I have to quit Amazon to deliver a better world
Online giant is either no help or part of the problem when it comes to society’s biggest issues
Recently, in these seemingly interminable days of the pandemic, whenever a package has arrived at my doorstep from Amazon, I scurry outside to the porch and whisk it inside, glancing around to make sure the neighbours haven’t seen.
I know I shouldn’t be ordering things from Amazon. I know that workers at Amazon’s warehouses are contracting COVID-19, and that I should be buying local. But somehow, that pandemic combination of boredom, loneliness and selfishness is a powerful mix, and — voilà — despite myself and my precariously spare bank account, everything from a new backpack to a Japanese paring knife has appeared at my front door.
That admittedly shameful activity has been on my mind recently as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he is stepping away from his leadership position at the company and shifting to more of an oversight role. Whether one is a fan of Amazon or not, Bezos’ reign has been remarkable. Though in its early years Amazon was thought of primarily as a bookseller, it has in truth emerged into something more like a massive logistics business than retailer — an enormous behemoth of cloud computing, delivery systems, global sourcing and more.
Still — for most people Amazon is, more than anything else, convenient. There is something half-futuristic, halfdystopian about idly thumbing through your phone late at night and then having someone schlep through the snow to deliver it to you the very next day. Thanks to Amazon, you can carry a hundred books with you to the beach, tell a speaker to play some music just using your voice, or ask it why the sky is blue and have it return an answer.
In that sense, Bezos’ tenure at Amazon feels like progress, but a somewhat strange sense, broken of progress — convenient, yes, but somehow all for the sake of convenience and not much else. The harms caused by Amazon form a long list. It began with the decimation of bookstores both small and large, but soon morphed into something more insidious. Small business generally began to find it hard to compete with the Seattle-based giant and during COVID-19 consumers have been asked to shop local to stave off further domination. The company has been accused of mistreating its warehouse workers, both years ago and more recently.
And as its purview expanded, so too did its ills. It shares surveillance data from its Ring doorbell cameras with police, while helping to normalize surveillance generally with its Alexa voice and camera projects.
Whether that represents progress seems far from clear. Proponents of technological change or free markets will claim that the convenience is merely what people want — that, yes, there are casualties amid change, but on the whole, the change is good.
However, the idea that we should welcome change in and of itself has long since become an obsolete, backward way of thinking. Far closer to the vanguard is the idea of restraint or even refusal: that when it comes to questions of convenience, the problems caused — the insidiousness of big tech, the challenges of climate change among them — mean that after a couple of centuries of marching toward making everything easier, we might have to learn to say no.
Clearly, that isn’t easy. Obviously, I am having a hard time saying no these days. Perhaps that suggests that asking individuals to take on Amazon is an absurdly skewed position to take. The “convenience” that companies like Amazon offers might have to be curtailed because their costs are too high. Even if we consider the environmental costs of the free market allowing people to order countless trinkets with no-cost shipping, it’s clear that simply making things more seamless or frictionless isn’t itself an unmitigated good.
It occasionally feels as if our idea of progress is broken: that the things that actually do need addressing — the soaring numbers of people with mental health problems; the looming climate crisis; the seams of a society beginning to fray from inequality, disinformation and prejudice — aren’t actually addressed at all by the tech revolution. It all sounds a bit “woo-woo” to talk of whether our humanity or dignity is also progressing — but isn’t the simple that the question itself sounds naive indicative of where things have gone wrong?
To change the world, you have to at least start small. I am going to have to give up this Amazon addiction of mine, for the planet, for my wallet — and dare I say, even something like my soul. But if something larger is to change — if we are to resist that Amazon-ification of the world — it will take more than just personal action; it will take rethinking the very idea of progress itself.