Tech Won't Save Us - Amazon Wants to Dominate Everything w/ Brian Merchant

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Brian Merchant to discuss how Amazon’s response to COVID-19 has put its workers in danger, how big tech companies are partnering with oil and gas companies, and why the pandemic makes it clear that shopping at Amazon is unethical. Brian Merchant is a senior editor at OneZero and the author of “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone”. He recently wrote how the pandemic is accelerating the Amazonification of the economy and why it’s unethical to continue giving Amazon money. Follow Brian on Twitter as @bcmerchant.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

It is unethical to continue to support Amazon. It just is. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that can't wait for the day Jeff Bezos is knocked off his throne. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Brian Merchant. Brian is the author of The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone, and is also writing a new book called Blood in the Machine. He is a senior editor at OneZero and the founder of Terraform at Vice. Today we talk about Amazon, its response to the pandemic, and all of the terrible things that it does. One piece of that is also how Amazon and the other major tech companies are increasingly working with oil and gas giants to help them better extract oil through the use of cloud and

artificial intelligence. If you like our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it with any friends or colleagues you think would like it. And if you want to support the work that I put into making this podcast, you can go to patreon.com slash Paris Marks and become a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy the interview. Brian Merchant, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you for having me, Paris. It's great to speak with you. You've been writing a bunch on Amazon and the tech companies for years, but particularly in this moment and what they're up to. You wrote a piece, I guess,

about a month or so ago, or even a bit more than that now. Time, you know, I just don't know time anymore. Meaningless. That's right. Yeah. So you wrote this piece about how this pandemic was going to kind of accelerate the Amazonification of the economy, increase Amazon's dominance. So I guess to start, do you just want to explain what you mean by the Amazonification of the economy and what it has meant for workers and, you know, just for all of us. Yeah, in some ways, it's kind of a clumsy coinage or terminology, because it's not limited to Amazon. But Amazon, I feel like exhibits this phenomenon to the greatest degree and sort of exemplifies it. It's basically the act of transferring

sort of the modes of work, modes of commerce from sort of traditional brick and mortar to online based e-commerce, along with the platform based work, a transfer of people who used to, you know, work in stores and sell you goods and sit behind the cash register to the more distributed model that we've all become familiar with through the gig economy. So Amazonification is basically what we have feared and people have been wagging their fingers about for almost two decades now, just sort of the disappearing of boutique shops, mom and pop stores, even to some degree, larger retail chains, places on so called Main Street, where you'd walk

in and buy your goods. And that model, you know, does have sort of a more robust and direct connection to our local economies. It's important in a lot of ways to have people employed in good jobs in stores that serve a direct community. What Amazonification does is it replicates a lot of that from groceries to obviously books to any consumer good now. And as something like the pandemic sort of accelerates these trends, my fear is that those trends that we've been worried about so long, which have kind of to some extent proved to be, I guess, a little unfounded, will now not be. A shock like this can wipe out stores permanently. And Amazon can sweep in and not only take over that business, but then replace those jobs. Who's hiring in this pandemic?

It's Amazon. It's a few grocery stores that need essential workers. But by and large, Amazon is the only marquee hirer that has emerged from this. It made headlines when it announced it was hiring 100,000 people. In the greater scheme of the economy, of the US economy, that's not all that much, but it is indicative of a trend. And we will see more of that sort of platform-based, this is platform-based precarious work. Even if you're at an Amazon warehouse, a lot of that is seasonal work. A lot of it is extremely difficult. It is low wage. It is not benefited for the most part. And it is, again, precarious. Even though it is an in-person job doing something like stocking warehouse shelves or picking goods at a distribution center, I have myself looked at the platforms and the process of how you go about getting one of these jobs. And it's more akin to sort of how one would get a job on Uber or something like that than a traditional job where it's this automated

