Against Amazon: Seven Arguments, One Manifesto I. Because I don''t want to be an accomplice to symbolic expropriation. For 55 years that building in Barcelona, one of city''s few examples of modern industrial architecture, was the head office of the publishers Gustavo Gili. Now, after a refurbishment costing several million euros, it has become Amazon''s local center of operations. Thanks to the technology of efficiency and immediacy it houses, Barcelona is now one of the 45 cities in the world where the company guarantees delivery of products in an hour. The Canuda bookshop that shut in 2013 after over 80 years'' of existence is now a gigantic Mango. The Catalònia bookshop, after over a hundred, is now a McDonald''s with a kitsch modernist decor. Expropriation is literal and physical, but also symbolic.
If you enter "Amazon bookshop" on Google, dozens of links appear to Amazon pages that sell bookshelves. As I will never tire of repeating: Amazon is not a bookshop, it is a hypermarket. Its warehouses store books next to toasters, toys or skateboards. In its new physical bookshops books are placed face up, because they only display the 5,000 best-selling books most sought after by their customers, a lot less than the number on the shelves of genuine bookshops that are prepared to take risks. Amazon is now considering whether to repeat the same operation with a chain of small supermarkets. As far as it is concerned there is no difference between a cultural institution and an establishment that sells food and other goods. Jeff Bezos has a history of lengthy, symbolic expropriation. He plumped for the sale of books rather than electrical goods because he saw a niche in the market: all available titles couldn''t fit in bookshops and he was in a position to offer every single one.
In the 1990s there were few large-scale competitors (mainly Barnes & Noble and Borders) and distributors had already adapted their catalogues to the digital age, with ISBN numbers incorporated. That was why Bezos followed a course offered by the American Booksellers Association and in record time appropriated the prestige that books had accumulated over centuries. Even today, when Amazon produces television series, offers music online, stocks spare parts for cars and motorcycles and is considering whether to become a mobile-phone operator, everybody continues to associate the brand with the object and symbol that we call a book. Kindle, from its launch in 2007, has imitated the form of the printed page and the tone of the ink. Fortunately, for the moment they can''t reproduce on screen the vegetable feel or the smell of lignin. Whether we like it or not, we still cannot remember with the same precision what we read on paper and what we read in an e-book. Architectural transitions happen quickly; mental transitions, less so, fortunately. II.
Because we are all cyborgs, but not robots. We all carry implants. We all depend on that prosthetic: our mobile phone. We are all cyborgs: mainly human, slightly mechanical. But we don''t want to be robots. The work Amazon employees have to do is robotic. It was ever thus: in 1994, when five people were working in the garage of Jeff Bezos''s house in Seattle, they were already obsessed about being quick. It has been like that for 20 years, with stories galore of stress, harassment, and inhuman conditions at work to achieve a horrendous efficiency that is only possible if you are a machine.
The Amazonians are now helped by Kiva robots capable of lifting 340 kilo loads and moving at a speed of a meter and a half per second. Synchronized with the human labor-force via an algorithm, they keep themselves busy lifting shelves to facilitate product collection. Once they have gathered the items a customer has purchased, another machine, by the name of Slam, with its huge conveyor belt, sees to the scanning and packaging. Kiva and Slam are the result of years of research. Amazon commissioned robot competitions within the framework of the Seattle International Conference on Robotics and Automation to perfect the processing of orders. One year the machines designed by MIT or the Technical University in Berlin had to collect up in the shortest time possible a rubber duck, a bag of Oreo biscuits, a toy dog and a book. For Amazon there is no substantial difference between those four items. They are equivalent commodities.
But not for us. Amazon has gradually eliminated the human factor. In the early years it employed people to write reviews of the books it sold; now there isn''t even mediation in the process of making up and placing a self-published book on the network. It has robotized the chain of distribution and wants us, the consumers, to perform similarly. But we won''t. Because for us a book is a book is a book. And a read--choice or present--is a rite, the echo of an echo of an echo of something that was sacred once. III.
