Tech Won't Save Us - How Amazon Reshapes Small Business to Serve Itself w/ Moira Weigel

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Moira Weigel to discuss the third-party sellers who supply many of the goods sold through Amazon, how the company’s policy decisions reshape small businesses to act like mini-Amazons, and what that means for regulatory responses.Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School, and a founding editor of Logic Magazine. Her most recent book is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk about What They Do--And How They Do It, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff. Follow Moira on Twitter at @moiragweigel.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, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Moira recently wrote a report for Data & Society looking into Amazon’s “trickle-down monopoly,” and previously worked with Ava Kofman and Francis Tseng on research into white nationalist publishing on Amazon.Aiha Nguyen and Eve Zelickson wrote a report on how Ring doorbells are used to surveil delivery workers.Logic Magazine published an interview with an anonymous AWS engineer.In March 2020, an Amazon seller bought 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer and tried to price gouge.Marketplace Pulse found that Amazon fees for sellers now account for 51.8% of an average sale, rising from 35.2% in 2016.Amazon is now the third-largest digital advertising company after Google and Facebook.In January, John Herman wrote about the state of Amazon that touched on some of the Chinese brands.Amazon has been scaling back its private label business, in part due to regulatory fears.Books mentioned: Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization by Sarrah Kassem, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang, and The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy by Lin Zhang.Support the show

Big versus small is not the best way to cognize the kind of power that Amazon has and how Amazon uses its market power. In addition to eliminating small businesses through competition, Amazon April of 2023, is the podcast's third birthday. That's right. All the way back in April of 2020, I started Tech Won't Save Us with the goal to ensure that people had a more critical take on the tech industry after seeing how so much of the reporting on this industry happens. And it's pretty clear that a lot of people wanted that too, because plenty of people now listen to the show, and it's so fantastic to see that. Over the past three years, we've done more than 160 episodes with nearly as many guests. There are more than 40 transcripts available on our website of episodes that we've done. And all of that is to try to give you a better understanding of this industry, to ensure

that you have critical perspectives on the companies, the technologies, and the powerful people who are involved in it. And that's all to ensure that you're not falling for the PR madness that is going on with so many of these things. And so that you have kind of clear eyes when looking at the industry and can assess what it's trying to sell you again and again and again. And it's been fantastic for me to be able to put this podcast together, to be able to have these conversations and from listeners like you to hear how much you're enjoying all of this.

So this month, to celebrate the podcast's third birthday, I'm asking listeners like you to consider supporting the show on patreon.com slash techwontsaveus. And that's because, you know, to make the show, it's great to have listeners and it's great to have public support for the show. But we also still need that financial support so we can continue putting this together every week so I can do the research and the interviews that are necessary for it. So Eric can edit the show and put it all together and make it sound nice. And so Bridget can put together the transcripts. And so if you like the show, I would ask you to consider going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can support the work that goes into making it every single week. And on top of that, if we hit 200 new supporters in this month of April, we're going

to do something special. I'll start working on a new series to air later this year that will dig into Elon Musk and the myth that was built around him over many years that got so many people to buy into his visions for the future, what his companies pretended to be offering, and just this general idea that he's this genius that we need to be listening to and believing as he was saying all of these wild things that he was never ever going to follow through on.

Knowing the listeners of the show, I think that this is something that you will really enjoy listening to. But as I said, we need your support to do it. So if you like the show, if you want to make sure we can do this series, and if you want me to send you some Tech Won't Save Us stickers in the mail, go over to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, become a supporter, support us for the podcast third birthday. I would really appreciate that. Thanks so much. And now to this week's episode. This week's guest is Moira Weigel. Moira is an assistant professor at Northeastern University, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center, and a founding editor

of Logic Magazine. I was very happy to have Moira back on the show to discuss a new report that she wrote with Data and Society that digs into Amazon's monopoly, you know, the platform that Amazon has created and what that has meant for all of the businesses that kind of rely on Amazon in order to, you know, run their own businesses, basically. And, you know, when I say businesses, I mean the third-party sellers who are responsible for much of the goods that are actually sold through Amazon's platform. And so, you know, we often talk about what Amazon means for workers in fulfillment centers or delivery drivers. And this is another way to look at Amazon and to understand Amazon. And one of the

things that Moira says in this conversation is that looking at the third-party sellers is important because they have a really good picture of what is actually going on on this entire platform because they need to understand the various intricacies and what is happening because as things change, as policies change, as the conditions of the market change, that can have huge effects on how they run their business. And, you know, one of the most fascinating things here is Moira explains that with these companies operating on this platform, they basically have to act like mini Amazons themselves in order to thrive on this platform. And that has really big implications when we think about policy responses, right?

You know, when we talk about antitrust discussions and Amazon being a monopoly, is it just that we need to break Amazon up and have a bunch of smaller little players? Or is the fact that Amazon exists and that it shaped the way that a lot of these smaller companies act, you know, does that need to be part of that conversation a bit more? Because there's a real kind of structural change that has occurred in the broader economy that has reshaped a lot of these other companies in response to Amazon. So that's all to say this was a fascinating conversation that I think you're going to really enjoy because I really enjoyed it personally. And it's the type of thing that I think that we all enjoy on this podcast. So you know, there's plenty to learn here. And I always love having Moira back on the show. So finally, if you like the show,

and you like this week's episode, consider helping us hit our goal of 200 new supporters for the podcast third birthday by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus, where you can join a bunch of supporters like Edie in Cape Town, South Africa, Glenn from Belfast, Harpreet in London, DK in Los Angeles, Elizabeth Grace from Minneapolis, Paula and Ayla, Kyle, SJ Martin, Mary Campbell in Cape Breton, Mateus from Brazil, Andrew in Pittsburgh, Colin in Newark, New Jersey, and Rich from London. Thanks so much to everyone who is supporting the show. And with that said, enjoy this week's conversation. Moira, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks so much for having me again.