online process where you get called in and it further sort of destabilizes the link between a person and employer. So Amazonification is basically those two trends. Workers getting precarious jobs through a platform for less money, fewer protections. And on the other end, more of our commerce and activity sort of being taken over by online services and companies. So Amazonification is both Amazon and major gig companies, which right now Uber and Lyft are taking it on the nose. And hopefully if AB5 in California and some other laws give workers due protections, it won't be the case. But once the pandemic sort of starts to pass, Amazonification sort of says that there will

be fewer sort of good jobs that are not always high paying, but are good because they're part of a community in your local ice cream parlor or diner or record store and more jobs at the whims of these major services and gig platforms like Uber and Instacart and DoorDash. Yeah, I think that's an important observation to look at that larger trend, right? Because the talk of kind of the larger consolidation in the economy and how downtown's main street what have you has been kind of been getting eradicated for much longer than amazon's been around right because back in the 90s there was talk about that in relation to walmart and what it was doing to smaller businesses and mom and pop stores and now it just seems like Amazon is kind of the next

stage in that. But the pandemic is even helping to accelerate it because where there is so little support that seems to be coming, at least in the United States from different levels of government, then the smaller businesses are just not going to be able to survive. And it's these massive conglomerates like Amazon that span the globe and do not really have so much of the physical presence in terms of like retail locations that they need to worry about that are really going to be able to survive this and benefit from it. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that, you know, I did write this piece kind of early on in the pandemic. And it was more like, this is a warning, this is what's going to happen. And since then, it has only been borne out. And we've seen small businesses really

struggle to get the loans and support that are promised by things like the CARES Act, whereas major corporations have sort of the lobbying power and the expertise and a fleet of lawyers to make sure the process gets expedited. They get their billions of dollars to stay afloat. Smaller businesses that are only, you know, one or two locations really have to struggle to make the case. And in some cases, they don't get any money at all. There are a number of sort of midsize businesses. A friend of mine has a family member who owns a small chain of gyms. And if you're so small that you only have a couple employees, then you can kind of apply for direct aid in the way that we would get our $1,200 or whatever meager bandaid we were promised. But if you're

in the mid-range and you have a couple dozen employees, you have to go by a similar set of regulatory hurdles. You have to appeal to a much larger process. And in some cases, you don't actually qualify or it's difficult to get it through. And I know some businesses that have not seen any money since this has started, even though they employ dozens of people, they've had to lay them off, they've had to furlough them

because the process, again, benefits a behemoth. And that's not just Amazon. It is also, like you said, some of the larger chains that have been spurring modulations of this trend for longer than that. But Amazon is the prime, not to use a pun, beneficiary of this trend because they are so well positioned. They are so well capitalized. They have the advantage of actually having grocery stores in the form of Whole Foods. And to them, it almost

doesn't matter if I've seen in some cases locations, even when they were shut down, that doesn't matter to Amazon. That can then serve as a distribution hub for their online sales. So anything that happens as a result of this pandemic to hollow out existing businesses and to drive people online will benefit Amazon. So it's by far, I mean, we've seen how much Bezos' net worth has gone up. It's been tens of billions of dollars. The stock, Amazon stock has skyrocketed. It's in talks to buy movie theaters because we can't go to movie theaters because of the pandemic. It's in talks to buy the AMC chain. So Amazonification is just this creeping tech platform-led mobilization of a new sort of mode of the economy that benefits whoever is sitting atop

that platform. And that's the Amazon C-suite and very few others at the expense of more equitable distributions of wealth and gains from these previous businesses. Yeah. And I think that's a key point. And obviously it gets back to the second point that you made earlier about the labor question, right? And obviously, as part of this Amazonification and part of this wider trend of precarity, of lower wages, of beating down the benefits and the labor protections that people have in their jobs, right? And so obviously, what we're seeing now is that Amazon, as you say, is one of these main companies who are still hiring during this pandemic. But the conditions that many of those workers are having to experience are particularly terrible because Amazon is not or has not been. Maybe that's slowly starting to change now because workers did agitate and did get so angry and did get the media and the public to pay attention.

