Amazon’s dominance is concerning
Amazon has access to all kinds of crucial internet-use data about businesses that other arms might be competing against.
The second concern, the anxiety felt most sharply by conservatives, is that it’s bad for cultural and political freedom to have one company so dominant over so many spaces and platforms. If Amazon decides not to carry certain books on its marketplaces because they offend progressive norms, its dominant position in bookselling will obviously affect their likelihood of finding a publisher in the first place. If Amazon decides to kick a company off Amazon Web Services, as it did with the social-media app Parler after the Jan. 6 riot, the nature of web hosting means that the affected company might not survive (though Parler is still alive). Even if the specific decisions are justifiable, the concentration of cultural power is a threat to free debate.
The final anxiety, meanwhile, is about what the Amazon business model does to the American worker and the American social fabric. This is the great concern of Alec MacGillis’ new book “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America,” a rich sociology of the world that Amazon has made. He spends a certain amount of time on the company’s anti-competitive power, the abuses occasioned by its size and scale and profit-seeking. But his central story is about the way that a business that cuts out economic middlemen and shared spaces of commerce and circulation, from brick-and-mortar Main Streets to shopping malls, inherently contributes to our grim geographic polarization — in which service-sector regions exist to sort and package consumer goods to ship to wealthy tech hubs, while midsize cities and middleclass communities decay or disappear.
MacGillis’ book is not a policy manifesto, and while he takes note of specific political decisions that have furthered Amazon’s imperialism, his overall story has a bleak and ineluctable momentum and a pessimistic end. And understandably so, since none of the obvious policy responses, whether from critics of “woke capital” like Hawley or the antitrust-and-labor left, seem commensurate to the transformation MacGillis describes. One-click America is being forged, in the last analysis, by human nature — by the near-universal appeal of convenience, the magic of having the thing you want when you want it, which people are likely to choose even if it means that regional department stores evanesce and local businesses decline.
A full response to this kind of Amazonification probably needs to come from policies and movements with broader aims than just restraining Bezosian power — whether that means industrial policy that tries to seed the Middle American landscape with middle-class jobs, a telecommuting-driven dispersion from the big cities that spreads social capital around or even a period of social and religious
BOB MILLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES renewal that spurs the upper class to new forms of service and missionary work.
With that said, though, just because a policy is insufficient doesn’t make it useless. Would the heartland still be hollowed out, the new economy’s capitals still flush and gilded, if Amazon were several powerful companies rather than just one? No doubt. Would one-click America still be polarizing if more money flowed to sellers on Amazon Marketplace and workers in Amazon warehouses, and a little less to Bezos and shareholders? Certainly. But a weaker Amazon still seems as if it might be better, on the margins, for a lot of people, a lot of smaller companies and a lot of would-be innovators, and combining left-wing and right-wing fears about its power yields a pretty reasonable critique.
The question is whether that critique can build a coalition strong enough to overcome not just Amazon’s direct lobbying power but also the general popularity its conveniences have earned. And the answer is that it probably can’t, unless the anti-Amazon left figures out a way to work with figures like Hawley, and figures like Hawley with the left.
That’s a scenario that Jan. 6 made much less likely. But no less desirable, if the alternative is to imagine Jeff Bezos fist-pumping, forever.