Very excited to chat with you again. You know, always great to get your insights on the tech industry and all these things anyway. But you have this new report out looking at Amazon and in particular, you know, its relationship to third party sellers and how its kind of platform, how its policies shape the types of businesses that take place on this platform. Right. And I think this is really important as we try to understand the impacts that Amazon is having on the world, how it's shaping the economy more broadly. And so I want to dig into all these things with you. But I want to start by asking you kind of a broader question, right? When we talk about Amazon, especially on this podcast, we often focus on delivery workers and warehouse workers and what that relationship to

Amazon kind of tells us about the company. But in the report, as I said, you explore the relationship to third party sellers. Why do you think that's an important kind of way to look at Amazon? Well, I should say loud and clear that I think it's extremely important to focus on workers in the fulfillment centers and delivery and logistics workers as well. So I certainly intend my approach to be a complement to the excellent work by various people doing that. And in the spirit of being a good feminist scholar, my colleagues at Data & Society, Ai-Han Nguyen and Eve Zelikson put out a fabulous report on how the ring doorbell cameras that Amazon sells are used to monitor delivery workers and also the sort of racialized implications of that, sort of thinking

about that as a form of racialized labor surveillance. And there's a brand new book just out that I'm very excited to read by a scholar called Sarah Kassem on organizing at Amazon. I believe it's a comparative study based in a couple of countries in Europe. So all that to say, lots of important things to look at with Amazon. I got to focusing on third-party sellers through a sort of circuitous path. So I hadn't studied retail in depth before starting this research a couple of years ago at this point. I first got interested in Amazon in 2018 or 2019. I did this collaborative project on Amazon book publishing with Ava Kaufman and Francis Tsang. And we were looking at right-wing and white nationalist publishing on Amazon,

which is a big thing. Our study or piece on that came out in April, 2020. So we didn't, you know, we'd been working on it in months leading up to that. So we didn't really look at COVID issues. But since COVID, I think Amazon has been a huge platform for people publishing false information about the disease and about vaccines. So all this to say, I got into looking at Amazon through an interest in something that seems very different maybe than what I'm doing now, which was sort of conservative and right-wing media production. And I don't really like the term disinformation, but since that's what people use, I'll just say disinformation. And in the course of doing that research, I got really

fascinated by Amazon as a platform. And it sounds silly, but I think still to this day, there's new work coming out on Amazon, but I just think Google and Twitter and Facebook and basically search and social media platforms have for the most part been much more extensively studied by scholars. And then, as I was saying, there's been a lot of great work from a labor perspective on people who work in Amazon warehouses and logistics, but not that much study, indeed, hardly any study I came to find of Amazon as a platform and sort of what it meant to platformize retail. And as, you know, like with any project, my sort of methods and research questions evolved over a period of time when I first thought, okay, I want to really understand how Amazon retail works. Cause it's like, you know, it doesn't sound glamorous. I think we like to think of cloud or

we think of logistics, but retail is the core of Amazon's business and always has been in a number of ways. At first, I thought I would take an approach that I've taken in the past in the book of oral histories that I did with Ben Tarnoff, Voices from the Valley, and in these anonymous interviews that I did over the years for Logic. I thought, okay, great. I'll find people who work in retail at Amazon. I'll find software engineers or yeah, folks inside HQ in Seattle, basically, who will talk to me about how this platform works from the inside. And I did a few interviews like that. We published a long interview I did with an AWS engineer in logic a couple of years ago, which made people angry in a way that delighted me at the time.

I sort of quickly, because I was like, he's supposed to make you angry. He's supposed to be a jerk. But anyway, I very quickly realized that actually this method wasn't going to get me at what I wanted to understand. And that's for a few reasons. First, of course, Amazon full-time employees are NDA'd. It's hard to find ones who can talk to me. It would be very hard to get a sort of random sample of ones who could talk to me and do academic research on them. But more importantly, engineers have a very specific type of knowledge of a platform like Amazon. And I interviewed one or two folks, you know, who'd worked on one really

particular widget, right? Like the AI system that tells the Amazon algorithm, which search results to display in which country based on that country's product safety laws, which might be different or something like that. And engineers I spoke to were really brilliant about explaining whatever widget they'd happen to work on. But the nature of Amazon's third-party marketplace and its retail business is so global and so sprawling that I started to think that I needed to talk to the people who actually use it and navigate it to get a more global perspective. And this, of course, was politically appealing to me to think, you know, how can we tell a story of this global platform that is not about a small handful of mostly

white and perhaps East Asian, mostly male engineers in Seattle, but rather about the single mom buying stuff in targets in North Carolina to resell on Amazon and the hustler from the country who's moved to Shenzhen, white labeling goods like Tomahawks or whatever. That's another story. How can we tell a story in which these folks are the protagonists of Amazon's rise as they really are in a lot of meaningful ways, right? But the third-party sellers, the fees they pay to use Amazon have been among its largest sources of revenue, if not its largest source of revenue for years. And they provide the products that stock the catalog, that make the everything store. Amazon keeps them mostly invisible. That's by design. But in any case, I thought,

how do I tell a story of this global platform in which these folks are the protagonists and that recognizes that in many ways that single mom who has to figure out several times a week in North Carolina, whether flip flops or lawn flamingos that she's able to source from Target and Best Buy will sell for more on Amazon than they're selling for there, or the Hustler in Shenzhen who's white labeling ammo bags and tomahawks for the US market, those actors really in many ways have a much more comprehensive view of the global system than Amazon is, than does the engineer who's building the one piece of software to say,

okay, this baby product will show up in Turkey, but not in Germany because they have different product laws or whatever it might be. So I became very drawn to these third-party figures. Third-party sellers sell more than half of everything bought through amazon.com, fees that they pay to use Amazon's physical and virtual infrastructure. In many years, Amazon's highest source of revenue for years considerably higher than AWS. AWS is only just beginning to catch up and they go up all the time. And the work they do sort of sourcing and finding and advertising products and the risk that they bear, that work and that risk bearing has really made Amazon the global behemoth that it is. And they're almost invisible the way Amazon is designed.

They should have designed to be invisible in many ways. And so I was really interested in their perspective as a way to try to tell the story of this global platform, not quite from below, but from in the middle of it or from the edges. I think they have a perspective that lets us sort of refract an account of how Amazon has grown and developed. I think it's really fascinating to hear what you describe with that, right? Because, you know, there was a report recently from Marketplace Pulse that Amazon's fees have now exceeded 50% of, you know, the average price of what is being sold on the platform. So that means that it's taking a significant chunk of these sales. And as you say,

when we think about Amazon, we think about Jeff Bezos. Maybe we think about Andy Jassy and some of these other kind of executives and engineers in places like Seattle. But we don't think about these third-party sellers who are supplying a lot of what actually goes on to the platform is actually sold through the platform. And it's designed in such a way often to kind of abstract when you're buying from third party sellers. So yeah, and how that has changed, you know, how things work for these sellers, and how they have seen things change over that time. But first, I wanted to ask you about the particular names for these periods, right? Because these are names that come from the sellers, and they kind of termed it the old times, the Wild West, the jungle, and the rocket ship. As I said, I want to dig into each one separately. But before we do that, I want you to speak to us first about those terms and what they say about sellers perceptions about Amazon itself as this major kind of global platform. When I set out into this research project, like anyone at the beginning of a research project, I didn't know exactly what

I was going to find. And I found quickly that the world of e-commerce, to me anyway, is so complex and so bewildering. And I think not just to me, a lot of people talk about this, that it took me a really long time, relatively speaking, to just understand what was going on and to learn all this language that participants in the marketplace use to describe different features of it

and different aspects of their experience. And over the course of conducting dozens and dozens of in-depth interviews and lots of more informal conversations with people in this world, it started to strike me that I was hearing among the English speakers a couple of phrases again and again. And as you just said, these phrases were the old times, which was a phrase I heard from the relatively small number of people I met who'd been active on Marketplace before around 2010.

