TRASHFUTURE - Damming the Amazon feat. Alex Press

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

This week, Riley, Milo, Alice, and Hussein join special guest Alex Press (@alexnpress) of Jacobin magazine and the Primer podcast (@primerpod) about the Stratford Orb, another union-busting app, and the news that the Amazon union election has to do a re-run (and the Teamsters are getting involved!). You will enjoy this. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Please consider donating to charities helping Palestinian people here: https://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/palestine-emergency-appeal/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3oja5NbR8AIVSOmyCh2LdQ9rEAAYAiAAEgKM9PD_BwE and here: https://www.grassrootsalquds.net/ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, and welcome to this podcast, TF, that one you're listening to at this very moment. This juncture. This very juncture. Unless you've paused it now, in which case you will just have been listening to it recently. Yeah. If you're still with us, you are listening to it now indeed. Well, if they're listening to this, they are still with us. It is me, Riley, here in studio with Milo, and also we have Allison Hussain.

Hi. Hi, from Obama's 60th birthday party, we're having a great time. Remembering his only scandal, the tan suit. Hussain is turning Obama's 60th birthday party technically into a masjid. That's right. No one can stop him. I think you'll find it already was a masjid. Yeah.

What do you think the funding's for? Barack Hussain, Cosvani Obama, that's right. We have Alice. We have Barack Hussain, Cosvani Obama, and joining us today, we are very pleased to have Alex Press of Jacobin, and also of the primer podcast about Amazon, Alex. How's it going? Great. Thanks so much for having me.

Oh, it is a pleasure to have you here talking about the various sort of blights that different councils and companies are inflicting on London, the streetscape of London. Awesome. It was, we talked about the ore, not the ore, rather, we talked about the mound, just well, last week and also just now the green room where we all are before we record this. Yeah. That's right. That's right.

The big green room. Yeah. However, I have to, I assume something is there is some kind of great happening must be upon us. And some lay line has been activated. Something has happened in the sky. It is time of monsters because, I'd say there's a specter. The orb has arisen on the same horizontal line as the mound, not noticeably, not the

Saudi Arabian Trump orb. A second orb has struck the trash future podcast. Yeah. And this, this orb is much bigger. This orb is much less like the Trump orb and much more like the carousel orb from Logan's run. Yes. It is.

It's a giant orb that they're putting into Stratford. It will, it is to be as tall as being a Stratford is getting. Awesome. Whether it wants it or not. Yeah. Get it. Get it. Get it.

Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it. Get it. I thought he did say you don't have to build an orb. So basically it is going to have 36 million LEDs.

It's going to be a right. And it's going to, just like my asshole, blow bright red all half the time, just like my asshole. I know what you're going to do next. It's going to be been playing ads half the time. I know my asshole doesn't do that. Well, if you know, it's people. Yeah, you pay $1 a month, you get ad free.

We are giving Stratford an RGB backlit gamer keyboard. So the ads will display like on the surface of the orb. Yes, on the outside of the orb. Then they're going to be all fucked up. They're going to be like orb deformed. Like you're going to want to, you're going to look at like a car ad or something. And the car's going to look fucked up because it's not on a flat surface. It's on an orb.

Yeah. Well, you know, you're talking about it. You wouldn't drive on an orb. The first time I heard about the orb, like the first thought I was thinking was, by the time this orb is done, the queen will probably be dead, right? Oh, yes. She'll be entombed in the orb. So yes.

So, well, so the orb will have to like memorialize the queen somehow and like the second memorial orb. That's right. We're like, they project. They just project. They just project like a really distorted version of her face to make her look like a cartoon kind of like, to make her look like a cartoon character, memorial orb. That's right.

Yeah. There's no way, also, that the queen, there's no high resolution picture. There's not a picture of the queen right now. There's high resolution enough to display on the giant orb without looking very pixelated. They should actually have the orb should be a 3D image of the queen's head so that she looks like the inflatable autopilot from the airplane. So just a little more on the orb because I'm clearly on this orb that we're talking about this orb that's appeared or the orb hasn't yet appeared.

It's not like the mound, which has appeared. The orb has merely been, I believe, it's well, it's, it's, it is in the planning process. It looks like it will go ahead. There's a great quote in this Guardian article you just sent me about the orb where one of the residents who's going to be near the orb said, nobody expects a gigantic ball of light to arrive. That is true. All I can, all I can say is that's your own fault if you don't like it.

There's the door. Very few people, interestingly, anticipates a gigantic orb. Maybe, maybe you should. That's what I'm saying. I expect that on my doorstep every day. And you'll continually disappoint. If you're going to live in London, you have to expect some stupid monstrous bullshit covered

in ads is going to appear on your front door and it will be illegal for you to do anything. This all has to be filled with balls. Well, I get a play pit. So basically, here's a little, here's what's actually going in the orb because there's an insight, much like the mound, there's an inside to the orb. Yeah. P is stored in the orb. It is a, it's going to be a, it's owned by Madison Square Garden, oddly enough.

So thank you to New York for the orb. We're very excited to have the orb, our own Madison Square Garden. Madison Square Garden. It's recompense for vessel, right? Because an English guy did vessel. So in return, the Americans have to give us an orb. This is like a cultural exchange. Yeah.

Beautiful. Yeah. This is, this is, this is what the, these two great, great cities, but the centuries of connection between them have decided that, you know, their main thing is sort of twee bullshit. And they've just sort of exchanging it back and forth. Now I can imagine some, some dads a barbecue in like 2040 having a conversation. Yeah.

Did you get it? Yeah. M11 and left at the orb. Yeah. So the, basically it is a venue that's designed for quote, next generation immersive experiences featuring an infrasound haptic system of vibrating floors. An infrasound haptic system. Like, like they had on phones for about six minutes until everyone realized it was shit

and turned it off. The feeling that it pushes back. They're trying to capture the energy of when the millennium dome was come when it, when it was the millennium dome. Yeah. It should have been an orb. That's right. It's well, well like, so in 10 years time, it's just going to be this weird illuminating

orb. And when you go inside, there'll be like various mid tier chain pizza restaurants. All, all that is solid dissolves into ZZ's. That's right. That dissolves into orb. Yeah. Yeah. But cyborg Prince Andrew will be saying that he can't have been at the cyborg nonsing

venue because actually he was, he was having a, a, a, a, uh, one of those futurist style pizzas with nuts and bolts on it at the pizza express. Is cyborg nonsing orgy and orgy in which the cyborgs are nonces or in which cyborgs are nonced? No, they're recently built. Uh, the thing is like, like the, the, the orb, it's weird, right? Because the orb is something that you would expect in sort of in, in, in a kind of cyberpunk story, right?

It seems like it's sort of from Neuromancer that there would be a big constantly glowing orb covered in ads, but in Neuromancer, the ads would be for something like, I don't know, a katana that digitally interfaces with you or whatever. That's the kind of thing that would be. I don't say that you would just buy it. Where, but the problem is, is we live in cringe cyberpunk. Basically. Oh fuck.

Where it's, yeah, it's, it's advertising. Instead of advertising a neural interface katana, our giant glowing orb advertises the ball pit bar. Yeah. Like fuck. Is it Ryan Reynolds and Blade Runner where he just has the like pink light projected on him? But what's being advertised to us is like a slightly higher rate of car insurance.

Whatever. They're all the same Ryan. There's only one Ryan. No compare the giant orb. So a little more on the orb. Uh, number one, uh, basically the, the, everyone who lives there is going to have just, it's good. There's going to be like the episode of Seinfeld where they open up the chicken roaster sign

and Jerry turns into Kramer, uh, because he's driven insane by the red light. Everyone's going to have red light beamed into their house who lives around there 24 hours a day. And all of the housing that's around there tends to be the quote unquote affordable housing. Yeah. It's going to be like being on a submarine. If you've paid for the bit, the expensive housing that you don't have to, your chances are you don't face the orb.

