivated by AWS booting the social media network Parler off its platform for violating the company’s terms and services. Since then, AWS has done the same for accounts linked to the NSO Group, which was linked to surveillance software that was used to spy on journalism organizations worldwide. (AWS’s response came after an Amnesty International report claimed that NSO had recently switched to Amazon’s CloudFront service.)

The problem here is that there are no clear guidelines as to what, if any, services a backbone internet infrastructure provider like AWS should refuse to provide to a client. While public-facing platforms like YouTube or Facebook might act relatively quickly (in some cases automatically, and in some cases using software like that provided by AWS) to pull down a video that violates copyright or is deemed abusive, commercial platforms like AWS are rarely called upon to stop supporting entire platforms. Yet in other cases this lack of accountability and the absence of oversight is exactly what allows truly atrocious behavior to continue.

Another distinction one might make is between Amazon as a public-facing storefront and again, as an infrastructure provider for other, perhaps competing applications. Amazon’s Kindle store (or print bookstore) might come under public pressure for profiting heavily off controversial or misleading books, but that seems different in some degree from a case where Amazon is providing hosting services for a separate bookstore selling the same book, or an app or video streaming service offering that same content. Should Amazon be in the business of policing everything its wholesale customers do? If so, how would that work?

It’s a tricky thing when you’re writing and reporting a newsletter about Amazon, perhaps especially when you’re writing about Amazon in a very broad sense as both a company and a cultural phenomenon, to avoig getting caught up in Amazon’s own news cycle. Amazon produces a lot of media fireworks that everyone is intended to chase: Prime Days is one of them, and Jeff Bezos’s side ventures like Blue Origin have been another. Even if your take on them is critical or humorous or dismissive, you’re talking about them. And that seems to be part of the point: they’re like countermeasures designed to baffle anyone who’d make other aspects of Amazon a target.

That at least, is part of what’s going on. But Blue Origin is a little different. (It’s not an Amazon project, for one thing; like the Washington Post, this is Bezos’s own thing.)

This is Blue Origin’s mission statement: “We're committed to building a road to space so our children can build the future.”

I generally dislike writing about Prime Day (or Black Friday, etc.), or any Amazon sales or deals because I don’t see the job of this newsletter as helping Amazon move products, even (or especially) when they’re things I use and like. I’m not an Amazon expert or watcher in that sense, at least not professionally.

But you really cannot deny that Amazon has been largely successful in turning Amazon Prime Day(s) into a media event, at least for online media, and to some extent to television as well. Online news covers the sales, both as service journalism (here’s what to buy, from Amazon or elsewhere), and as a business event (here’s how Prime Day sales met/beat/fell below expectations, and what that means for Amazon’s stock/online retail). And both of those kinds of stories push commerce for (and interest in) Amazon.

Social media, too, drives Prime Day sales, as people share deals they’ve found (or less often, warn their readers away from a sale that looks generous, but really isn’t).

The trouble with Prime Day, though, is that the sales can change in real time. Deals unveiled one day can expire before the day’s over, or sometimes before noon. So even the sites recommending a sale can get burnt if Amazon runs out of product or decides (for whatever reason) to end or change the discount.

If your social media feeds are anything like mine, last week was full of people lamenting the news that Oxford University Press intended to close its subsidiary printing house, called Oxuniprint. But I think there’s some misunderstanding about what this decision actually means.

First of all, it doesn’t mean the books Oxford publishes will no longer be printed. It just means they’ll be printed by a different printer, one not owned by OUP. Oxford isn’t going to give all their business to Amazon, or anyone else in the world of digital-only books.

In fact, printer outsourcing has been the case for the vast majority of books and other material printed by OUP for a long time (more than thirty years). That long history of outsourcing is one of the main reasons Oxuniprint is in financial trouble. This is right in the story by The Guardian on Oxuniprint’s closure:

Welcome back to Amazon Chronicles, my newsletter about Amazon and the industries in its shadow. As always, the main newsletters themselves are free for everybody; paid supporters usually pledge $5 a month or $50 a year for access to comment threads, some behind-the-scenes community posts, but mostly just to help keep the lights on for everyone else.

You’ll notice that the newsletter has a new design this week! This is something we’ve been working on for a while; the actual work was done by Tara Slade, who somehow incorporated my crude, Pixelmator-made designs into something new and professional. Thanks Tara!

I’ve been writing and reporting about Amazon’s labor issues, from warehouse workers and delivery drivers to content moderators and cloud programmers. It’s my belief that as much as Amazon is a harbinger of change in how we shop and consume media and other goods using the internet as a go-between, it’s equally significant for showing how work is changing in the 21st century.

It seems clear that Amazon is one of the contemporary companies that is broadly transforming the nature of labor in the 21st century. This is happening along many different fronts: executives whose life-changing wealth is tied to the company’s stock success, cloud programmers looking for new ways to automate pieces of entire industries, third-party affiliate sellers and delivery drivers whose fates are tied to a company that does not, strictly speaking, employ them, and warehouse workers whose constant surveillance and negotiation with their own continually reprogrammed workplaces are becoming a model for a new kind of global blue-collar work. Any of these transformations would be significant: for all of them to be crucial in the evolution of an enormous company at once can be difficult to wrap your head around.

This is one of several reasons so many of us have been fascinated by the recent unionizaton election by employees at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. Union protection for at least one class of Amazon workers, plus collective bargaining and everything that comes with it, might introduce some stability and predictability into this transformation of labor. So far, it’s the corporate side of Amazon that has been setting the pace. If unions were introduced to American Amazon warehouses, and they become commonplace, then everything becomes more recognizable. Workplace safety issues become part of the labor agreement; you have fewer standoffs directly between the company and politicians (at least pertaining to warehouse work); the jobs and careers themselves ideally become more stable, as greater salaries and benefits accrue to more experienced workers, and so forth. The 21st century labor struggle would look a lot more like the 20th century one, and not the wild, inchoate mess it looks like now.