This phase, the Wild West, which folks use to describe the era from about 2010 to the mid 2010s. I could say a lot more about that. I know the Wild West is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in the tech industry. And then most strikingly to me, this phrase, the jungle, that multiple people used to refer to the era that they and we have been in since about the mid 2010s to the present. With a small footnote, I'd say that COVID sort of created its own era. And sometimes people called that the rocket ship, although now it seems maybe the rocket ship is crashing or coming to ground or something. But yeah, I could say more about each of these phrases and periods and also what led me to sort of take them seriously instead of inwardly roll my eyes at the suggestion of a tech wild west. But just to make a sort of meta point, over time, as I noticed people referring to these periods, and I noticed the fact that widely dispersed individuals who don't have very much

in common with each other, demographically or regionally, or in terms of what they were selling or anything like that, all seem to share a sense of when these turning points or breaking points between the eras had happened, I came to believe that the fact that there are these abrupt turning points is itself a kind of salient finding. And that everyone, again, from the single mom in North Carolina to the very successful furniture business owner in the Midwest, family man to, you know, sort of paterfamilias, this family business to consultants in Shenzhen who tell Chinese merchants how to spin up Amazon businesses. The fact that they all or many of them agreed when these turning points happened, pointed

to me to the fact these changes in Amazon's policy and also the algorithmic implementation of its policies created these really abrupt breaks in the livelihoods of the people on the platform. And I came to think that that itself was sort of a key finding and pointed to something important about the specific kind of dependency and vulnerability that third-party sellers experience, even when they do also sometimes have great opportunities. That sort of ambivalence is also part of what interests me about their position. Maybe I just should say as a meta point, I was working through the writing up of all this data

that I'd gathered. I had come to think that these metaphors were important and that the kind of periodization that they reflected were important. And I was talking about it a bunch with my editor on this report and friend, Patrick Davison, asked me a question that really stuck with me. And he said, you know, if, you know, we were sort of trying to tease out the metaphor. We're like, if it's the wild west or if it's the jungle, what do these sellers mean by that? Like, where is it? And Patrick asked me a question that at the time briefly that sort of stumped me initially, or he's like, well, if it's the wild West is Amazon, the land, like, is it the land grab or is Amazon like the United States sending people out to grab the land? And I thought about that going through the interviews, interview transcripts, and came to think it was actually both that the people I spoke to were imagining Amazon's marketplace itself, which was growing rapidly in terms of its customer base, as a kind of land rush or land grab where they wanted to seize their opportunity. But their use of these metaphors

also reflected this sense that to them, Amazon was like a crown or a state that was sort of sending them out to conquer new territory on its behalf. And I came to think that the fact that it was both was actually, you know, not a mistake or something, but pointed to something quite interesting about the ambivalence of the seller position, where they're both trying to seize opportunities that are opened up by this global, and one might say monopolistic, retail platform, and then also simultaneously highly, highly vulnerable to the, you know, opaque and non-democratic governing power of Amazon itself. Again, I could say a lot more about the sort of colonial extractive imaginaries of these phrases, but I thought that that contradiction actually pointed to something kind of interesting about the seller position.

Absolutely. Because, you know, at the same time, they see the opportunity of Amazon also being one where, especially if they are kind of selling a particular product, things can take off really quickly. There's an opportunity there that you might not have in, you know, a traditional economy or something like that, that comes with entering into one of these platforms. And so I want to talk about some of these periods, right? The first one being the old times, which, you know, you define as being kind of pre-2010. What defines Amazon in this period and how do third party sellers kind of start, you know, getting access to this platform and growing on this platform in this time? Yeah. So, you know, Amazon's founded in the mid 1990s and Bezos has this idea of wanting to become somehow the intermediary for e-commerce.

And I always tell this anecdote, but I love to tell it as someone who writes books because it keeps us humble. He settled on books as a product category because the distributors are concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, three of the four national distributors. Books are mostly about the same size. There's a limited number of kinds of boxes you have to buy to ship them, and they mostly aren't going to break in transit. And, of course, he was interested in being in the Pacific Northwest because at that time, if he was HQ'd in Washington, they could not charge sales tax to most of the people they ship things to. Anyway, Bezos starts out in the 90s coming from D.E. Shaw with this vision of becoming an intermediary for online commerce. And at first they start with books and start, you know, a more traditional so-called first party business. In commerce, in U.S. law, a first party seller is someone who sells directly

to a customer. So if I wanted to sell my hat that I'm holding here to you, Paris, we could say I'm the first party and you're the second party to the transaction. You buy it directly from me. When I hand the hat to you and you give me money, it becomes your property. And then you can do with it what you like. A third party in commerce refers to a situation where business is transacted and the entity who Paris buys from in this example never actually holds title to the product. So I had my hat and then I handed it to my charming young child who was going to go sell it because she's cuter than I am and more appealing to buy a hat from. And Paris bought from her. You could say that I'm the third party. Paris, you buy the hat from her, but actually she never owned the hat and she has to give the money right

back to me. This is a very clumsy comparison. But just to make concrete, what it means to be a third party seller is that you source goods that you sell through Amazon without Amazon ever buying them from you. And what it means for a consumer, maybe this is a neater way to put it, is that consumers mostly buy through Amazon. They buy from a third-party seller through Amazon rather than buying from Amazon. People do also buy from Amazon, which is part of what makes it confusing. I often say Amazon sort of grafted an eBay onto a Walmart while making it look like a Walmart online. Anyway, Bezos had this idea in the 90s of wanting to be an e-commerce intermediary. Starts by selling books first party. Amazon sells it themselves. Then though, by around 2000,

start opening up what they call the third-party marketplace, starting with used books and CDs and then other product categories, letting third parties sell through them. And this sort of begins the era that my interviewees called the old times. And in that era, Amazon was effectively just like an online catalog for them. And so how it worked is that Amazon would recruit merchants to sell through it, or maybe merchants would find Amazon on their own. This meant that when a customer went to Amazon and placed an order, Amazon would email, or sometimes I even heard fax, the name and address of that customer to the merchant. And then it was the merchant's problem, or the merchant would then go about

sending those goods to the customer on their own. So in this early era, it's basically just like an online catalog where customers pay a cut of sales for their goods to appear in Amazon search results. In the late 2000 aughts, an important change starts to happen. In late 2006, Amazon introduced its prime subscription program for customers, which meant that for a flat fee every year, customers could get two-day delivery on goods from Amazon. This is basically loses money. And you can argue about what makes or loses money with an Amazon, but this is basically a loss leader to try to get more and more people to sign up and therefore to buy more and more from Amazon.