The, all the cheap housing faces the orb and is never going to be humanized yourself and leads to orb. Yeah. Cause your windows aren't ad free if you live in the poor area. Yeah. Who needs influencer room lights when you have a big orb that will constantly give you, uh, nice illuminated rooms for your YouTube videos. That's right.

Britain 2050. Curtains are illegal. The orb cannot be switched off. It can only be dimmed. The thing is this is, this is obviously a plot, uh, by big gay, by globo homo to make everyone in Britain have bisexual lighting. They said homo globalist, I says, uh, we suggested it wasn't appropriate development for a residential area.

I said one of the affected residents for any area. The representative just said, if you don't like noise and crowds, you shouldn't have moved. So as though, as though people aren't constantly moved around either by councils or by the property market, anyway, difference here between noise and crowds and omnipresent orb of lights. I feel it's a beautiful British statement that we suggested that this wasn't appropriate. We raised our hand and also just the whole like, don't like it.

There's the door. Leave is like the most British response. Like this Stofia. Oh, yeah. Love me wife. Love me orb. Don't like it. There's the door.

Don't like it. There's the orb. Love. Love me orb. Love me orb. Love me orb. Don't like it. There's the orb.

Alice has orb madness. Right. Yeah. But orb bass. I just followed the orb. It's sad. It's an orb is kind of a big ball. You try to say it.

And this is what's up. The image is a born guy holding a miniature orb. I caught this orb in the river. Do you want it? I'll use maggots. Anyway, my point was it's very funny that like presumably Newham council are saying like Stratford is a hellscape. Why would you move to our borough if you didn't expect it to be hell?

And it's like, you made it hell when you built the Olympic Park. Yes. Stratford used to be quite nice. I think like, I don't know if I'd go that well, but it used to be as fucking cursed it as it is now. Interestingly, you should mention the Olympics because the sitting labor MP for the area Lynn Brown wrote an article titled quote this monstrous glowing orb makes a mockery of wait for it.

East London's Olympic legacy. You can't make a mockery of East London's Olympic legacy. It's fucking shit. It's one of the worst parts of London. Everything about it. It's like, it makes sure ditch look authentic. It's so fucking bad. Like they have like, they have like a fake axe throwing bar.

Like the real axe throwing bar is bad enough. Why do you have an imitation of it run by like fucking Securacore? Like the entire thing is owned by like one guy and like every shop is like a fucking Potemkin like, ooh, the neighborhood grosser, but it's staffed by like 800 versions of the same guy. It's the worst fucking part of London. I hate it. It's designed for people on graduate schemes.

How do you really feel about Stratford? It's fine. Before we move on to talking about this, there's no fucking parking either and another thing The ramps slowly get more and more boomer until the parking occupies a good 90% of it. So the, uh, one more thing about the orb, I love talking about the orb in the background. Some credit to the labor MP for A, opposing the monstrous glowing orb and B, calling it coining the phrase monstrous glowing orb, which I will be thinking of for the rest of my life.

One, welcome the monstrous glowing orb. Developing a lasting positive legacy for the Olympic site was a job entrusted to the London Legacy Development Corporation with the promise that local people really would benefit from the impact of the game. Well, they never do. The Olympics. The Olympics kills cities. This is known like it's very good reasons to not want the Olympics in your town.

So for the most part, opportunities that have been created remain out of reach for most local people. Rent and living costs have risen rapidly in the area, but they have not been matched by wage increases or accessible new jobs, little known enough, affordable and social housing. But there is like a helter skeleton now and there is like an orb, I guess, a helter skeleton designed by fucking Anish Kapoor. But hey, we got the orb though.

We got the orb. You can go on a cableway from nowhere to also nowhere and see nothing. This is such a fucking dumb city. It's so bad. Alex, final thoughts on the orb, final thoughts on the orb, um, you know, I think it seems like a great idea. You know, in New York City, we have Times Square and people love it. People love the lights.

Everyone wants to live in Times Square. Yeah. People. If there's one thing I know about people, it's that we are generally enticed by like beguiling lights. And I think we should, we should, we should do more stuff to appeal to our moth brains. Look, I, I, I went to Times Square when I went to like for the first time when I went to New York, like, um, I, I, I was not as horrified as I expected to be.

Like yes, it was kind of a tourist hellscape. I can imagine that like if you live there, like it's a place that you'd want to avoid. But if you're like someone part, it's like, it's not difficult to pass through. I think the orb is worse because like Stratford is already a really fucking difficult place to drive around, to walk around. Like if you live, like if you live in Stratford, um, I went to go visit a friend of mine who used to live in Stratford and it took ages to like find his apartment, not because it was far away from the station, but because you had to go all the way around the Westfield

shopping center and then some to get to like where people live. And the orb is just going to make this even like worse and stranger. No, you're going to be able to navigate via the orb. It's nothing about the way that Stratford is designed makes any sense. There's nowhere that you can stop outside of the train station. We're doing traffic chat on the podcast. We're doing it. I went on a, I went on a date with a girl who was like, can you drop me a trap Stratford

train station afterwards? And I was like, I have to say yes, but also like, I'm silently panicking about how that's going to work. And I literally, I basically had to push her out of the car. I was like, I'm going to go as slow as I can. Having talked about the orb, uh, and also having done the necessary amount of traffic talk, I'd like to bring us on to our startup in the TF helicopter. And yes, a TF trash feature presents traffic and weather together in the sky.

Uh, no, so the startup today, it's called zoom and the you has an umlaut over it. It's not called zoom. It's called zoom. Yeah. Oh, it's a nightclub that Riley, it's got like, what's the accent? That's just the straight line. The umlauts, the two dots.

Oh, it's, um, yeah, it's got that one. It's a Latin. It's a you with a straight line over top. It's zoom. Yes. So the startup is called Norwegian Skyping service. I was going to say that it's actually American. Uh, so Alex, a startup called zoom.

Uh, what do you think it actually does? It is a very heavily invested in and very well funded. Um, I'm going to guess something to do with driving in cars. Correct. Uh, that's all I got. That's as far as my brain had gone. Alice, it's to do with driving in cars. It's called zoom.

Uh, it's American and it's very well funded. It's like, uh, a variation on Uber or Lyft, except they don't actually stop the car at any point. You have to dive in through the window and then back out again. The only place you can go is a strap. I'll say our story, they say on their marketing copy, our story begins with our mission, bring blank into a new age, enabling equality, innovation, efficiency and sustainability.

Hussain. Oh, you've really trapped me that, um, especially like considering the guesses, um, uh, come back to me. I'm just thinking. Okay. Is it, um, it's Uber for something and it's a transportation, but it's bicycles. No.

Unicycles. It's like a particular kind of user. Oh my God. Is it what? Yes. Milo is correct. Oh, it's a particular. It is.

It is an, no, it's not a particular mode of transport, which actually is kind of worrying when we realize which kind of user it's for. Is it Uber for stupid guys? Well, like, did you find using regular Uber kind of hard? Why not a version of Uber that's in nice primary colors with large fonts and less buttons? Is it Uber for like electric scooters where you get to like hug the driver? Think bigger.

Think, think of a bigger, a bigger vehicle. Um, but it is still for people. Okay. Smaller people. Excuse me. School buses. Yes. Uber for school bus.

Oh, wow. It's been genuinely competitive there. That was embarrassing. The quiz stream has had a long tail for me. Yeah. Alice, Alice was raising her hand during that. You can't say that. I was buzzing in.