But workers were not given the protections that they needed to stay safe from COVID-19. I think so far there's been eight reported deaths of Amazon workers in the United States. And obviously you've written about this larger trend of automation and how that's being applied by tech companies, whether that's on the gig side or in warehouses like Amazon, where it's not so much that technology is taking away jobs, but it's creating this kind of automated form of management that tries to grind every last bit of productivity or labor out of these workers and makes these jobs so much worse when they already weren't the greatest jobs to start with, right?

Yeah, I do think that that's a part of this picture here. The next piece that I'm working on right now actually is about sort of how automation is factoring into this pandemic and with companies like Amazon in particular. And I think it's interesting. A lot of the evidence that I'm seeing so far, and I guess this might be a little bit of a tangent, is that it makes for a media-friendly narrative that the pandemic shows up and the robots take over

because people can't be manning the factories. But what I'm seeing is less of that actually taking place. So far, anyways, there haven't been any mass orders of robotics equipment or actual sort of like on the ground automation. And I've spoken with a number of economists and experts who say that that is because it would actually be really, really hard to do that, right? Because if you were rolling out new machines that you would have to install in the middle of a pandemic crisis, that you'd have to get declaration as essential work.

You would have to find people willing to sort of learn machinery in crisis conditions. You would have to like make a risky bet. I mean, that's how the narrative goes is that pandemic shows up, crisis hits, companies want to invest in automation because suddenly labor is more scarce. And it makes sense on some visceral level,

and it is scary to think about how robots could come in and take away all these jobs during a pandemic. But what really seems to be happening is the opposite, is that companies are reluctant to make a risky bet when there's a recession on, and they don't have to really make any investments to compete because kind of everybody's taking it on the chin and it's making people more conservative.

And if you look at Aaron Beninoff at the University of Chicago has looked at how productivity really hasn't grown in the way that you would expect it to grow if we were really seeing all this exponential automation. Now, all that means is that the specter of automation can be used more as sort of a cudgel by employers, by managers to threaten, you know, workers with replacement or to at least cast this looming sort of threat over the workplace earlier, you know, it's yes, designed to goad on employees to work harder and faster. But it's also this omnipresent reminder that, you know, like your job could be taken away by a robot at any time, even if it's not really the case, we're really a long ways away from actually seeing picking software deployed on the factory grounds. But it is a useful tool to sort of stir fear among the labor pool and to sort of keep wages down. And Amazon itself has not touted automation much in this.

What you see happening more is the companies that sell this stuff, the robotics companies, the enterprise software companies, they're showing up on interviews with Axios going like oh we're seeing a automation revolution and by the way you know like buy our b2b software that'll you know replace your middle managers online whatever so it's really kind of like glorified advertising um that said there is a fear that the truism itself, the maxim, will become accepted widely enough to be deployed by managers who are looking for reasons to justify hiring fewer people back. So what might end up happening that I would be afraid of is people saying, well, we've kind of got this experimental automation program, or we're going to invest in this automation, we don't need to hire everybody

back. And then the workers that are there, that are hired back now suddenly have 30% more work to do because they're having to deal with this sort of untested, glitchy automation software or checkout kiosks are a great example of this. They were touted as automating, you know, checkout back in the 90s and early aughts and a lot of chains like bought them up and people kind of roundly hated them. And so they may have hired cashiers, but then they would have to hire people to stand next to them to teach customers how to use them. And people would get frustrated with them. It was unpleasant work and they would sometimes still have to do their cashier job. They're basically doing more work to try to patch up this efficiency system, quote unquote,

that the company had bought. In some cases, remarkably, don't quote me on this, but I think it might've been Walmart or maybe it was Costco. One of the big chains ended up basically sending them back, crossing out a huge shipment of a million dollar deal to get these guests. And they said, this is not worth the trouble. And in those cases, it actually cost the company money in the long run because it discouraged consumers, it made more work for them, and they had to end up paying more in payroll, and they had to foot the bill for this sort of faulty software. That's not saying you can't do that right or that we won't see systems that ultimately