Shortly thereafter, Amazon decides to open its warehousing and logistics services to third-party sellers. They also begin a sort of redesign of the software that they use to run the warehouses, which they had initially basically just copied from Walmart. And they hired a lot of logistics executives from Walmart early on. But after starting Prime and sort of trying to rev up the growth of their retail division,

they both redesigned the logistics services and opened them up to third parties, which means that the third parties paying to use those services subsidize their redesign and subsidize Prime. Now to a good capitalist, this all sounds great, right? This is like efficiencies. You get these users to supplement the design. Everyone wins. And there is, I do have that haunting sense sometimes that it's like someone reads this and it's like, oh, this is great. But anyway, that begins this new era. And particularly in 2010, when they finished redesigning the fulfillment system, that opens up this new era. And particularly in 2010, when they finished redesigning the fulfillment system, that opens up this new era that the people I interviewed described as the

Wild West. And why they described it that way is that, you know, it's an era of quick expansion and kind of lawlessness or lack of rules. In practice, that redesign combined with the 2008 financial crisis, which pushed a lot of people into needing to either, you know, they lost their jobs and they needed a new job or they needed to supplement their income to pay off debts, led a lot of people to seek gig work and sort of non-job work. And a lot of scholars of the gig economy have talked about this, how that same era brought a lot of people to work for Lyft or Uber and various other gig work economy, right? Because you have all these people who lose their job, who go out trying to find other ways of making income, even if they're able to find a job. Again, it's not making the same money that they often would have had in the jobs that they had before, you know, lower paid jobs. And so they need to find some way to kind of make up for that. And so that's often associated with Uber and Lyft and some of these food delivery apps. But we don't often think about Amazon in the same way, right? It's not framed in the same way with Amazon, even though Amazon has all these third-party

sellers is taking advantage of it through that route, but also has its own kind of gig services as well that it created, whether it's through the delivery side of things. You know, Mechanical Turk, of course, benefited from this. And we kind of forget that that's even part of Amazon sometimes. So there's this whole piece of it. You know, you said in the old times, you wrote in the report that sometimes recruiting these sellers didn't always work out, right? These things didn't always work for the sellers, this whole program. But as Amazon kind of revamps everything for the Wild West, as the recession happens and pushes a lot more people in this direction of looking for other ways to make money. That significantly benefits Amazon.

And so, you know, there are a few business models that really emerge in the Wild West era. Can you talk to us a bit about that and how these businesses kind of are formed and shaped by the platform that Amazon creates? Yeah, for sure. To step back one pace from that question, then I'll answer the question. When I first started this research, I had the perhaps naive expectation, I've lost all touch with what's a normal amount to know about Amazon or retail,

but the maybe naive expectation that when I looked for Amazon sellers, who I would be looking for or the people I'd be talking to would be people who had some background in retail, who had like a brick and mortar store and then used Amazon to, quote unquote, get online. And I put quotes around that because I increasingly think that as with every aspect of our social world and lives, the online offline distinction is not all that useful. But anyway, I thought I was going to meet, you know, the mom and pop at a corner store who then thought, oh, wouldn't it be nice if we sold our widgets online? Of course, this is not what selling on Amazon actually looks like. And I was startled initially

and then realized it made perfect sense when I discovered that almost every successful Amazon business I've ever encountered, and I've spent hundreds of hours speaking to people in sort of Amazon world, almost all of them are Amazon native, sort of with business plans designed specifically for Amazon. And I mentioned this at this moment too, because a striking thing about those old timers who I interviewed, the folks who'd been doing it for a long time, is that with one exception, everyone I can think of got recruited by Amazon, started trying to sell through Amazon in that era. It failed. It didn't work to take their offline business onto Amazon and then sort of went away and came back with an Amazon specific business. And the reason that I emphasize this

is that, again, we have such a sort of political religion around small business in the United States and this idea of the independent entrepreneur and so on. As I'm sure your listeners are used to thinking about, this belief in entrepreneurship has trickled into all sorts of other areas where folks also think Uber driving is also sold as a form of entrepreneurship and so is, are working for Instacart and all kinds of things are sold as entrepreneurship. What's striking about the Amazon sellers is they really are entrepreneurs in a certain sense. You know, they register as small businesses. They have all these sourcing relations. But then in another way, Amazon has really gigafied entrepreneurship in the sense that it, I'd say their entrepreneurial

autonomy is very significantly shaped, constrained, if not undermined by Amazon's metrics and Amazon's algorithm and Amazon's market power. So the one kind of popular business model and the one most closely associated with the Wild West is a business model of reselling or what's called retail arbitrage. Retail arbitrage or online arbitrage refers to trying to source goods, places that are not Amazon, and sell them for more money through Amazon. Amazon has a seller app that it released in, I want to say, 2013, 2014. And it has a barcode scanner that will facilitate doing this. It lets you use their app to walk through Target or Best Buy and scan barcodes and see what the current price of those goods on Amazon are now. I mean, the other way that Amazon benefits from the post-08 crisis

is this so-called retail apocalypse and this collapse of big box stores that had been built and overbuilt because of tax incentives and other reasons throughout the United States from the 1990s onward in the sort of big box Walmart era. So Amazon inspires the rise of this new business model. And many people who got involved, particularly in that Wild West era, started out by just signing up for an Amazon seller account, which is not very much money. Right now it costs, I think, $39.99 a month to sign up for the bare bones account. And then going out to see if they could find stuff at their local Target or Best Buy or wherever to resell on Amazon. Fascinatingly to me, the people I spoke to who did this, some of whom went on to do pretty huge volumes, I mean, reselling $50,000 worth of stuff a day or something, $70,000 worth of stuff a day,