But in Bessemer, the union was not approved at the ballot box. Two solid stories that have appeared in the past few days that describe how and why this happened are CNN’s overview, including several interviews with anonymous voters in that election, and Labor Notes’s interview with Joshua Fuller, one of the lead organizers from RWDSU, the union seeking recognition in the election. Together, they describe a workplace strongly motivated to unionize, but also one facing both procedural hurdles and a well-funded, impossible-to-ignore campaign by Amazon to defeat the unionization effort.

There will be court challenges arguing that Amazon illegally interfered with the election. There will also be a renewed push to pass the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act in Congress, a change that could make it easier to organize other Amazon workplaces. And other unions and labor activists, like the Teamsters (who are organizing delivery drivers in Iowa) and the SEIU, are proposing using different tactics against Amazon that are less dependent on winning union elections — a battle unions never won, despite great efforts, against Amazon’s predecessor, Walmart:

The idea is to combine workplace actions like walkouts (the ground war) with pressure on company executives through public relations campaigns that highlight labor conditions and enlist the support of public figures (the air war). The Service Employees International Union used the strategy to organize janitors beginning in the 1980s, and to win gains for fast-food workers in the past few years, including wage increases across the industry.

For its part, Amazon’s leadership seems to be aware that bad PR and public fights with politicians could leave it vulnerable going forward (which is one thing that made its social media strategy during the Bessemer election so bewildering — that move seemed likely to backfire, and difficult to sustain, Walmart-style).

Hello Amazon Chronicles Subscribers!

For the last year, I’ve disabled new paid subscribers to this newsletter, since I wasn’t posting often and didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with the subscriber list going forward. HOWEVER, that does not disable autorenewed subscriptions, and many of my first wave of paid subscribers from back in January 2019 have started to get their autorenew notices. Many of you have probably been wondering: what is going on? So, here’s the deal.

My plan has always been to relaunch this newsletter in a big way in Spring 2021. This includes the following things:

1. More frequent posts, including one reported analysis post a week;
2. Exclusive community features for paid subscribers;
3. Continuing to make the main newsletter freely available for everybody;
4. Some kind of multimedia content that would live off the newsletter platform;
5. Reevaluating which newsletter/subscription platform I wanted to host the platform.

I’ve been writing about the history and future of media and technology on the web for about twenty years now — earlier, if you count some stuff that might be considered juvenilia. I’ve been writing about it professionally for well over ten years. Over that time, I’ve accumulated a pretty extensive body of writing that is, well, all over the place.

I mean, some of you were there from the beginning. (Maybe five of you.) Some encountered me along the way, or when I started writing for what used to be your favorite publication (unless you think I’m the one who ruined it). Some of you became my friends after most of my public writing was over. And some of you just got referred to this newsletter, or just graduated from college, or you’re not even sure why you’re reading this or why anyone might put any weight into what I think about this stuff. None of you remember everything. (Even I don’t remember everything.)

And now I’m wondering whether it’s time to gather the limbs of Osiris, so to speak: take all of that writing and put it back into one place, where anybody who wants to see what it was like for a person who was studying and reporting on how all of this happened while it was happening.

On Tuesday, February 2, 2021, Amazon announced that its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos would resign that second position and assume the role of executive chair sometime during the third quarter of this year. Andy Jassy, currently the head of Amazon Web Services, will take over as CEO at that time.

In a letter to Amazon employees (also released to the public), Bezos explained his decision and its timing. (Don’t worry, I won’t quote it all.)

In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence. This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, “What’s the internet?” Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while.

A lot of stuff happened this week. However, for the purposes of this newsletter, we’re going to confine ourselves to stuff that happened involving Amazon this week. Trust me: there’s a lot!

Most of it happened on Monday. The smallest one in the news cycle (but maybe the most important) was the one I chose to write about: Amazon’s continued construction of new sorting and fulfillment centers all over the world, including my hometown of Detroit.

Later, Amazon Web Services announced that it was suspending Parler’s account for violation of AWS’s acceptable use policy. Parler, having already been removed from Apple’s and Google’s app stores, had to shut down, and responded by suing Amazon. Amazon’s response to Parler’s motion for an injunction is 100% worth reading (although the threats of violence / bigoted slurs it shares from Parler’s forums are 100% disturbing).

Amazon also announced it was removing QAnon products from its retail platform, again in response to last week’s violent attack on the Capitol building and its environs by right-wing groups, resulting in several deaths and the disruption of the U.S. government.

An artist’s rendering of the transit center that will be part of the Amazon complex at Detroit’s State Fairgrounds site. Courtesy the City of Detroit.

I have had another story planned for Wednesday for a while, and I’m still going ahead with that. Now, though, I want to write about something that just happened, but turns out to have been brewing for years, and which sheds some light on Amazon’s dealings with local politicians and developers. The last time this side of Amazon’s business made big-time waves was when Amazon first selected, then chose to walk away from the city of New York after strong opposition to its plans to build a second campus there. I wrote about it almost two years ago, in this newsletter’s early days. Anyways, what’s happening in Detroit right now repeats many of the same things that caused Amazon so many problems back then. The biggest differences are the sheer numbers and the fact that I don’t expect there to be much of a fuss, except from a few very pissed-off Detroiters. Of which (raises hand) I’m one, right here.

So what’s going on?