do replace those jobs. But a lot of times when it's hastily done, as it might be done in a pandemic, you might get a lot of cases where it just complicates things, makes things worse for everybody, even ultimately the companies that are trying to profit from the saved labor in the long run. I feel like the potential impact of this pandemic on work in tech is not just on that lower scale, right? It's not just on the gig workers and the people working in the warehouses. A few weeks ago, I talked with Wendy Liu, the author of Abolish Silicon Valley, and she was talking about how she expects that there would be more outsourcing,

even of the higher ranking positions, I guess, in these companies in the aftermath. And I feel like we're already starting to see them floating those ideas. Facebook has announced now that anyone who works remotely and moves out of the Bay Area will face a pay cut. And Uber had its layoffs, I think it was like 3,000 and 3,700, so huge layoffs. And some of the executives went to the CEO and basically said, like, we'll take a pay cut so you don't need to fire as many people. And he said, like, no, we need to fire these people. So when we're ready to hire back up, we can do so like in a more efficient way. And one of the things he said was that so that they could kind of like outsource

some of those jobs when the time comes to hire people back if they need to again. Oh, absolutely. And that's another trend that that has been underway. And again, that might be sort of like vaguely said to kind of fall under even sort of the auspices of the Amazonification trend, which is sort of like you're just kind of moving jobs across the ledger. I think there was a piece in The New York Times, maybe it was last year, about sort of the number of temps that Google uses, for example, and its contract labor is maybe 40 or 50% of all the work that Google does. They're making nice money compared to an Instacart delivery driver. But again, you're right, it's eroding some of these that used to be really good, really sort of top tier wealth generating jobs. And it's kind of

moving them across the ledger. And it's eroding, again, who benefits from sort of the sheer concentrated capital that these companies can generate. And we had kind of a fierce debate in our company Slack about the Facebook move to sort of create tiers of what it will pay you, depending on what city you live in. And some of the argument was, well, you know, this has always happened to some extent because labor markets in, say, St. Louis are, you know, it's not as expensive. And the tech sector doesn't have as big of a presence. It doesn't have, there's not as much competition. So you would get paid less if you were a tech worker living in St. Louis anyways. But my fear is if Facebook begins to codify this and say like, this is the approach to employment, there are tiers

based on geographic locations. And then if you live in tier one, you know, San Francisco, say, then you still get 250k a year because it's expensive to live here and but if you want to move out to like reno then maybe you're tier three and you're codifying basically this subcast system and people were arguing back against me saying well you know it's still tech they'll still get paid a lot and it's like yeah for now but also what if other companies start to emulate that system too this seems like a blueprint for cyberpunk to me, right? Like a Neil Stevenson novel where you have these vast beacons of capital and that people sort of live in these huge megapolis cities. And then it's kind of hinterlands where anything goes beyond

that because we really do, we need to be distributing more of the economic gains out to other cities that don't have, you know, access to these mega economic engines like Silicon Valley or the finance sector in New York or entertainment in LA or whatever, it would be great if people could work from home, make a good living, not contribute to radical gentrification, and say, you know, live comfortably and spread some of their gains around a city in Ohio or something, you know, instead of exacerbating this accumulation of capital in just a few hubs. Yeah, I obviously completely agree. And now another piece of that question, because obviously we've seen the warehouse workers and the gig workers starting to push back,

but we've also seen more and more of these engineers, programmers, what have you, also protesting the actions of the companies that they work for in tech. And that has become a big movement over the past couple of years. And one of the specific ways that that plays out that you've written about is on these companies' approaches to climate change. And in particular on what Amazon has been doing. I know recently, I believe some of the people who pushed back on Amazon over its climate policies were let go of the company. And you've written about how Amazon in particular,

but also Google, Microsoft, and some others court these oil and gas companies through their cloud businesses and their kind of AI businesses, I guess, to kind of develop these solutions for them so they can more efficiently extract oil and more efficiently make use of all of the data that they collect. So what are we seeing from the workers in terms of how they're pushing back on the companies? And what are the companies actually doing in order to kind of accelerate climate change when really we need to be going in the complete opposite direction?