Because I reject hypocrisy. The great shame of Barcelona, a city with many, excellent bookshops, was the existence for 24 years of the Europa Bookshop, run by the neo-Nazi Pedro Varela, an important center for the diffusion of anti-Semitic ideology. Fortunately, it closed down last September. Amazon sells a huge number of editions of Mein Kampf, many of them with highly dubious prologues and notes. In fact, the World Jewish Congress alerted the company to the dozens of negationist books it makes available with no obstacle to purchase. In other words, the Europa Bookshop was closed down for inciting hatred, amongst other crimes, but Amazon isn''t. Even though it is a crime to deny the Holocaust in many of the countries where it operates. Amazon defends its opposition to censorship.
That''s why it kept selling, despite the hue-and-cry raised, The Pedophile''s Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover''s Code of Conduct, by Phillip R. Graves, although they had to withdraw it in the end. Something similar happened with Understanding Loved Boys and Boy-lovers, by David L. Riegel. Amazon defended giving its customers the opportunity to access those books promoting the sensual love of children, just as it did with books promoting Nazi ideas, because supposedly it doesn''t want to censor. However, the truth is it censors or privileges books to suit its own interests. During its dispute with the Hachette publishing group a couple of years ago, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin denounced the fact that her books were more difficult to find on Amazon while the conflict lasted.
Apparently the only thing that matters is the speed and efficiency of the service. Seemingly there is no mediation. Everything is automatic, almost instantaneous. However, a large economic and political structure exists behind all those individual operations. A structure that puts pressure on publishing houses in order to maximize Amazon''s profits from their products, just as it does on manufacturers of skateboards or producers of frozen pizzas. A macro-structure that determines visibility, access and influence: that is shaping our future. IV. Because I don''t want to be accomplice to a new empire.
There are no booksellers in Amazon. Human recommendations were eliminated because it was inefficient. Because it torpedoed speed, the only value the company recognizes. Recommendation is in the hands of an algorithm. An algorithm represents the height of fluidity. The machine transforms the customer into the prescriber. Customers who bought this product also bought. Self-publishing puts the process in the hands of the producer.
Amazon eliminates intermediaries or makes them invisible (equivalent to robots). It''s like an ordering machine. It wants to be so streamlined it will seem to be invisible. By eliminating dispatch costs and haggling with its big clients so it gets the lowest possible price for the individual customer. Amazon seems cheap. Very cheap. But by now we know that cheap means expensive in the long term. Very expensive.
Because that invisibility is mere camouflage: everything is so quick and streamlined that there seems to be no mediation. But there is. You pay for it with money and data. Order, items, price, and dispatch: individual processes dissolve in the non-material logic of the flow. For Jeff Bezos--as for Google or Facebook--pixel and link can have a material correlative: the world of things can work like the world of bytes. The three companies share the imperialist wish to conquer the planet, by defending unlimited access to information, communication and consumer goods, at the same time as they force their employees to sign contracts with confidentiality clauses, hatch complex strategies to avoid paying taxes in the countries where they are based and construct a parallel, transversal, global state, with its own rules and laws, its own bureaucracy and hierarchy and its own police. And with its own intelligence services and its own ultra-secret laboratories. Google [x], the research and development centre for that company''s future projects, is located in an indeterminate place not so far from the firm''s central headquarters.
Its five-star plan is to develop stratospheric globes that within ten years will guarantee access to the internet of the half of the world''s population that is currently disconnected. Amazon''s parallel project is Amazon Prime Air, its drone-based distribution network, drones that are currently 25 kilo hybrid devices, half-airplane, half-helicopter. Last August the regulations of the Federal Aviation Administration of the United States were changed to facilitate the flight of drones for commercial purposes and to make it easy to qualify for a drone-pilot certificate. Long live lobbying! Let our skies be filled with robotic distributors of Oreo biscuits, cuddly toy-dogs, skateboards, toasters, rubber duc.