was so interesting to me because they interpret it in these really gendered ways, even though it's like they'd use different gendered language to describe exactly the same thing. So there are communities of people who call themselves sort of coupon queens or moms who often were good at shopping from shopping for their kids who got into this. And then also people who refer to themselves usually men as Amazon nomads who would talk about driving around the country and driving to different places to source goods. If any listeners remember that guy at the beginning of the pandemic who'd bought 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer, was trying to price gouge people for them on Amazon, who I feel like

was like the most hated guy on the internet for like two days at the beginning of the pandemic. He was actually a pretty well-known member of this community of male Amazon nomads and doing something that definitely is antisocial and wrong, but is also exactly what Amazon has encouraged these arbitrageurs to do for years. So I loved his story because it's like a great glimpse of the pathology of normal market mechanisms. So yeah, retail arbitrage was this model that thrived in the early 2010s. Because again, if before... And I should say Amazon calls these fulfillment services that they sell to sellers, fulfillment by Amazon or FBA. Before FBA, if you wanted to sell through Amazon, you need to have your own logistics outfit and warehouse and all this stuff. Now, all you needed to do is be able to find stuff and ship it into whatever fulfillment center they told

you to ship it to. And so it greatly reduced the overhead for getting into the marketplace. And so that is a business model sort of thrived in the early 2010s. It's gotten a lot harder for reasons that I'd be happy to expand on, but it gradually has been supplanted by sort of private labels or Amazon brands, which I'd be happy to expand on. But I'll hit pause there for a minute. I appreciate you outlining all that, right? I think it's fascinating to connect back to that early story from early in the pandemic of what was happening to illustrate like how this all works and a particularly extreme case of it, right? And it was bad.

This is no one but me would remember this. But what was his name? Matt no one but me would remember this. But what was his name? Matt Colvin is that guy's name. And I've met people like friends with him who used to work with him doing arbitrage in the New York Times story. And in the court case that eventually followed, he was working with his brother. And in all the pictures of him that were taken for the New York Times, he was wearing this t shirt that said family business. And I just sort of loved it because it's like this ethos of the small business and the family business used by Amazon.

I could say more about that, but to sort of justify what is just blatantly kind of sociopathic activity, you know, it shows how powerful I think that small business, family business imaginary is. But anyway. Yeah, it's just wild, right? It's a wild story.

And to see how these things interact with Amazon and benefit Amazon for this to be able to go on and continue. But you mentioned, you know, the private brands as an extension of this as, you know, kind of the evolution of the model, right? As retail arbitrage becomes something that works less and less on the platform, all of a sudden developing your own brand, you know, relabeling often Chinese goods to sell into the US and global markets is the way that you make a go of it through Amazon. So can you talk to us about that element of this? Yeah, for sure. So retail arbitrage gets harder and harder to do over the course of the 2010s for a few reasons. There's sort of natural price

competition driving a race to the bottom, which, you know, again, a capitalist or someone with faith in markets would say that's good. That's terms of the paperwork that they'll accept for resale goods, they make it extremely risky to do it because there's a chance that they'll say, oh, you have bought $20,000 worth of lawn flamingos, and we're just not going to accept it. But the other big reason is this rise of brands or what some people described as the pivot to brands. And like everything, there are a few different factors that go into that. One is Amazon developing its ad tools and sort of wanting sellers to use its digital advertising tools. It starts that division in 2012 and then rapidly expands it over the 2010s. As I'm sure listeners of this podcast know, it's now the big third biggest digital advertising company after Google and Facebook. So you also then in this era have the rise of Alibaba in China and Alibaba's sourcing platform, AliExpress, which they launched in 2010, I believe. And other sites like Wish.com that start sort of reselling cheap Chinese goods in bulk to customers in the West. So platformization and disintermediation are happening

in the Chinese economy too, in ways that make competing on price harder, if that's all you're competing on, which is what arbitrageurs are basically doing. And then finally, you have Amazon's opening in China, which is sort of a big piece of the story. And if there's anything I cover in this report and I'm planning to continue to do in my ongoing research, it is to tell the story of how much Amazon's growth is sort of built in cooperation with the Chinese state and sort of on the direct backs or with the direct participation of Chinese small business. So Amazon opens in China in 2015, and that makes it, again, harder to arbitrage because even if you're going to Best Buy in North Carolina, it's not easy to compete with. Factor is offering the same goods and

introduced a whole bunch of other issues and problems, but interacts with this rise of brands and that you get a lot of Chinese merchants and factories directly developing their own brands through Amazon for the U.S. marketplace. And that's the origin. There was a magazine story by John Herman like a month or two ago that I saw a lot of people sharing, but it's like the origin of all these Amazon quote unquote brands, which often, you know, I think I'm trying to write an academic paper about this, but it's like a brand in an age of digital monopoly is basically just like a position in the search results, right? It's like not necessarily a household name, but all these brands that are like HMXQ, whatever, that if you go to try to buy shoelaces or, you know, earbuds or whatever on Amazon, you'll be familiar with if you click

through that moment in the mid 2010s when Amazon opens and starts very actively recruiting manufacturers and merchants from China is sort of the beginning of the rise of that kind of Amazon native brand. Yeah. And that's the period that you term as the jungle, right? When this opens up and things really expand. Just to touch on some of the points you mentioned there about China. Like, I remember I used to think of AliExpress as like one kind of e-commerce marketplace, right? It was the place you could go to get access to all of these like low cost Chinese goods that are provided by all these companies, but you weren't really expecting to like buy something from Alibaba directly, right? Whereas Amazon seemed like something separate from that, where you were going onto Amazon, you were buying from Amazon or like, you know, a small number of approved sellers or something. And it was a very

different experience. Whereas it was a very different experience, whereas it feels like in the years that have passed, Amazon has moved much, much closer to kind of what AliExpress was doing, right, as it has opened to China, as it has allowed more of these sellers onto the platform. And just hearing what you say there about how you've been looking into how much Amazon's growth, especially since the mid 2010s, has relied on China and cooperation with the Chinese state and kind of the investments and policies that it put in place to enable this kind of growth. Like, it just seems fascinating to me that we have these discussions now around, you know, oh, my God, TikTok is in, you know,

