09.13.12
I don’t do business with Amazon
Most fawning and pretentious quote this year, easy:
“[Jeff Bezos] thinks on a planetary level,??? said David Risher, a former Amazon senior executive …
It comes from an article on Amazon Web Services, an operation that sells cloud computing worldwide. Recently the subject of a puff piece in the New York Times, it was essentially described as a business to change the world.
However, when you read the fine print, the world-changing seemed fairly trivial, use of massive cheap computing for stuff that ain’t special at all:
Another start-up [that uses Amazon computing], called Cue, scans up to 500 million e-mails, Facebook updates and corporate documents to create a service that can outline the biography of a given person you meet, warn you to be home to receive a package or text a lunch guest that you are running late.
Underwhelming.
“Millions of people in Africa shop for cars online, using cheap smartphones connected to A.W.S. servers located in California and Ireland,” reads the piece.
Hunger, in millions, by world region.
But Amazon computing services, by Jeff “Planetary” Bezos, is selling cars to a small percentage at the top in Africa.
Amazon is the world computing business model of destruction of wealth in populations easily attacked and liquidated, for the near instant self-gratification services of the upper slices of the world. Amazon does not solve world problems, it does not alleviate hunger, it does not boost human health.
Amazon’s massive computer resources do not noticeably advance science.
However, Amazon Web Services have been an alleged boon to “sales leads:”
GoodData, based in San Francisco, [uses Amazon services to analyze] data from 6,000 companies on A.W.S. to find things like sales leads. “Before, each company needed at least five people to do this work,??? said Roman Stanek, GoodData’s chief executive. “That is 30,000 people. I do it with 180. I don’t know what all those other people will do now, but this isn’t work they can do anymore. It’s a winner-takes-all consolidation.???
Sales leads.
Amazon enables massive computing to destroy jobs in making and selling things, so that it can sell all the most trivial objects in the US.
It smashes professional publishing for mass vanity publishing, which makes little for the people sucked into it, but potentially quite a bit when you take a slice of every book a self-published author sells to himself or members of the immediate family.
It builds warehouses nationwide, where temporary workers with no benefits earn sub-standard wages and are worked into heat strokes, so that it can sell razor blades or other household goods and consumer electronics to lazy Americans who could just as soon buy in the shops in their towns and cities. It wishes to out Wal-Mart Wal-Mart, one of the biggest liquidators of the worth of labor and manufacturing in this country.
[A] multibillion-dollar [warehouse] building frenzy comes as Amazon is about to lose perhaps its biggest competitive edge — that the vast majority of its customers do not pay sales tax. After negotiations with lawmakers, the company is beginning to collect taxes in California, Texas, Pennsylvania and other states …
“We want fast delivery,??? Mr. Bezos said. At a minimum, “we can work on making it the next day.???
It is a monumental bet, even for a company that consistently defied skeptics on Wall Street and Main Street as it rose to become one of the country’s largest retailers. Amazon’s delivery of everyday objects needs to be fast enough and cheap enough to wean customers from their local stores.
Weeks ago the Times ran a piece on the mass making and selling of fake five-star book reviews … on Amazon.
A follow-up piece by the journalist was even harsher:
I’ve tried to talk to Amazon about this, but in general it is unwilling to discuss — well, just about anything, in my experience. An executive there briefly dismissed the problem, telling me that it would be easy to fake one or two reviews but when an item had hundreds, you could trust that the reaction was authentic. Then I wrote about a case for the Kindle Fire where the manufacturer was secretly refunding the price if readers wrote a favorable review. Just about every review of that case was fake, and there were hundreds.
On the basis of that story and others, I got a lot of messages from Amazon customers about suspicious review activity. Amazon, it seems, is not overly interested in policing its own site. Authors buying book reviews to establish their credibility is one thing; manufacturers trying to juice sales of their new products is much worse.
There’s a larger point here. Technology companies visibly improve people’s lives and sometimes talk about their higher purpose (think Google’s “Don’t be evil??? motto) but in the end they are profit-seeking corporations. Amazon may in some ways be replacing the public library, but unlike the libraries of yore, it is not a public service.
It is not a surprise that the world Google, Amazon, and social networking has made promotes faking and rigging. The reduction of all measures of quality to web ranking by numbers has created a winner take all environment where there is always very strong incentive to cheat. In fact, cheating often seems like the only way to survive if you’re not already sitting on top of the pile of lucre at the web tech giants.
In fact, Jeff Bezos and Amazon have a piece of the cheating business, too, covered by the Mechanical Turk service.
If you spend time testing Mechical Turk’s Human Intelligence Tasks world bazaar, a Bezos/Amazon creation, you quickly grasp that much of the work advertised in it is in the generation of astro-turfed content to websites in articles, ratings and posts done for copper slivers of a penny per word. And the only purpose this work, or “product” serves, is to contaminate the web environment with oceans of phony, obscuring all else, in the aim of rigging the purchaser’s of it into the top returns of internet search.
From here, last year:
Another great category of [Amazon Mechanical Turk] work, which you should probably stay away from if you’re a sweat-laborer, is article creation.
“Write an article containing x-number of words on [you name it]??? they read.
Most of these appear to be ads by a variety of scumbags in the business of uploading astro-turfed content pushing businesses, services and products on the web.
You can tell they’re scumbags, and that they expect scumbags to work for them by the screechy commands, demands and veiled threats inside the solicitation.
The commands warn the sweat laborer not to “plagiarize??? because the content will be checked by “plagiarism checker??? software [meaning it’s run through Google] which seems to mostly indicate the employers are trying to generate stuff that won’t get downgraded by the search giants robots in spam blogs and miscellaneous insta-sites …
Also in this category, the jobs for virtually nothing in which one writes phony posts and articles for web places trying to gin up the appearance of actual use and enjoyment.
I used to buy books through Amazon and still have an account on it. And it’s possible, if things keep condensing and shriveling, that Amazon will be the only agency to do certain kinds of web businesses with, in the future.
But Jeff “Planetary” Bezos and Amazon are poison now.
One waits for all the wonderful things said to be coming because of Amazon:
[Amazon] is also a philosophy of enabling other people to build big systems. That is how Amazon will make a dent in the universe.
Don’t hold your breath, “make a dent” meaning it just gets more and more of the pie at everyone else’s pooled expense.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon — from the archives.