(as found in
the New Yorker article “Cheap Words” by George Packer: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/17/140217fa_fact_packer)
Jeff Bezos originally thought of calling
his company Relentless.com
has successfully fostered the idea that
a book is a thing of minimal value—
a widget.
“I just don’t see what value you add.”
Amazon’s shape-shifting, engulfing
quality,
its tentacles extending in all
directions, destabilizing and intimidating,
is a ruthless predator.
A rising power with stock options and an
enormous audience,
a titan of the digital world that helped
lay waste to it,
Amazon has more control over the
exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.
A monopoly is dangerous—
a single owner of both the means of
production and the modes of distribution:
the rich getting richer, the poor
getting poorer,
Earth’s most customer-centric company assembling an
ant farm —
Amazon’s conquistadors galloped onward.
Amazon’s unparalleled power along with
paranoia, resentment, confusion, and yearning.
What remains constant is ambition, and
the search for new things to be ambitious about.
An unrealized dream grandly called the
Alexandria Project is to warehouse two copies of every book ever printed.
Amazon began as a bookstore unlike
traditional bookstores—
books were a gateway drug—the feeling of
your beloved indie bookstore,
full of hip, book-loving people.
Many of them functioned as cultural
centers, people browsed and exchanged ideas,
making their bets on books a matter of
instinct rather than metrics.
It’s a tiny little business, selling to
a bunch of odd people who read.
What purpose would they serve if reading
went entirely digital?
A decade later, the company is a
megastore,
not an indie bookshop,
selling more books than anyone in the
history of the world.
Judgments about which books are
increasingly driven by promotional fees—
ten thousand dollars to be prominently
featured on the home page.
Editorial suggestions for readers with
algorithms make recommendations for future purchases.
Original writing wasn’t even called
content, it was known as verbiage simplified to verbage.
Even its bitterest critics reluctantly
admit to using Amazon, unable to resist its unparalleled selection, price, and
convenience.
“I drank the Kool-Aid.”
Transactions are as quick and thoughtless
as scratching an itch,
just you and the BUY button,
which already knows your address and
credit-card information,
and items you don’t yet know you want to
buy
in a warehouse near you.
You don’t have to think about how much
the cashier, with her wrist in a splint, makes per hour.
The Internet’s invisibility shields
Amazon from the criticism directed at its archrival Wal-Mart.
A high-tech version of the dehumanized
factory floor satirized in Chaplin’s Modern Times,
Amazon’s warehouse jobs are gradually
being taken over by robots.
Pickers holding computerized handsets
are perpetually timed and measured as they fast-walk up to eleven miles a
shift, expected to collect orders in as little as thirty-three seconds.
A stress expert said, “The evidence
shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.”
None of Amazon’s U.S. workers belong to
unions; the customer would suffer.
Ceaseless innovation and low-wage
drudgery makes Amazon the epitome of a successful New Economy company, pushing
American culture under the control of ever fewer and more powerful
corporations. Its brand of creative destruction might be killing more jobs than
it makes.
The quest for publishing profits in an
economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. When consumers are
overwhelmed with choices, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.
Americans don’t read as many books as they used to – too busy doing other things
with their devices.
Writing is being outsourced, because the
only people who can afford to write books make money elsewhere. The real talent—the people who are writers
because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t able to afford to
do it.
Analyzing surveys and viewing patterns
does not describe a path to artistic excellence. You can easily argue that it
stymies experimentation, that it prevents innovation, because the audience is
telling you what they want.
The prospect that Amazon might destroy
the old model of publishing—fifty to sixty percent of the list price goes to
Amazon or another retailer, the price of best-sellers below wholesale and so
low a serious threat— How long before publishers have to slash the cover price
of all their titles?
Amazon had carefully concealed that
number from publishers. “We don’t discuss our business negotiations with
publishers.”
Bezos announced the Gazelle Project,
that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would
pursue a sickly gazelle.
One of the few people in publishing
willing to criticize Amazon on the record, faced with his own professional
extinction, and perhaps the industry’s, knew that they would stop being favored
by the sites algorithms if they didn’t comply, realized that Amazon had their
house keys and their bank-account number, and wondered if that had been the
intention all along.
By the next day, the BUY buttons had
disappeared from Melville House’s titles on Amazon.com
“When are you going to get with the
program?”
Amazon effectively had a monopoly in
digital books and was selling them so cheaply it resembled predatory pricing.
Amazon’s obsession with secrecy and
aversion to scrutiny creates problems for people whose job is to expose what
powerful institutions want to hide.
The humanists brought a strain of
intellectual irony that set them apart from the company’s cult of
relentlessness, and formed a counterculture that never fit easily in a company
ruled by computer engineers and MBAs who valued data most and believed only in
measurable truths.
That gives you some idea of the level of
business focus.
Bezos announced that the next eighteen
months would be devoted to making serious profits, suggested eliminating the
editorial department, and simply squeezed its suppliers harder.
Amazon demanded ever-larger co-op fees
and better shipping terms.
The arrogance level in Silicon Valley is
very high.
The virtue of markets in solving social
problems.
Sell more devices and sign up more Prime
members.
What we want is traffic through our
device, and we’ll do anything to get there.
As I recover from being punched in the
face by Amazon,
a shared sensibility for a certain kind
of fiction or nonfiction writing unites everyone along the way; the only point
that Bezos enters that chain is to take all the money and the email address of
the buyer.
There’s an entire community of people locked
in a death struggle with Amazon and the distracted American reader, and Bezos
stands in the middle of it and collects the money.
What gave publishers the idea that this
was some big goddam business? It’s not—
Steve Jobs once remarked, “Customers
don’t know what they want until Apple shows them.”
Amazon’s view is the opposite:
Publishers are tastemakers deciding what
customers should read, listen to, and watch.
But gatekeepers are also barriers
against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time
to develop and learn to tell difficult truths.
When the last gatekeeper but one is
gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good?
Then Amazon will have eliminated the
human factor from shopping, and we will finally be all alone with our
purchases.
“People forget that John Henry died in the
end.”
Sweet words
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