North America, we need to stop it. Or, you. Or Apple has supply chains in China that maybe it should be pulling back on. But we don't usually hear Amazon treated in the same terms, even though it's so reliant on Chinese goods and that relationship with the Chinese state. Yeah. And I like to cite this figure because Amazon gets very upset when people cite this figure. But Amazon actually loves to bring out this figure that by volume, 49% of third-party sales in the United States through Amazon come directly from China to the U.S. consumer. This is not counting the additional huge percentage of things that are sourced in China by American or North American first party sellers. Amazon gets very upset when you say that number because Amazon loves when it is asked about being a monopoly or when Bezos is called before Congress to say, we're just helping, you know,

we're not like Walmart. We're not a big business. We're just helping small business flourish. And over 60% of our sales are from small businesses. And again, what they don't, and again, I point on this, I feel it's tricky to talk about this because we're living in this moment of really stupid, in my view, sort of great power antagonism between the US and China, really horrible anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism in the United States. So I say this not to say necessarily that it's a bad thing that Chinese merchants are selling directly to the U.S. through Amazon, but rather to just point out the disingenuineness or hypocrisy of Bezos going before Congress saying, you know, America is a great country that supports

small businesses and entrepreneurs and over half of what we sell is from small businesses. And I think it just should be added as a footnote that about half of that is directly from China, not to count the other vast percentage of stuff that's made in China. So Amazon's retails growth, like the growth of Walmart in the 1990s and 1980s, 1990s is deeply, deeply dependent on Chinese manufacturing and more specifically on China's push in the 2010s to support micro entrepreneurship and what they call overseas e-commerce, and Xi Jinping and more specifically Li Keqiang, the premier, really pushed that and put all these resources into supporting different, sorry, I should say it's at a provincial level that this is mostly administered, but different provinces put a lot

of material resources into getting Chinese merchants onto Amazon to sell to the US. And so Amazon's rise is just deeply entangled with Chinese capitalism and the Chinese state in a way that I agree, I think it's rare to hear about it. Yeah. And I should also say, I completely endorse what you say about this kind of rivalry and conflict being ridiculous, but I just think it's important to note how Amazon kind of escapes from these narratives that are kind of positioned and thrown at some other companies. And if people do want to know a bit more about, you know, what China was doing with micro entrepreneurship, of course, Xiaowei Wang was on the show back in October, 2020, to talk a bit more about, you know, what China was doing with micro entrepreneurship. Of course, Xiaowei Wang was on the show back in October 2020 to talk a bit about that and their

book, Blockchain Chicken Farm, which is fascinating. I just want to throw out one other name just because it's publishing this month. I have a good friend called Lin Zheng who teaches at the University of New Hampshire. She has a new book out this month, March, called The Labor of Reinvention, that is about the Chinese platform economy in the wake of the 2008 crisis. And Lin is also wonderful. People should read her book. You know, if we look at the kind of phase of COVID growth, I guess, with Amazon, you know, as you say in the report, this is referred to as the rocket ship where things really take off in a significant way for those first couple of years of the pandemic in particular. You know, now we're seeing a bit more of like a pullback on that, a realization that that is not reflective of what things are going to look like forever. Can you talk to us a bit about that period and also, you know, what it means for some of these sellers that these trends that were expected, I think, that the business was kind of planning for, you know, Amazon was going to build out all these additional fulfillment centers that they're kind of pulling back on a bit now.

What it means for that not to have really kind of taken a hold in the way that some expected. Yeah. So it's funny. I began this research, as I said earlier, kind of a little bit before and then at the beginning of the pandemic. And part of why I was drawn to it is because it was just seemed like a lot of change was happening in e-commerce world, you know, both because of the trade war and the pandemic at that moment. And there was this strong narrative that people probably remember just as consumers or citizens at the beginning of the pandemic, that it was going to drive sort of a permanent shift from shopping in person to

shopping online. You know, people would say things like, oh, e-commerce has just been accelerated by five years or 10 years or 15 years. Again, one of these sort of tech determinist narratives in a certain way. I think it's like problematic in so many ways because it's like, what is e-commerce? But anyway, I could say a lot more things to complicate that. But basically, there was this narrative at the beginning of the pandemic when people were quarantining and a lot more folks were shopping online, that that was going to cause a permanent shift in American shopping habits. Amazon's retail did grow a lot for two years after the start of the pandemic, and Amazon stock prices went up and up.

There was also this whole other field, which I'm doing research on now, and I'd be happy to expand on a little bit, but there emerged sort of right after the pandemic, this whole area of private equity or sort of venture capital firms called aggregators that were founded in order to buy portfolios of Amazon native brands, you native brands on the theory, which has turned out not to be quite as easy as it seemed to those Wall Street guys when they got into it, but on the theory that they could use their superior data-driven insights and scale to make these brands more profitable. And so when I first started this research, there was all this anticipation in general in the culture around e-commerce, all this hype, people selling their brands for huge multiples to these aggregators in the sense that there was new money suddenly to be made.

Another thing I just want to mention is that probably a few of us think about this now, but at the beginning of COVID, Amazon made this decision that they weren't going to fulfill non-essential goods, however they deemed what that was. And this was a huge thing for third-party sellers because it meant that suddenly they couldn't send in any new inventory to warehouses. The inventory that was in warehouses was kind of held hostage and couldn't be delivered. For some of them. All of them have these hard-earned search rank results and metrics that are dependent, many of them, on fulfillment rates. And so it would hurt their rankings a lot. Some of them have loans from Amazon whose interest rates and repayment are tied to their sales. So their loans went into default. So anyway, this thing had happened at the beginning of the pandemic that was like a major kind of wake up call or trauma. And every seller I spoke to said, look, we understand it was like a crisis. It was important to prioritize the right things.

But I think that led a lot of sellers to appreciate in a newly acute way, the sort of risks of being so dependent on Amazon. And I should say also that of the people I interviewed, almost everyone did at least almost 90% of their business through Amazon. I think I talked to one or two where it was only 60 or 70, but most Amazon sellers are hugely dependent for their livelihood on Amazon sales. And so anyway, the beginning of the pandemic was this interesting time where there was a sense of a great deal of possibility, but also precarity or worry that Amazon could just turn off tomorrow and then your whole livelihood and your company could be held hostage or disappear or something. And I think that combination of outward expansion and exploration and so on, but also like shakiness

or riskiness were captured by this metaphor of the rocket ship that people used. Even though, again, a rocket ship is kind of a tech industry cliche. I think the only one of these phrases that wasn't a cliche I'd heard a lot before was the jungle, which was fascinating to me, which over time I came to think like, A, it referred to the fact that marketplace was getting like denser and more dangerous and you needed more advisors and guides to it and so on. I think also reflected the rise of an influencer culture of Amazon influencers trying to brand themselves with Amazon's own branding, right? Because it's like the jungle, it's like the Amazon. But anyway, COVID was kind of this paradoxical time where on the one hand, sellers saw a lot of opportunity and possibility perhaps