So I think it's actually kind of a similar case. It's comparable to sort of workplace automation in that one of the key things that I've come to understand is that a lot of times, you know, some of this stuff is maybe useful and will increase sort of efficiency at a company when you're moving operations onto the cloud. But a lot of these sort of like AI tools and automation functions are still untested. It's not really clear that it would render the operation extremely more efficient or anything, maybe to some degree. I think Greenpeace, who recently did a report on this, found that in some cases, the automation could increase the rate of oil extraction up to 5% or so, which is not insignificant. But the bigger role that these deals are playing is further entrenching sort of an alliance between sort of yesteryear's mammoths of capital

and companies that were so big and habitually exploitative, environmentally destructive, malfeasant actors that were so powerful that they were able to do a lot of damage. And now when we need to roll them back, they're too big to really constrain without major action. But they are in a tough spot. And again, now with the pandemic, they are in some senses seeing diminishing returns, their wells are not as productive, they're having to drill farther and deeper and do more exploring. And allying themselves with the tech industry, which is, of course, the largest and most entrenched and profitable sector of the economy today, gives them extra juice. It gives them extra lobbying power. It continues to prop

them up. It continues to help make the case for their continued existence, basically. Tech companies are basically throwing them a lifeline. And it becomes much harder to do things like radically regulate the wells they can drill or pass CO2 emissions controls or anything that has ever been on the table. It becomes that much more difficult if the sectors are interlocked, if they have this case. So what they're doing basically is Google and Amazon and Microsoft are the three main actors here. And they realized a few years ago that while all the other sort of major industries are coming online, bringing their business onto the cloud and whatnot, oil had kind of lagged behind. It's kind of a conservative industry.

They have a lot of technology in terms of drilling and engineering and that kind of thing. But they were, a lot of them were not up to speed, did not join in the digital revolution, to use the industry buzz speak. So Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all opened oil and gas divisions targeted at building partnerships with the oil companies. Because if you look at the companies by market capitalization, it's still, it's still it's like

Apple, Amazon, Exxon, Microsoft, on any given day, some combination of oil companies and tech companies are there, they have an immense amount of resources. So it's a lot of business sitting on the table. So they say, Oh, we'll bring your businesses online, they sell them on these AI tools. And they say like, Okay, we'll use our AI to revolutionize the act of exploring for new oil wells. Google had a deal with Andarco, which is a big oil exploration company, for example, and said, oh, this will streamline the process of locating new wells. And if it works, that of course means more oil gets drilled faster. Microsoft has software that can help automate functions of the extraction process, has upstream, you know, these are usually classified as upstream or downstream.

Upstream means that you're actually helping to facilitate the act of getting more oil out of the ground. You're speeding up the rate of extraction. You're speeding up the rate of exploration. You are making it easier in some way to pull oil out of the ground. Now, this was something that not even a lot of Amazon and Google and Microsoft employees were aware of was happening. It was kind of sequestered away. Google opened its oil and gas headquarters down in the oil belt down in Texas, had its own, you know, they hired a former BP executive to staff its oil and gas effort where they were directly targeting, you know,

deals with these companies. And it kind of snowballed through the industry and Microsoft was maybe the quickest to really sort of start accumulating business. Microsoft has the most deals, most of the deals that are sort of the most outwardly outrageous, a deal with ExxonMobil to sort of help its extraction efforts in the Permian Basin, which is one of the largest sources of oil in the United States. So that right there is pretty nakedly extractive or upstream. Or in this day and age, you know, I would argue flatly unethical. This is a company whose figurehead Bill Gates is talking about the need to fight climate change.