So zoom, uh, has proven itself a force to be reckoned with in a market that has a lot of untouched opportunity. BMW called something as generic as zoom. When we had another public service taken over like this with ambulance. Why isn't it called like school booths? Yeah. Uh, look, we school, maybe they'll listen to this and they'll rename their shitty start up to a BMW, I venture is managing partner Ulrich

Key, uh, said in the following statement, Ulrich Key, a man who's always offering you a bit of his bag. That's right. What a nice man. Yeah. It's leadership is strong. You're careful. I bump leadership is strong.

Not only because of their drive to help working families, but because they themselves have families to understand the need for better school transportation today. So we have offered an end-to-end student transportation solution. Ulrich Key, a man who was walking across the room like John Wayne and stopping every three paces to just like you look at his feet and go, okay. He's, he's, he talks, comes and talks to you about how the, the new dubfire album is really, is really good before realizing he thinks you're his

friend, but he's actually mistaken you for someone else. So I am in fucking space right now. So how does the ZeeM work? So, well, Alice, thank you for asking. We're setting you up for the next bit. Will you tell us how it works? Student transportation has been completely reimagined and delivered as an end-to-end platform experience for all.

So basically, can mean worse. Remember that. So basically how ostensibly what they do is right is they have, they have a bunch of employees who are, they've hired on a gig basis, right? Given some, some, some training to some, uh, not better than none. I think we can all agree. Not as much as a school bus driver gets. I want to ask at this point, how much training does a school bus

driver get? That's a genuine question. Oh, uh, weeks of classroom learning, uh, a lot of assessment. And then you have to be kept up on refresher classes. I would, I would believe like, for instance, more than to be a cop. Basically, right. What it is, is they were like, Hey, why do we need to have school buses as buses? Can't they just be normal cars and be in vans from around the town?

I love a guy picking up my kids. Generally, we've been trying to keep children out of vans, uh, but it's disruptive, I guess. So, uh, basically, right? What they, what they do is they have this platform, right? Uh, the platform is your ab, your school district and parents are all able to like track where their kid is, uh, to and from school and all that. Like one of those fucking like tags in there, like a cow.

I mean, that attracts the car, not the child. Um, and as your first, yeah. So basically it's like you get an Uber, uh, comes and picks your kid up. Sometimes they're school buses. Sometimes it's a car, a kid's going to be able to rate their drivers. I'm sure someone can. Awesome. Um, and this start, they basically, all of these companies, what they're

obvious, what they try to do, right? Is they're trying to take over a public service. And in this case, it's a public service that was already privatized. So mostly this happening in California where school, most school districts had a contract, the company called first direct for student transport, which as, um, the British bank first direct and, uh, essentially, uh, zoom says, Hey, hang on a second, you have lots of they, again, first direct private company, but things like heavily regulated, heavily unionized things of that nature.

Zoom comes in as the thin end of the wedge and says, Hey, we've noticed that first direct is not able to say transport students with special needs. They're not able to make unpopular routes. So like, like out to farms or whatever. Uh, so why don't we just take over the special stuff? You have a profit motive in your school bus and the solution is to allow us to do more profit motive to it. Yeah.

What if we had a profit motive with a tablet computer? Yeah. Basically zoom basically started by taking over responsibility for transporting special needs students, uh, in Oakland after schools sort of started reopening, um, Oakland then, but then zoom doesn't sound predatory at all. Cut the number of school buses by 29% instead, like doctrine is happening here, um, instead relying on a mix of quote buses, vans and cars for efficiency.

So you just put your kid in whatever shows up. Drivers get real time routes updates on the zoom app plus personalized information every student's needs and the ability to report and resolve issues at any time. Parents and school officials also get real time visibility of the student status on a dashboard. So it's like, Hey, we've got this sort of there's no one bus route anymore. There's like a fluid web of cars that are kind of just driving around the

city libertarianly picking up kids and dropping them off at school. Oh, no, don't say libertarianly. This is like the domino's pizza tracker. Like you can watch your kids get your kid just getting quality controlled by like as the expedizer. Why is my kid on bake zoom also is very proud of itself that all of its drivers are are now full time, though it doesn't specify if they're employees or contractors, but they are specified that they can

drive, but they are full time. Well, I mean, again, by school bus standards, it barely specifies they can drive. Yeah, we look, we apply a rigorous standard of all our drivers are trying their best. Okay. And if that's not good enough for you, then, you know, maybe isn't part of the point of having a school bus or a school bus, yes, that

it's a big distinctive vehicle that is like safer both in like car accidents and also when kids are getting into and out of it. Like it has the like stop signs and stuff. Yeah. But Alice, how valuable is the safety of your child? How valuable is the life of a child compared to this fancy app? That's a great question. And not being a parent myself, I'm not sure if I can like properly

wait like life of child versus life of app. But I don't know. I kind of, I kind of like the idea of having the big yellow bus is the thing. I'm a traditionalist like that. Sorry, it's going to be a mix of whatever's around. Now, here's Alex has primarily a labor journalist. I want to know if you can understand, if you can sort of picked out why zoom offers such good cost savings to school districts who are

worried about their budgets. Why? Well, I have to assume it's because these are independent contractors, right? Not only that, they are also explicitly not able to unionize, whereas unionization is very, very, very dense in the school bus driving industries in California. So it's just union busting. Yeah, it looks like an app.

It, it sounds like a tech company. It has a website that looks like a tech company, but in fact, it's just a Pinkerton, uh, who's got himself an iPad app. That's very Kramer business. The thing about strike breakers, right? They used to just do the same job. Like you got a bunch of the worst people on earth and you put them in the coal mine, the principle people were picketing, right?

In this case, right? They didn't have to like bring their own pickaxes. And it was whatever fucking pickaxe they had on hand. Yeah. One guy's just got a spoon. Yeah. They've made the thing qualitatively weirder and worse by strike breaking it like this.

Yeah. But yeah, this is so Kramer. This is like school buses, Jerry. They make sure the drivers are all unionized, but you, you know, you're replacing with pedophiles. It's not allowed. The more you do an impression of Kramer, the higher your hair gets. So I also, I get, uh, Alex, so what's your impression of this, of this firm sort

of so far as a sort of a Pinkerton disguised as a tech company? I mean, I can see why you said it's well invested in. I mean, this is the Uber and Lyft model, right? Labor arbitrage is a growing, uh, it's a growth industry. So. So basically, right? Uh, they, they've now, they now have voted, uh, in San Francisco to expand this to the point where they've now awarded the entire hundred and fifty

million dollar contract for all school transportation in San Francisco, to Zoom. To Zoom. Yeah. It, of course, it would be in San Francisco, the dumbest city on earth. And I say that as someone who lives in London. Like I'm not being high handed here. That's right. Well, like the thing is San Francisco, San Francisco school district had to

make savings like this because they'd already, uh, like used up a vast amount of their budget, trying to like crush their own teachers and also refusing to rename any of their own schools. That's right. Uh, so yeah, I'm at N word high. Basically, I mean, I think that there was some huge controversy about exactly what they were going to rename schools to in San Francisco specifically. And the answer was essentially just whatever we feel like.

Don't worry about that. I thought Diane Feinstein just renamed them all the Confederate flag. Diane Feinstein has renamed them all to saying the word high school. Uh, I thought she renamed them all to, uh, Diane, please remember to name this school. So, um, so basically, right? They are saving several million dollars a year because in San Francisco, what they've done is they've gotten, they've taken all of the existing school bus drivers and then fired them all and then just reabsorbed them through

the app. So they've basically just done fire and rehire on all of the school bus drivers in San Francisco. But again, it's because it's got a tech for you for your own job. But, uh, question one, do you own a van? Yeah. Well, they are, they're actually evens now using, uh, school buses. So all this company has done basically is break the union.

That's literally what it's done. It's broken the union and it has added some like route mapping. Uh, now for the job, you're going to need to provide your own flumps. How many flumps do you have? Uh, so they say they, and that, but then they've said, oh, but we're going to electrify all the buses. So it's actually a green initiative. So if you want to, I mean, that's perfect California seats.