to take money and sometimes a lot of money off the table by selling to these aggregators. And then on the other hand, we're like very aware of some of these external risks. Again, whether it's a trade war with China, which is its own whole thing. I remember talking to people at the beginning when Trump had threatened to ban WeChat, who were just like, oh my God, how am I going to communicate with my suppliers if they ban WeChat? And then also, of course, COVID itself. Sort of like if we think of Amazon as a huge prediction machine, right? That's basically what these machine learning powered systems are. It's like the beginning of COVID was like, what happens when the unforeseen happens to

the prediction machine in this place that like runs very efficiently, not much safety or sort of slack in the system. I do think it's interesting to think about like the effects of that, right? And the narrative that we had and how that affected a whole load of things around Amazon. And surely the third party sellers were not, you know, free from that. Right. And another thing to maybe say just really quickly at some point, if not here is like, I said earlier that sellers are very, very controlled by Amazon metrics and algorithms. And one way that this manifests can be in pressures to scale and to scale very rapidly

if there's demand for your product. So there's this metric called the IPI or inventory performance index, which is like this mysterious metric, but that has a lot of impact on where people turn up in search results and so on and has to do with how many units you move. So when I said earlier that Amazon simultaneously holds out this promise of independence and autonomy and entrepreneurship, but in many ways undermines it to the extent of its control. I'd say that in some cases, and especially early in the pandemic, I think the sellers like small to medium-sized businesses saw not only opportunities to scale, but also sometimes felt real pressures to scale, to compete,

and to take on large amounts of debt to get more inventory or whatever might be. Again, that could then cause whole new headaches with the supply chain crisis starting in 2021, 2022. But yeah, I think that Amazon, it's not only that you can scale, but Amazon places on sellers very distinct pressures and imperatives to scale at their own risk. Yeah, no. And you describe how, you know, these businesses kind of have to act like their own mini Amazons because of the whole kind of system and structure that Amazon sets up for them to participate in. And I think that touches on, you know, the broader question that I wanted to ask, which is after doing this research and after looking so

in depth into how Amazon's platform, how Amazon's marketplace functions and the incentives that it creates for third party sellers, you know, how should we understand Amazon's larger business? Right. Because one thing I want to make a note of is that as the company takes, you know, over half of an average sale in the various fees and charges and things that it accumulates. You also note that, you know, a lot of these third party sellers are benefiting from public policies and public supports and all this stuff. So kind of indirectly that is benefiting Amazon as well, though that's not often considered as a direct subsidy to Amazon. So yeah, broad question is, how should we understand Amazon's business understanding its relationship to third-party sellers? Yeah, you're asking a great question. I can get kind of weird and cosmic in a way that is probably interesting to no one but me about what actually is Amazon. It's actually pretty hard to describe like an alien or a future anthropologist or something what Amazon actually is. So I have two things to say to this question. And maybe you will then have further interesting thoughts that will help me be clearer. as kind of an engine that subsidize and make possible the growth of new kinds of products

and offerings. And we could say this about the retail business at large, right? Cloud is developed to help serve the needs of the retail business and then sold to other people. Some of the specific services that are developed for cloud are based on the needs of third-party sellers, as well as the retail business. The advertising business is also developed for third-party sellers and funded by third-party sellers who pay for it. So within this larger logic of what we might think of as risk shift or this kind of relatively familiar, I think probably

to your listeners, familiar kind of narrative about platformization, that what platformization does is shift work and risk onto third parties while reaping profits or money from their labor and risk-taking and so on. Amazon sort of applies that logic first to retail and gets all kinds of products out of that, but then also tries applying it to other realms too. And we have the Amazon Flex program, which is like a program to platformize delivery there at least six or 12 months ago. I can't remember when exactly I was looking at the Flex app applications and there were these really sinister sort of classic predatory inclusion type glossy stories on the Amazon Flex page about how if you were Black, Latinx, or Indigenous,

you could apply for a loan from Amazon so that you could start your own business to hire other people to be a mini logistics company for you on Flex. So I think there's this drive to platformize everything. And I really think when we think of what that means, platformization, probably the best way to think about it is using data-driven and computer technologies to shift work and risk onto third parties. So it's like, what if Walmart could be Walmart, but instead of ever, and you know, Walmart does a lot of this on its own. Like let's not spare any punches for Walmart.

It's pushed a lot of risk up at supply chains onto like sweatshop workers throughout the world. But it's like, if you can think of how do you use platformization to turn Walmart or Target into like a global flea market where everyone in the world is trying to sell things, but like under Amazon's control, that's sort of how this logic of platformization works. It's like, how do you take the risk and work and shift it onto third parties to whom you own nothing? Right. And I should say, Amazon has these business agreements with its third party sellers in which they basically renounce to any kind of rights over anything. I could tell a million stories about Amazon suspending businesses or suspending products and people losing millions of dollars literally over that. And in the time it takes them to reach a human at Amazon who can explain what happens, Amazon can ban a business and just hold its money, not give them back their money. So one way that the third party sellers help us understand what Amazon is and how it works is that it's like this infrastructure for innovating new products that enable it to continue extracting capital while shifting work and risk onto third parties to whom it owes nothing. And incidentally, you know,

Amazon strongly prioritizes customers in all sorts of ways, but Amazon also gets rid of product liability to consumers in a lot of cases. For years, the Supreme Court had a ruling on this in 2018 and it changed. But from 2000 to 2018, Amazon was not responsible for any sales tax. It didn't have to charge sales tax. It could have more competitive prices because it didn't have to charge that. So yeah, I think third parties illuminate the way that Amazon applies this logic of shifting risk and responsibility while maintaining control. And I think it illustrates, again, to circle back to something that you said, you know, we have this narrative of the new