And in the trenches, in reality at the company, it's helping the world's most notorious oil extractor to do better business. There was a story in Logic Magazine, I think sometime last year, by an anonymous Microsoft worker who essentially said that part of the way that these deals work out is not just cloud and AI tools, but also them going in and kind of installing worker surveillance systems in these kind of oil wells and things in places around the world. I think the specific one was in Kazakhstan, I believe. Yeah, yeah, they run the gamut. They're selling these packages. And it's not just limited to the extraction technology. It's a deal with in Microsoft's case, it's Azure is its cloud

company. So they're selling a whole suite of business services. And they sell these to many companies. And they begin in a lot of senses as sort of like one size fits all, depending on how rich or how deep your pockets are. You can then tailor it to your operations. And all these companies realized that the oil and gas sector was worth tailoring their services to. So they all had oil and gas portals on their websites, for example, that you could see

sort of what they were capable of doing. So yeah, it's not limited to extraction. There could be worker surveillance, there could be, you know, more mundane things like just new sort of big data analytics software, it could be any number of things. But when I wrote the first story about this, that I did, maybe a year and a half ago or so at this point, the employees of these companies, and particularly Amazon, when we're not aware that this was happening, some employees at Amazon had just filed a resolution to try to get Jeff Bezos and the executive board to try to incorporate a

more robust climate policy in the company's operations. And they did that through filing shareholder resolutions that would get voted on. The board opposed it, of course. But that started, and in response to that, Jeff Bezos said, oh, well, here's, I think they called it shipping zero. In 20 years, we will have shipping down to 50%, and then eventually we'll get it all the way down to the zero. And it was very, very mushy, very vague. And they said, well, okay. And then they had seen my article, some of the workers in one of these meetings, and they brought it up to the sustainability officer when they were discussing that stuff. And not even the sustainability officer high up at Amazon was aware of these oil and gas. She had no answer for them. She had nothing to say.

It just gives you a sense of how these sustainability offices in these companies work, where it's like, well, we're looking at reducing emissions. Oh, we have this deal with like the largest polluters in human history. That doesn't apply because it's over there. It's part of this other suite. So that kind of, as I understand it anyways, then spurred them to sort of really ratchet things up. And they wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos saying, we want you to stop this section of your business altogether. It became sort of a fixture of their protest. And that developed into Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, which became a pretty well-oiled organization within Amazon and became very effective in calling out the executive board. More issues were raised at shareholders. And two of the people who were really involved, as you mentioned earlier,

Emily Cunningham and Marin Costa, were not shy about bringing this up. Ultimately, that's one of the inspiring things about this. And yes, they were well-paid, upper echelon Amazon employees, but they did not hide. They believed, as many still do, in some of the tenets of Silicon Valley's vague desire to do good, or they believe these companies are capable of it. And they believed it enough to say it plainly with their names attached to stand up and to raise the issues. And it resonated. Thousands and thousands and thousands of Amazonians signed on to support this effort. And it led to a walkout. And it led to time will tell whether the Bezos' climate pledge will yield any actual results.

But it forced him to make that pledge. It could not be clearer in my mind that their activism led to that climate pledge. And it still has its wishy-washiness. It's still not great, but it is a flag in the ground that can forever be pointed to. Who knows if Amazonification continues apace and then becomes the third arm of our government, our for-profit arm, then it might not matter

whether or not we call it out and embarrass it for not living up to its climate goals. But still, they agitated for change, and they got it. And that activism continued to evolve. Just yesterday, a couple days ago, they called out Amazon for engaging in environmental racism for where they're placing their fulfillment centers in disadvantaged neighborhoods, often neighborhoods of color, that are then seeing traffic and pollution skyrocket.

And then during the pandemic, they got involved in calling for more protections for the workers in the warehouses and sort of more allegiances were forming there between the climate justice and sort of the workers who are organizing in places like Minneapolis and warehouses in New York and New Jersey. And Amazon just went ahead and fired them for violating some subclause in Amazon's policy about how you can organize company events or something. It was something marginal. And it was clear that we knew months back that they were tired of these protesters, and the Washington Post reported that they had threatened to fire them before. My sense is from Amazon's perspective, there's a pandemic on, a lot of this news gets swallowed up, so folks like you and I and your listeners will of course care.