That is perfect California Democrat mindset. Yeah, that is perfect greenwashing. Yes. And instead of a big yellow bus, now it's going to be a big green bus. You're welcome. That's right. I, it's, that's very good. And again, say, oh, these are all salaried employees, but again, none of them

are unionized. Uh, so they, this is last, last couple of things about zoom. Um, this is from, uh, Megan Adams, who is from the San Francisco school bus drivers, local union. So our members have seen drivers for these, uh, other companies leave children in the car and get out of it and cross the road by the, cross the road by themselves. And these are things that we would lose our jobs over.

There's a lot of expectations that are put on us that are to ensure that children are safe. And we think that the same thing should be applied to other workers who are transporting children. And so it's, I think it's one of these things, right? Where when you try to do labor arbitrage. If you're so obsessed with making sure that you don't deal with a union, you arbitrage away a lot of other good stuff as well.

You know, you, you end up with, um, everyone ends up with their worst children. Yeah. Yeah. You are an arbitrage away. My kid not being run over by a van, but that kid could have grown up to join a union, right? The ultimate union.

Well, those union guys are full of kids. That's what they don't tell you on the fake news. They're all, they're, they're all interested. Look, if they say they want the kids to be safer, like look into their past, they were probably kids. It's a former child. I can't trust him. That's just Brassai.

Cause he passed with children. Yeah. So, uh, so there, I mean, look, we, it's also like when you starve public services of funds, right? You effectively force them to believe good and efficient. You force them to believe in nonsensical moonshots like this. Like, oh, we can replace your expensive fleet of school buses with unionized drivers with people from the town driving cars.

Because they basically have been the worm with the hat. They've been put into a position where they basically almost are obligated to accept someone who's offering them a magic beans solution. Once you get into like stuff with like, uh, local school boards, in some cases they may literally be obligated to do it, not just financially, uh, which is fucking great. I think it's fantastic. Uh, and I love education policy and I love thinking about education

policy and how it's going to create a very normal couple of generations of kids. Yeah. Uh, but yeah. So these, these circles that you attempt to square them with magic, the magic never works and then you end up either paying a lot of public money to clean up a mess that was left by one of these firms. You've lost all unionized drivers. You've lost all of your standards.

Uh, and it ultimately like what's happened is that the guys who run it, I think that the person who runs it is a former product manager at eBay because all of these fucking people are, of course, um, is what you end up with is you end up with a thing that is broken and someone who has massively profited off of breaking it, but you had to step into what you kind of knew was a trap because you couldn't go anywhere. It's exactly the same as like all corporate radar shit. It's exactly the same as, uh, you know, uh, various sort of like forced and

leveraged buyouts of companies back in the day. It's, it's not new. It's just we've now devolved to applying it to, uh, children, which is great. Again, I cannot stress enough. This is good. This is positive. This is a good thing. And you should feel good about it.

I mean, it's incredible to see the problem of like, Oh, the buses don't have enough resources to go to rural areas or pick up or deal with children's disabilities. And so it's more realistic to imagine like, what if we just created an app that tracked children into vans rather than like, maybe we should have some more school buses so that they can go to the rural areas, but you can't get more. So it is more realistic. Look, on the one hand, it's, on the one hand, it's a problem that, you know,

there isn't enough investment into school buses, but on the other, um, the kids can like choose what they play on the, uh, on the, on the orcs. So, you know, really, it's like a win-win. You can't really say that, you know, my school bus driver has a bunch of like little bottles of water on the back of the front seat. Oh yeah. Nice. I love my school bus driver always used to say five for five, five for five.

Yeah. You go on the school bus and the guy like offers you a spray of Poco Ruban, one million, and then charges you a dollar. We've wooved well beyond Uber driver. Wait, is your Uber driving on? Wait, was I not in an Uber? Wait, wait, should I not have let that guy give me a rectal exam? You were talking to Ulrich Key, remember?

Yeah. You're in, uh, you're an Uber van. Uh, so, I mean, like it's, it's also something like where we've decided that sort of actually solving the problem by solving it is sort of a political third rail. Uh, it means that, yeah, we, you have to do a bunch of shit that won't work. And that's very easy for people to scam you to just run obvious, uh, grifts on you and very easy to bust unions because you're like, well, look, this union

says they want to do all of this stuff that will work and we're committed to magical bullshit. Yeah, exactly. Um, this MFE and magic, but I think it goes back down and this sort of also is what you talk about on primer as well is like, they're kind of, there's almost no such thing as a tech company, right? Like these companies are, they're odd entities, right? They're, they're sort of, um, almost like a cup and ball, uh, not

a cup and ball, like, uh, like a three car all torture, there are a bit of a three card Monty, right? Yeah. No, I mean, that's right is mostly it's, it relies on amnesia at sort of this narrowing of the sense of possibilities is you take a problem that actually could be fixed in ways that have historically, you know, been done before and you say, actually, there is no history. There's only the present.

Don't turn around and then you say, okay, how can we fix these holes? Right. And so, I mean, that is, and it's funny talking about this. I mean, Amazon, like sort of famously there's been good reporting over the past couple of years about the drivers basically having who are of course not direct Amazon employees because Amazon uses third parties, um, to keep away, um, the pesky thing called, um, labor law requirements. Um, but like the drivers will get training on their phone.

That's like a 10 minute video and that's their training. And then we wonder why there are all these accidents. So this does sound very familiar. Fun sort of like Amazon house style, uh, line up of do not nonce the child, right? And then you click, okay. Got it. It's the, it's, it's what I, you can call right the sort of ongoing

Potemkin occasion, Potemkinification and more or less everything. That's just a difficult word. Yeah. That's not going to catch on too hard. You don't, you don't want to coin that on an audio medium. I'm not calling that. I'm not calling. No one's calling here, but it is, it's, if you think like who's calling there.

This isn't really training. It's something that sort of looks like training. If you're sort of not looking at very closely, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it is because the more, more important things become box tickery and less important things, sort of mushroom in sort of the the school with him. Yeah.

And so the, and so just like, yeah, he's, he's half Luxemburg-ish. I think he works at that. His dad's investment fund. Now we're a key ever at Twenkel. Yeah. So I think like sort of moving on, I think to our, to talking about Amazon and the thing is we've talked about Amazon recently, but if you're interested in, in work and labor, like you basically should be

talking about Amazon all the time. I guess it's the work company. It is the business factory, right? So I think one of the good questions I think it's useful to ask when we talk about Amazon, we asked it when we spoke with Jathan and Ed from this machine kills a couple months ago about the same topic. It's what makes it so good. Yeah.

Well, why is it so great? No, is, is what is, what is Amazon? What, yeah, what, what is, what is a perfect Sunday at Amazon? We're living in it every week, guys. That's the thing. Um, every day is Sunday. That's true. Um, yeah.

I mean, the work factory is a good way of thinking about it in that Amazon sort of is playing this dominant role in reshaping what work looks like. Right. Which is why, like I'm a labor writer. I didn't particularly have any interest in Amazon years ago. You know, it's just one company among others. But as you're writing about all sorts of companies, Amazon keeps coming up because it's sort of pioneers, new modes of surveillance and sort of norms that

then leak out into other industries. And so in a sense, it ends up reshaping even, you know, even if you don't work at Amazon or know anyone who works at Amazon, it sort of plays this Vanguard role for capital, right? And like, what can they get away with? And then everyone in boardrooms. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, Jathan actually, when he was on my show was sort of making the case of like, this is, you know, the Fordist era, it is the Amazon kind of era. Um, I think there's a good case to be made for that because again, like you could try to avoid Amazon, but it just creeps back in to use. You're talking to a worker and all of a sudden you realize that these practices that they're dealing with actually were pioneering in the warehouses at Amazon. And you say, we could talk about how it creeps back in, in working practices, but also in more bits of the industry.