Cold War and the Great Firewall around China. It also illustrates the extent to which these two digital capitalisms or these two platform economies are deeply, deeply entangled. So Amazon not only does this platformization thing, but does it at a global scale and in ways that entangle the US and China in particular. I should have said earlier when I said that 49% of third-party sales by volume are directly from China to US customers that Amazon has pushed and pushed in recent years to try to get more sellers in Mexico and Latin America and in India and Pakistan. And it's still the most recent data is like only 6% of third party sellers to the US

are anywhere except North America and China. It's like all North America and China. So anyway, it shows how these logics of platformization that maybe we're used to thinking about with a firm like Uber are applied to new domains and at a very global scale. And the report is so insightful on these points as well, right? And just as you say about, you know, Mexico and Latin America, there was a story recently, I think it was in Rest of World about how some of the economies down there are being transformed because of cheap Chinese goods from like Xi'an and things like that coming in, right? And so I think the expectation then that, you know, they are going to kind of displace China from the goods that are

coming into the United States or North America or what have you is probably not going to kind of displace China from the goods that are coming into the United States or North America or what have you, is probably not going to happen in the degree that they would want to be able to show that they're becoming less reliant on China. As you are describing the way that the company actually functions by looking at the relationship to the third-party sellers and the broader kind of platformization that's going on there, one of the things that you note in the report as well is that some of the kind of antitrust frames and arguments around Amazon don't properly reflect, you know, what is actually happening there based on what you're observing. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and how,

you know, understanding Amazon in the way that you do in the report, you know, how we actually respond to it with that understanding? So look, in the past few years, we've had this really developed antitrust discourse, not just in the United States, but throughout the world, you know, the EU, Britain, China have taken kind of anti-monopoly actions, not against Amazon in the case of China, but in the EU and Britain against Amazon, China against Alibaba. And in the United States too, there's been a lot of momentum on that front. And a common frame that comes up when talking about competition has to do with how Amazon competes unfairly with small businesses that sell through it. If some small seller has been selling something

successfully, Amazon can invent an Amazon Basics equivalent of that thing. They have all kinds of access to data about the product and the supply chain. And so on Amazon, one person I interviewed used this term dragon boated. And I was like, what does that mean? And he's like, well, that's when Amazon goes and just goes to your factory in China and it's like buys them out for the next three years. And then you go back to place an order and they're like, sorry, we're selling. We're already making three years worth of that for Amazon. And in antitrust discourse, because the ultimate goal is competition, we often hear about these cases of how Amazon eliminates competition by eliminating smaller businesses and small

competitors. That is true. That's absolutely true. And I want to pause and just think about how amazing it is in a way now that we know, thanks to the marketplace pulse research that Amazon is taking 50 to 55% of every sale anyway, that it's like how high the margins must be for Amazon to look at that and think, oh, but we could get an even bigger cut by making it ourselves. Because I have to admit, there's a part of me that just doesn't understand why they do that. It's so clearly anti-competitive and they get such a big cut without doing that. Yeah. I feel like there was some reporting recently that they're kind of pulling back on that a bit, but maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, no, I'm sure you are right. You

probably, you're probably right. Because to me, it's always seemed completely irrational that they do it because it's so clearly a violation. But anyway, sorry, to answer in a more concise format, as just like a normal human reading news coverage before I went deep into the rabbit hole of Amazon, as a normal human reading news coverage, I had in my mind this idea that Amazon destroys small businesses because it puts small businesses out of business. And I think that's a narrative with deep roots in American culture, going back at least to Brandeis and these battles in the 20s over national grocery store chains versus small businesses. It's something that lefties a little closer to our age, I sort of barely remember, you probably don't remember, but it's like in the 90s, these debates about Walmart and Kmart and like the small local stores fighting them. It's this narrative of big versus small. And what big does is that it eats up small or destroys small. And I think while there's some truth to this, and as I said,

Amazon does copied products from its third-party sellers and so on, big versus small is not the best way to cognize the kind of power that Amazon has and how Amazon uses its market power. In addition to eliminating small businesses through competition, Amazon sort of elicits or calls into being all these new kinds of small businesses that are optimized for Amazon and do this important work for it. As I was saying earlier that I thought I was going to be meeting mom and pops who just like incidentally got on Amazon, but actually it was almost all people who had to make a business plan for Amazon. And then their businesses optimized the Amazon's goals and prerogatives and very susceptible to

its control, utterly susceptible or vulnerable to certain kinds of algorithmic governance or policy changes like deciding, oh, we're going to just let anyone with a Chinese IP address also sell retail goods through our marketplace, which is, you know, again, we can have a complex discussion about it normatively, but that's a great big uh-oh for like all these retail merchants they brought on in the United States for years. And so I think that rather than thinking of it in terms of big versus small, I like to think about how it exercises its power. I mean, this is how the logic of platformization works, right? Like Facebook likes to say it's made information more democratic because now anyone can be a broadcaster, right? And anyone can start a

digital native news outfit for much less money than it would have cost to start a TV station or whatever with the same reach. And that's true. That's not bullshit. That's true. It has, you know, democratized the production dissemination of information in some ways at the same time that it's created the greatest concentrations, monopoly maybe, over information, the greatest concentrations of information and wealth in a single person or a single entity that's ever existed in the history of the world, right? And so these things are both true. And this is platformization. This is the scholar Anne Hellman uses this phrase, but they decentralize in order to recentralize power.

And I think with Amazon, I clearly don't have a snappy enough way to say this, but it's not quite so much about big versus small as about how this huge corporation enrolls small actors in ultimately growing its power and recentralizing its power. And I don't know how we build a moral imaginary around that that's as powerful as the vision of big versus small when it's Walmart versus the mom and pop. But I think that to cognize how a firm like Amazon works, we need to think in those terms.

Yeah, I think it really makes two important points for us, right? First of all, there are all these narratives around decentralization in relation to the tech industry and thinking about how decentralization from a tech perspective then enables a re-centralization that is helping these companies is really important, right? Because that piece of it is often left out of these decentralization narratives, if they even happen properly anyway. And then the other piece of it is to say that it's not just that you should be fighting for small businesses or whatever in relation to these large firms like Amazon, but if Amazon is reshaping the way that those small businesses work in the first place to serve its own ends, regardless of what happens from an antitrust perspective, then how much further ahead are we really getting, you know, with antitrust

measures in relation to Amazon? Perhaps it's also a way for those on the left or those whose hearts don't flutter at the thought of competition in the same way, like market competition in the same way that some of the antitrust discourse does. Maybe seeing it this way also helps us reframe the question a bit so that we're saying not how do we protect competition or a kind of ideal of market competition, but rather how do we ensure that, you know, the whole global economy isn't sort of drawn into this process of aggrandizing this platform and sort of drawn into whatever Amazon's KPIs are. I mean, we talked about how to succeed on Amazon. You need to be like a mini Amazon, but it's like, maybe it lets us reframe that values conversation a little bit. So it's not only about competition, but like, what goals do we want the world economy to be optimized for? Amazon's goal is to keep as

many things moving as fast as possible through Amazon. I don't think that should probably be humanity's goal. No. And I think that is a great place to leave this conversation as well. Moira, it has been great to talk to you as always. Highly recommend people go check out the report with even more great insights around Amazon and how its business actually works. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Thank you. Moira Weigel is an assistant professor at Northeastern University and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center. Thank you. want to support the work that goes into making it every week, you can go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.