But I've been astonished speaking with folks who aren't following this so closely that no idea. My parents had no idea that Amazon was being a bad actor in this pandemic at all. I had to tell them that they were firing workers, that they were not providing protective gear, that they were hiding the fact that infected workers had worked at the distribution centers and the fulfillment centers, and that they didn't tell employees that they had been working alongside

patients who had died of COVID. The LA Times just reported yesterday that one of the employees who had heeded Amazon's call for 100,000 new workers showed up to make some extra retirement money and died two weeks later. And Amazon never told anyone at that warehouse that he had been infected with COVID. And then when the LA Times asked him about it, they lied about it and said it wasn't confirmed. His family said they were contacted four or five times by Amazon, and they told them every time what had happened. Yeah, it's totally enraging, right? But at least the organizing has been inspirational for the past couple of years, but the growing organizing and the growing solidarity between, you know, the gig workers and the warehouse workers and between the more white collar workers,

I guess, is very inspiring. But as you said, to go along with that, the people in the top executive positions are still making decisions that are hurting those workers that are hurting the environment that are hurting society at large, I would say. And so you wrote a piece a few weeks back where you argued that no question, seeing how Amazon has responded to the pandemic and how it has responded to the protests by workers and the demands by workers, that it's unethical to consciously kind of shop at and give money to Amazon. Yeah, the truth is it had probably been clear for a long time, but just the way that these

companies manage to sort of incrementally colonize our lives and make us sort of, if not reliant, then used to the convenience and the comforts that they can provide. Amazon has not had a great track record with its workers for a decade now. It's been almost 10 years since stories surfaced that they were just hiring contract paramedics to stay in the parking lots to whisk employees away when they eventually passed out from heat exhaustion because that was cheaper than installing a big enough air conditioning unit or actually keeping people cool during the hot months. That should have been a shock. The fact that it is openly engaging oil business and unrepentantly so when Jeff Bezos is asked about it, he says,

oh, we're just trying to give them tools to transition, which is a blatant lie. Another thing that the Greenpeace report found was that there were maybe one, or I think they found maybe one that was on the line that could be considered a transitional tool. Everything else is just tools for oil companies. This is a company that has evolved. And let's be clear about one thing about Amazon too. Unlike Google, or even to some regard, Apple or Microsoft that do put out these statements about how important it is to take care of the environment or how we want to be 100% clean energy. Amazon has kind of sort of made some of those statements too, but only years, months after

being forced by the other. It's not in its DNA. Jeff Bezos is bent on domination. He's never pretended otherwise. Google's like, do no evil. We want to organize the world's information, make everything better. We have our moonshot labs. Maybe we'll solve nuclear fusion. Hooray. Amazon from day one has been, how do I colonize this sector of the market? How do I win it? How do I dominate this? Okay, books. Here's how I take down the publishing industry.

Here's how I conquered this. Here's how I take over this. It's never been broadcasted any differently for us. And the result of that is workers and worker rights get treated as collateral damage. The people that actually make the engine work. I mean, you know, it's a small footnote, but it doesn't even extend only to the warehouse workers or the people doing the manual labor, the physical labor.

It's people in the headquarters and doing the tech work get treated like garbage. There's that New York Times story years ago where people were just breaking down weeping at their desks. They have bizarre systems where you can sort of snitch on your fellow employees without them knowing. It is a force for creating more precarious work, creating models for bad office work. It is a hollowing out and destructive company at large. And the pandemic came along and just crystallized that. Some companies, you know, at least tried to make some efforts, just like Kroger said, okay, our workers who still show up get an extra $2 an hour and they get hero pay, or they at least tried to make this, I mean, that's gone. It's all bad, but no one has been as bad as Amazon. Amazon from the beginning could have said, look, we're going to make this the safest

place to work. We're going to, everybody gets a mask. Everybody gets distant. Everybody gets notified as soon as they come into work, if there's been a case or a potential case. And we know they have these networks capable of relaying meticulous information to the workers because whenever somebody's late for a shift or, you know, it took too long in the bathroom, they know immediately.