Cause you can ask yourself, well, what does Amazon want? And I kind of hazard a guess here, just looking at two recent news items about them, just two from this week. Uh, there was reporting in the FT that Amazon is now handling, um, significant, if not the majority, then say significant minority of all of the logistics for companies like Walmart. So even beyond AWS, they're now handling warehousing and logistics for Walmart, which is supposed to be the public Walmart to that's right.

Uh, and so even in their, in their shareholders letter or in their share, excuse me, not the shareholder's letter in their, um, annual report, but they try to basically avoid being looked at as a monopoly. They say, oh, we're being competed with by Walmart, but they're providing core services to all of their competitors. And the second news item that I saw this week is they're, they're in the spirit of friendly competition. That's right.

A good sportsman over at Amazon. Yeah. It's like when it's runner helps another runner up. Uh-huh. Um, but also they're trying to purchase everyone's palm prints for $10. Well, that's a King's ransom. Okay. Where do I sign?

Um, $10 for this stupid palm print that I never use. I'm sorry, $10 American, $10, it's like seven pounds. Banana, first of all. So, but that's so that you can use your palm print to enter and pay in, uh, Amazon physical stores. I won't be paying. They're paying me with that. I'm living off of that.

I'm living off of the return on that for the rest of my life, you know, you invest that $10, you'll set. So, but, um, and when I say, what do they want? It's, you know, uh, when I, if I'm to guess, I would say, what do they want? It's, uh, everything. Yeah. Whole thing. They want, yes, they want all of it.

It's beautiful. It's really self-actualization. They're not choosing. I mean, what they want, the, the two things you're talking about are being the middleman, right? I mean, we, uh, that is the most profitable thing. You know, the idea you sell the, the coal miners, the shovels, right? And that's what Amazon is trying to do all the time.

It wants to be infrastructureed. It wants to mediate every activity in your life. And so when people sort of look at the disparate markets that Amazon's trying to get into, whether it's like healthcare or, you know, this palm print and things like that, whether it's the facial recognition technology. It's just about like, how many markets can we get to, you know, where can we go? And then we're going to run out of space and don't worry. We're already going to other planets.

Um, so it, they're trying to become the evil corporation from a nineties video game. Right. Exactly. Yeah. The one corporation that runs everything. Yeah. Shinra better life awaits you on the off world colonies.

Yeah, exactly. Like this is basically Amazon's, Amazon's policy of what industries they'll enter is if you only buy one Garth Marengi book by this one, which is all of them. And so I wanted to, so I want to think like what it is and what it's doing, but also sort of where the movement is around. You're doing like seeing like, you're seeing like a state, but the state is Amazon. Yeah. Effectively.

Uh, what is the union machine expensive baby? What is, what is they, what are they, what are they doing? Sort of physically, where are they pushing physically? Um, it's so funny that it's like, it's like you're talking about like alien invaders, right? Like they've landed these fulfillment centers, uh, which process of us numbers of our people and we're just like, well, what, what are they want?

I mean, that's kind of fitting because something that's incredibly funny about Jeff Bezos, um, well, there are many things, but the way he talks is like an alien, like if you ever read his like statements, his letters to shareholders or even sometimes when he gives interviews, he always specifies that he's talking about earth. Um, we want to be earth's best employer. We want to be earth's best company, which is meant to serve specific, like signal his extraterrestrial interests or whatever, but in fact, just

makes him sound fully like an alien who has just landed on to think that that like John Teeter guy was onto something. Um, so, uh, but I want to start like number one, uh, I think the most important, the most important labor story around Amazon right now, I think is that for $10, you can get an Alexa link soap dispenser that will play a little song while you wash your hands. That's true. You actually can do that.

No, I think it's that can I choose the little song? I think it's that. Yeah. It's a Johannes vonk. Uh, it's that no, it's that the, uh, where the union election, uh, or the vote to unionize in the Bessemer warehouse, uh, looks like it will probably be rerun, which is insane, uh, because usually as I understand it wasn't even the national labor relations board exists kind of as a, uh, does not exist to

facilitate unions starting, let's say, right? Well, nothing in the United States facilitates that. That's codified into law. Um, yeah. I mean, the, the weird thing about that union election in Bessemer was that Amazon actually broke the law, um, you know, like with, and we don't have to go into it, but basically the short thing that then the NLRB found that they had installed this mailbox, um, and really it, it is kind of scandalous in that Amazon

very explicitly demanded the USPS install it fitting to their wishes, right? USPS tried to install a normal mailbox and Amazon emailed them like, no, this isn't, this isn't the kind of thing we want. Can you redesign this? Not evil enough. Right. And so like the NLRB officers recommendation, the report they wrote said Amazon unilaterally decided this, it usurped the NLRB's authority.

It completely just directed the conditions, right? It set up this mailbox up under all these surveillance cameras outside of the warehouse and that was because they wanted to have an in-person vote because that usually helps employers in, in union elections. And then NLRB rightly said, no, because the county had huge COVID rates and they said, that's dangerous. And so Amazon then just went around and sort of hit up the postal service and said, remember how were your biggest customer?

Anyway, so if you can just put this mailbox here, um, we'll surveil it and so that's, that's what they, you know, and it's interesting because Amazon really didn't need to do that because there are so many, there's so many things that employers can legally do to bust unions and Amazon was doing all of that, right? And so it was just, I kind of have it in the notes as the New England Patriots school of cheating, which is to cheat on principle, even when you're winning outrageously.

Right. That's a good theory. I like that. Um, I mean, that's the thing is like Amazon just couldn't stop itself. Which is so true all the time about Amazon, you know, I sort of, like they can't accept limits. And I always use the example of prime day, which is their made up holiday that they started in 2015 exactly.

We all celebrate differently. Um, but it was, so it's one day it's in the name that it's a day. Um, and yet by two years later by 2017, it was 30 hours and now it's 48 hours. And so it's like Amazon just can't, it's the kid that can't stop going back to the cookie jar. And so that's, that's what they did with the mailbox. They're like, we know we're going to win, but let's just make sure that that's going to happen every fourth year is a prime year.

It's so interesting because it's like it is just, it is almost sort of capital doing what it's always tried to do ever since the completion of the spinning Jenny, which is just that never have finished that fucking Jenny. I'm going to go back in time. I'm going to break the Jenny. Um, I'll fix it. Um, but which, which is that sort of, um, relentless pushing and growth and and just on a matter of principle to never stop.

It's like, um, if we're going to further with metaphors, uh, I think you can talk about it's, it's Tetsuo in the last 20 minutes of Akira. You know, just this, uh, giant, disgusting, uh, monster that just can't stop sprouting new limbs basically. Yeah. I mean, this is sort of why Amazon is useful for someone who's like a dog mottic Marxist like myself. So I'm like, see, it's doing exactly exactly what we said it was going to do.

It really is. You know, like other companies get tempered by various, whether it's like legal constraints or worker power or just like a lack of confidence. But Bezos is very clear. I mean, the cowboy hat, he always says he wants cowboys. That's why he tells his executives. He says like go forth and prosper and, uh, you know, break any classic cowboys. Okay.

Well, I mean, and, but now that the, the union is sort of being the union election is again, it's not guaranteed to be rerun. It looks like it's probably going to be Amazon's going to challenge it up and down the courts and so on. But apparently the, um, there are, there are more sort of, uh, uh, sort of solidarity drives being run at the same time. Most importantly, most importantly is the one union that I think right now can

actually threaten a lot of what Amazon does, which is the America's only coolest union in America. We can thank them for JFK Las Vegas and, uh, long lunch. When you, when you say thank them for JFK, do you mean on the way in or out? Whichever. No, it's, uh, the teamsters, uh, the teamsters union, uh, Jimmy Hoffa's, uh, Jimmy Hoffa's bastards, uh, where they are basically going to, uh, supply all resources necessary to organize workers at Amazon and have in the past used

their ability to just stop driving shit around, uh, to, to, um, extract concessions from other Amazon locations. And I think San Diego was the most recent one. So it's, I, I'm, I'm allowing myself to be quietly hopeful. Nice. You've got to be ashamed of someone would've stopped driving it around. I don't know. Wait, what's nice children you've got here.