They get texts, they get emails, they get all this information all the time. It would have been very easy. They could have given robust sick pay. They could have come out the gate. Instead, they've fought tooth and nail to do the very, very minimum to, at least in the beginning, to ensure that they could maximize profits during this entire process. Workers were not given protection. Some were not even told. Weeks and weeks into the pandemic, they were still crowding into lunch halls and into morning meetings where they were given these pep talks, standing amongst hundreds of other employees. It was just bound to happen. It was not a question of if, it was when the disease started ripping through these fulfillment centers. So they demonstrated gross lack of concern for the employees. And as a result, like you said, I think it's more than eight now.

I think it's, I might be into double digits. Don't quote me on that. But people are dead that do not have to be dead. When people have died, they create these Kafka-esque sort of labyrinths for the employees' families and have no idea what's going on. And they lie to them instead of handling it in any humane way. And then when workers demand some modicum of protection, some basic dignities afforded them, they turn around and they fire the people that are making that call that that is when it most radically crossed the line i think you know like this is capitalism you know companies exploit their workforces all the time it's always bad but amazon's aggressiveness in the face of

its assumption that because it's amazon it can operate with impunity and because this pandemic was on it felt like no one would even notice anyways. And you know what? That calculus has, by and large, proven correct. Shares are through the route. People that stand to profit from Amazon have continued to profit. Jeff Bezos, chief among them. People are dying. They're ignoring calls for more protections. Workers did force them to provide those protections eventually. And they got sick pay. But I think the pandemic-related sick pay policy has already expired. They've already let that go.

I mean, and that's just the workforce. In the same stretch of this pandemic, I think, I don't know if it's because, again, the chaos factor, they thought they could use, you know, a variant of the shock doctrine. But they have discontinued its affiliate links program, which coincidentally, the media relied on a lot of websites, blogs. If you link to a product or

a book, then you get a portion of that. They drastically cut that back. It was also found that the third party vendors, Amazon had been lying directly to them saying, you know what, this is your platform. All the data is private. it's for your use only, use it to streamline your operations and sell your goods on our system. It turns out Amazon was lying to them, bald-faced, and was actually taking that data to develop products that would compete directly with them, to put sort of third-party vendors, mom and pops, out of business. Again, it's kind of been blown away by all of the pandemic news, but it was enough to sort of cause a bipartisan committee of senators to reproach them for that. But it's just, I mean, we're at the point where it's just like villainy. Like it's almost comical levels of villainy, letting workers die, like stealing data

from the people who depend on their platforms to undermine them and put them out of business, lying about everything. It became so egregious and it became crystallized in so short amount of time that I think you could look at this microcosm of everything that Amazon has done in a matter of months and say, this is what this company is. When crisis hits, you can tell what a company's moral compass is, what a person's moral compass is. If this is how you respond to crisis, when hundreds of people are at risk of dying at any given warehouse that you have, and you are callously moving ahead, when tens of thousands of people are dying outside its walls, and you're thinking about ways that you can increase your profit margin at the expense of human lives, it's beyond the pale. And it was time to just say enough is enough. If you still support Amazon, you have alternatives at this time

when Amazonification is happening and you have ways that are maybe a little more complex. Maybe you have to make a phone call instead of using a web portal to support local businesses. It is unethical to continue to support Amazon. It just is. That might make people uncomfortable because again, it is, and I don't blame people for using Amazon despite all of this. It has so deftly tapped into our animal impulses and our network of desires, and it is engineered to activate them with related purchases or suggested buys or the

shopping carts or add this or click this, you know, it is immensely, immensely alluring to use this platform. But it's also unethical. Yeah, I completely agree. Obviously, I think so many of these companies are unethical. But it's not surprising that this company is engaged in villainy when it's led by the chief villain and the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos. Brian, it's been fantastic to speak with you today. I really appreciated you taking the time for this chat. Thanks so much for having me on. Brian Merchant is the author of The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone. It was published by Little Brown, and you can get it at your local independent bookstore, your local library, or anywhere else that sells books.

You can follow Brian on Twitter at at BC Merchant. If you like the podcast, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow the podcast on Twitter at at TechWon'tSaveUs, and you can follow me on Twitter at at Paris Marks. TechWon'tSaveUs is part of the Ricochet Podcast Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. Thanks for listening.