It would be a shame if what's, what's, what's your, what's sort of your, your view on the, um, on the teamsters getting involved? Yeah. I mean, I love this that like Amazon is a tech company and presents itself as like this innovative thing. And the teamsters are here to remind you that like, actually, if the guy in the truck just doesn't drive the truck, like the whole thing doesn't work anymore. Everyone's like, Oh right, there is a material economy going on here.

Um, yeah. I mean, it's great news in that like people in the warehouses for years were sort of resentful of unions for not being willing to take on Amazon because unions, you know, I think totally understandably, um, we're like, we could never win this fight. Um, and so the teamsters finally are jumping into it. Um, and like the devil's in the details as far as what that actually looks like, you know, the teachers have a, um, a mixed history about democracy, for

instance, um, among workers. And so, but, you know, I've spoken to people who are sort of like rank and file militant teamsters who, you know, have no particular love for their leadership, but are going through the trainings and they seem very hopeful. You know, they're like, they're taking it seriously. They are giving resources. We are being moved, you know, to organize Amazon workers in a way that seems longterm and thoughtful.

Um, and so in that sense, yeah, I mean, like teamsters represent people in the industry, and they also see it as an existential threat to their own membership, you know, like they represent things. It is because Amazon, as you say, having the realization that there's a guy in a truck who can stop working is the greatest possible emphasis for, uh, a guyless truck. Oh no. Right.

Yeah, or, or a, uh, just like if you can, if they can break that, if they can try to break that union, then all of a sudden their truck drive, they're trying to make their local deliver, or they have made their local deliveries like these independent contractors and stuff. I'm sure they'd love to do that with the teamsters as well. I think that the point is, you know, that the team, perhaps they've realized this is going to come for us at some point. And at some point we won't be able to resist it.

Cause I mean, if you want to talk about Amazon coming for you, there is almost, and I think, again, you've talked about this on primer, there's sort of no better way to think about it than Amazon coming for your town. Right. Which happens all the time. Right. And I would just add that it's already coming for the teamsters in that, you know, UPS is the largest private contract in the country right now.

It's, I forget the numbers, but it's, it's hundreds of thousands of people are covered under that contract, which is Teamster, um, their teamster represented and UPS drivers have seen already, like their conditions get way worse, productivity expectations go way higher. And so for them, like it's not actually a boundary between working for Amazon or driving as a for a company that is employed by Amazon and being like a unionized truck driver elsewhere. It's one of these things where as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you

sort of start effectively working for Amazon in more and more and more industries and that method of managing workers, unless you're like one of the cowboys in one of the most favorite cities in, you know, New York or Washington or Seattle, then your work, your conditions are going to get worse and your, your pay is going to get worse. Your conditions are going to get worse and that's simply, there's very little you can do about it, except for all the stuff we talked about. Yeah.

Except for all the stuff they are desperately trying to stop you. This is a good sign that you should be doing it. Yeah. Indeed. Well, what will Amazon come for next? Is the International Space Station safe? It's never safe. I mean, we can talk with Blue Origin.

It really, yeah, I mean, the space, the specific things he wants to do in space, but you talk about that another time. But we, you, we, one thing we didn't want to happen. We've talked about Amazon. What essentially is trying to do is turn the world into a big factory in which it has divided the labor geographically, right? So it tries to turn the US into a big factory with divisions of labor between warehouse towns, data center towns, the HQ centers.

And it is essentially, like we said earlier, seeing like a state. And it's not just seeing like a state in terms of having state-like ambitions. It also wants to provide the services that a state usually provides the way it likes to provide them. So this is, uh, from an article that you've written in Jackman, Alex, um, about, uh, sort of, uh, Amazon going into a school in California's Inland Empire, uh, K Jon High School, public school in San Bernardino. Alex, I really hope you've read this article that you wrote cause you're

really going to be tested on it now. I'm really glad I was given a heads up that this was my own writing cause it's totally possible. I've been like, wow, yes. That's so true. Wow. This bitch knows what she's talking about. She should get a promotion in my opinion.

She should be head Jackabit. So, um, and this is the, and basically, uh, the public high school in San Bernardino, most of the, uh, family members, most of the kids have family members who are employed at Amazon and they can take classes at the Amazon logistics and business management pathways career track. This is, uh, you're quoting this in the article, uh, doesn't students sit clustered at work tables inside a classroom, which was designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility at a public school on one's wall, Amazon's

logo grinned across a re yellow and green banner with the words customer obsession and deliver results on a whiteboard. A teacher had written the words logistics final project in the lesson of the day was Amazon's quote leadership principles. Each teenager wore a company golf shirt emblazoned with the Amazon logo. I was so this is so cool. Yeah, I would, I would love to, I would love to send my kid on the weird, um,

in the weird van to go to school and learn how to be, learn how to be an Amazon customer, a customer service person. Right. I mean, this is the thing is like, I think a lot of people think this is the future, this dystopian future, but it's, it's already happening. And in fact, Bezos is like a big sci-fi fan. He thinks this rocks. He thinks this is utopia.

Well, look, there are two options, right? Either either all the schools get taken over by Marxist critical race theory, or, um, they become a conduit, Amazon training centers, uh, which way, which, which way Western man. Well, yeah, the thing that genuinely worries me about Amazon seeing like a state, if you like, or trying to do the things that a state does is that, uh, I think you can get to a point relatively quickly where, uh, otherwise reasonable people will go, well, at least someone's doing it because our nominal state very

much is not. So they have just replaced the school bus with a van. Yeah. Who else will build the orb? It's also like a good example of what we spoke about. I don't know when we spoke about it, but it must have been like a couple of months ago when really the question was like, what are schools and what is like education supposed to be?

Um, and what is it supposed to do? And like our kind of like general conclusion being that education isn't there to like serve any real kind of like public good, or to kind of serve any kind of creative purpose. It's there so that it can train people to take up like the very limited number of very limiting jobs available. What might be called social reproduction. That's right.

And then, and it, and it may, and it, and you know, those jobs may, uh, basically like have some form of Amazon association, whether direct or indirect from it. And this is just like a very direct and very obtuse way of doing like doing what is essentially just like a global trend anyway. Yeah. Well, it's the, um, well, we have, it's the, the, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Oscar Meyer-Wiener provides the, uh, uh, a periodic table and you have to know the atomic weight of Balonium.

Yeah. It's, this is, this is a, it is a, it once again, we talk about sort of these things as Potamkin or parody. It's essentially a parody of a school. Like where you go to learn, uh, Amazon's leadership principles as you're going to learn marketing, basically, you're going to learn marketing as though it's real, um, and, and not sort of, you're going to learn it all at face value on its own terms, essentially.

And again, like, yeah, as, as you say, Alice, uh, state's not doing it. And, uh, Amazon certainly does see like a state has state like ambition states not only neglecting it, but increasingly seems actively hostile to it. Yeah. Um, I have Amazon Juche, but you can also look beyond, uh, somewhere like beyond America, right? You can think about, well, Amazon sees not just individual states like this, but, uh, the entire world, right?

Where it's has a sort of global division of labor. So, and again, so I, we, uh, we hear like Amazon workers in, uh, Poland frequently are like guinea pigs for its, uh, insane plans that it then unleashes upon the world, right? Yeah. Which is, uh, I think that no one has ever tried before is using Poland as a test bed for your global empire. Absolutely not.

No one's ever done any fucked up experiments in Poland as far as I know. Uh, so yeah, what, and for the same reasons that it's like, it's centrally located, it has good transport links and it's poor enough to kick around like that's basically all there is to it. Right. I mean, so you're referencing like I did a recent episode where I interviewed workers in Poland at Amazon, where at Amazon warehouse who have been there for a long time, one of them had gotten the job when they opened

the first warehouse in Poland in 2014. And yeah, I mean, they're very clear about, and Amazon was pretty clear at the time too, that there was an uptick in militancy among Amazon's German warehouse workers who, you know, are well organized and we're starting to go on strike. And so Amazon said, okay, like we'll go to Poland, which is nearby and we'll just service German customers through our Polish warehouses. So we can reroute these goods across, you know, so we can avoid the workers

having any leverage and the Polish workers are like, we have lower unionization rates here. We have lower wages. It's so fucking progressive is the thing. Right. And so they're, they're kicked around. I mean, in the interview, they talk about how they basically sort garbage, like discarded and returned goods are sent to Poland.

And the workers are just incredibly, I mean, even for Amazon workers who all report feeling dehumanized, they're like, we're being treated as a, like a social dumping ground by Amazon. And it's very useful and profitable for them. Yeah. It's, it's why I think you can think it doesn't even see like a state. It sees like an empire. Really.

Yeah. I mean, Amazon's, to go back to the United States, Amazon's interactions with the state, I think are really like illustrative about how things work. Right. So I recently, I guess the episode this week for the show was an interview with Alec McGillis who wrote a book, Fulfillment. Or yeah, we did this interview a couple of weeks ago. And his book, I think even in the US context, just sort of goes through

what this actually looks like. Amazon sort of operating as this like kingmaker in this empire. You know, he has this scene where he, Amazon wants to build warehouses in Ohio, which had avoided for a while because it didn't want to pay sales taxes there. And so the way this plays out, the way Amazon actually interacts with the state is they go to, in this case, Jobs, Ohio, which is a private nonprofit that then Governor Kasich had created to oversee tax incentive negotiations. And every month, a board called the Ohio Tax Credit Authority approves

the incentives negotiated by Jobs, Ohio. And basically how this meeting works is Alec explains, you know, that it's, there's, it's cutitively a public meeting, but you can't find out where it is. And you have to get through all these security checkpoints and the agenda is sent out on Friday afternoon for the Monday morning meeting. And then you get, they're doing fucking Russian voucher privatization shit. Oh, you want to come to the Amazon Tax Credit meeting? Oh, well, try getting around this burning wall of tires we've put up.

And also we've bombed the local airport. I mean, that's literally pretty much what it is, right? So he like explains that the people get in front of the board and they explain the proposal, right? And there's the comical recusals because they've all worked for Amazon before. So some of the people on the board have to sit out because they are actually like direct employees of Amazon or previously were and they had the company Amazon had said

it would give 2,000 full-time jobs in exchange it wants 17 million dollar tax credit plus like a, I think 2 million dollar cash grant. And the board, you know, has a 15 minute conversation about it. Then they approve it for zero, right? And it takes less than the time it takes to eat lunch. And that is how the economy works. People make up all these complications, but it's actually just some guys in this room in Ohio being like, how much money should we give Jeff Bezos?

And they're like, well, he's my direct employer, but I say 20 million dollars. Oh, yeah. Well, I say 25 million dollars. Right. It's the Atlantic City Gambling Board, circa like 1973. It's also right. Like I think you can you can think about, like we say a lot on this podcast all the time, but what is a tech company? What is a tech company? What does it do? The company that says it's a company that goes on the computer.

But it's it's really what it actually is in reality. What a tech company is is it is a big app that conceals these kinds of sort of rigged meetings that conceals this sort of just union busting. It's the same thing that that's been happening in like the whole time. So what you're saying is that the mafia is a tech company, more or less. It's this company of all and they got this thing called cryptocurrency now. Yeah. So it's supposed to be pushing Dogecoin. Also, like they a company like this has a social license to operate, right?

And it's because they always present themselves as inventing the future. You know, and what I found very interesting is that was never the future before these guys started inventing it. No, what I see by very interesting about this time now as well is just like all of the rideshare companies that like, you know, destroyed the taxi industry like promised they were Tesla promised they're going to do full self-driving cars like any minute now, guys, it's go. Oh, boy, it's by this afternoon, probably maybe check tomorrow, right?

Before just, you know, shuttering off and selling off all these, you know, dogs that were losing the money would never work. Amazon has now done the same thing with its drone division, right? Where? Yeah, the guy wasn't just how they refer to their employees. So they're Amazon air, prime air was supposed to be a thing where you could be like, I'd like, you know, a whiz bang. I'd like a whiz bang. I'd like it now. And it'll go whiz and bang all right if it's delivered by drone.

And the idea was a drone in the UK decided to make itself like the regulatory test bed for this by allowing all of it. Yeah, a drone would come and like grab your grab the thing, grab your, you know, a flingamagu, it would then fly it and land on your whole plate of flingamagu. It would land on your lawn and would fly away and you would have your your thing. Now, of course, we've talked about this on the show before. That basically would mean that like there would just be at like

flying 30 feet at all times above everyone's house and road. Just we would do the Kessler syndrome, but for telegraph pole height, which is fucking great. Yeah, yeah, awesome. Where yeah, you just would have like these people's shit just falling out of the sky and you was like drones, like their batteries. Alice crushed to death by a box of sex dildos. Someone told him his sex asses were still stuck in Calais. She died as she lived, but right.

The it's by promising these things, right? But by promising things like full self driving or deliveries by drone, these sort of vast improvements in consumer quality of life or the quality of the service you're consuming. That's kind of how they get their social license to operate. I just thought it's very interesting that it's like, oh, yeah, this is this. We turns out this just this thing doesn't work. I'm afraid our business still hasn't evolved beyond trying to make sure

that the guy in the truck doesn't realize that he's a guy in a truck, right? It hasn't evolved beyond the smoky rooms. It can't gain sentience. We're just we are still doing the same things that everyone was doing to do a hundred years ago. It's just we're going to have to come up with a new sort of thing that gives us our social license to operate, which they will. Yes. Also, also, our boss got so divorced that he left both his job and Earth.

Yeah, they the Amazon, they watch Terminator 2 and they saw the Terminator driving that truck and they were like, I bet he can't unionize. So what's that guy doing right now? So this is from Wired. They say, um, prime most prime air staff in the UK were either phased out from short-term contracts or made redundant. But before being made redundant, we're told to train their replacements in Costa Rica, which just to me seems sadistic.

Well, Amazon, Amazon basically says like it probably will never realize. An insider say they will probably never realize it's drone delivery dreams. Quote, when I was there, prime air was already years from being a thing, but it's just never going to get off the ground. Again, because it's a patently ridiculous idea and anyone who isn't just hypnotized by this stuff would see that. Yeah, I love it won't get off the ground.

Great. That's fine. We should take children to school by drone. It should come and just like pick your child up by the head like with a big suction cup and lift him in the air and take him to school. There's a risk that the Uber for school buses drivers might later try to unionize. Yeah. So we're just going to have to use the drones. So this is a quote from Wired. This is about sort of the final days, the last days of Rome in prime air.

The downfall in the in the fucking Amazon prime bungalow. It was it was a Monday and it was about 11 or 12 p.m. And this guy just had an open can of Stella at his desk. Yeah, hell yeah. Took it out of a fridge and popped it open at his desk. Another describes an employee taping down the because this is their training AIs, right? Looking at pictures of like

Hazards, Carly Poles doing like a bunch of recaptures. Yes. So another describes an employee pitting down the approve button on their computer so that all frames of footage are being approved irrelevant to whether or not there is. Yes, yes. What a fucking I love this guy. We got to find that guy. He dropped.

Yeah, that guy needs to join the union. Everything started collapsing inwards, said an insider, because Amazon piled too much work on again. As you say, Alex, they can't stop. Every day is day one, baby. That's the Jeff Bezos promise. No sleep. It was an every day is Daisy.

It was just one gigantic oversell. Every day is year zero, year zero of the Amazon calendar. Yeah, they put they put people in charge who didn't know anything about the project and they just kept on overselling it. An Amazon spokesperson said safety was the top priority for the drone project and then but and then has rigorous procedures in place to check the work of employees. Meanwhile, yeah, they're just like getting drunk at their desks and taping.

It's like the drinking burge is hitting the approve button. Yeah, every every Amazon employee is just becoming Homer to do practice, which is fantastic. But so like this is a company who's social, who's who's promise of a sort of technology is, as you can see from the drone story, you might say false scant, a lie, etc. That it is just a guy in a truck really.

And it's that Jeff Bezos has managed to take control of the guy in the truck and live in this sort of I'd live as this sort of invisible emperor. Basically, astral projecting into the guy in the truck. So other but there's one more thing I want to talk about before we end here, which is the and again, that the teamsters are kind of back here. But the there's a bill being put forward by California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who basically wrote the law that forced companies to classify gig workers as employees that prop 22 is designed to overturn and did.

And she basically has this law now that is largely going because like Amazon workers get injured at a much higher rate than other workers in comparable warehouses, largely because or we think because of the opaque and harshly enforced productivity quotas that are applied to them. And so Gonzalez, what she's doing is she basically says like is trying to create a regulation that would ensure that basically put a duty of care on the company to ensure that the that the quotas don't put workers at a risk of injury.

And so this would basically legally sort of snooker Amazon in California by forcing them to to set their quotas differently. It's the sort of the state fighting back kind of right. And I sort of see that as an interesting project. Yeah, I mean, and the bill is about like in part there would be a standard set of what is the highest quota you can have that doesn't actually cause physical and mental distress for a worker.

And then you can't go above that and you can't be disciplined for doing that. It also has details like, you know, anything an employee is doing that makes things safer or to follow standards or say like washing their hands during a pandemic can't be counted as time off task, right? Which I think would drive like I'm sure Bezos is driven insane by that because that was a big part of of everything was that employees during the pandemic. We're like, I don't have time to wash my hands because time off task is the thing the scanner tells you.

And if it goes too high, if you're spending too much time taking a break or going to the bathroom, then you're basically you start being disciplined. You start getting yelled at and then eventually you get fired. And that's again, like where this these stories about not having time for bathrooms goes. So the idea that you could be like, well, I needed to take a break because I was being worked too hard and that can't be counted against you. I think would actually be a huge wrench in Amazon's disciplinary system. Exactly. Yeah.

And so and again, Amazon part of it relies on obfuscation around its practices. Like people who write about Amazon, it's very hard to get data, right? Like the stuff that we have now about the injury rates only came out a couple of years ago from one investigative journalist. Like Amazon hides those numbers and also explicitly lies to people all the time. Like journalists, it just fully lies about numbers, especially in the warehouses. And so this sort of thing would force some level of transparency. You know, Amazon's very slick, as I'm sure they have ideas

around how to keep this from being enforced. Certainly like state agencies are always lacking the resources like OSHA to actually go in and investigate different warehouses. But it's good that this is happening. And certainly like the Teamsters are a part of past of. I I do have an alternative and hear me out here. OSHA SWAT team, perfect. Yeah, let's get I will.

I want a bunch of guys to fucking breach and clear a fulfillment center for health and safety violations for OSHA, a battering ram. Yeah, the only good cops, maybe would be the OSHA cops. It's like them, the guys who stop people from stealing the like nuclear fuel out of power plants. Yeah. And I don't know, like meat inspectors, are they cops? Meat inspectors. Park rangers. Isn't that a category on porn now?

Shout the fuck out for a country. They're really spectacular meat forest cops. Yeah, that's right. Why does this slightly remind me of there was I I attended at a very a very small and weird Oxford College. I remember one of the fellows there who was in charge of no, I Anglia Ruskin and one of the fellows there who was in in charge of a lot of like admin stuff. He goes, you know, these freedom of information requests.

And I'm like, yeah, it's like, you know, I've never received one that wasn't in some way vexatious. They always want to know things about college disciplinary procedures and things of that nature. It's like, anyway, I realized that if I simply destroyed all the records, I wasn't obligated to show them to anyone. He's like, of course, I remember what's in all the records, but they can't prove that I'm not obligated to tell them.

And he got a job at Amazon here. Yeah. Oh, he was such a nice man. But so I think what what you're saying, right, is that this because Amazon is unable to stop pushing and pushing and prodding and growing and just picking at that scab, like never letting it heal and in fact, making the cut bigger. It's this law, if it gets passed, like immediately, you know, again, a bunch of you know, California Democrats are going to rally around,

you know, some like California Democrats sound like a euphemism. So but they're going to rally around again, some kind of like, I don't know, grassroots group of nine concerned Amazon employees and then try to get it overturned, get an exception, get it watered down. And someone like they did with the last piece of legislation Gonzales passed, which they over which were to overturn with Prop 22. So it's like right in a key thing again. And this was demonstrated with like the thing about the Ohio board

negotiating anything they want is like Amazon will do what Uber did, which is say, like, we'll pull out of the state if and even though they won't do that because they need to be near customers. It's their largest market in the United States, but they'll still say that. And then, yes, they'll find some workers that say they like their job and they'll put them up. And because there's no organized labor alternative with the Uber and Lyft drivers, that was what was hard.

Was people who just don't know any better were like, well, this guy says he's a Lyft driver and he loves not having a minimum wage. And nobody else's I can't find anyone disagreeing. And so, yeah, I think that's what you could expect from this. We spoke to the Omerashi Enthusiast Club of the Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse who actually love the disciplinary procedures. And so I think it's like sort of almost like by way of wrapping up, right? One of the things that you also you've sort of talked about and written about

is this idea that Amazon can never make a credible threat to leave anywhere because they have to be doing everything everywhere. They can't not. And so one of the things I think we have to sort of understand is actually you have you actually do have quite a bit of leverage over them. If only because they have a 100 percent can't miss requirement to be doing everything everywhere. And so they'll never leave.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is like they have more fixed capital than other tech companies. They actually have to be in places. They have to you can't get something to someone's door in two hours if you're not in the state. And that's what eventually gets them to enter all these states in these new countries and things. And so in that sense, people do have some leverage, at least on the warehouse arm of Amazon. I mean, EWS is a different story, but the retail operation.

Unfortunately, Bezos cannot sort of get around the the rules of geography and time yet. And so he does he certainly I mean, has to be in California. And this is happening in Europe, too. I mean, the EU has like issued a huge fine on Amazon. And they're probably going to threaten to pull out of it out of Europe. But at the same time, they have to be there. You know, they have to get goods to doors.

Because then they're another operator will just start in Europe. And Amazon will then buy that operator and they'll be back in Europe. Where else are you going to buy your shit? Nile. That's right. Yeah. Anyway, Amazon Albania. Noticing that we've been we've been going a little bit a little bit over time. I just want to say by way of wrapping up, Alex, it's been a real joy to have you on the podcast.

Thank you for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me on. This was fun. I learned so much about what it's like to live in London with the orbs. Annoying. So good. We love you. Learn so much about parking. I, for one, welcome the orb. Yes, we're all here in the new team. We've moved the TF recording studio from the mound to the orb.

You are inside the orb right now. It's all in the orb. Orb is life. The orb, the greater orb is the whole world. I think we're on a big orb. Yeah. Oh, no, sorry. Oh, I bet you hate that London's on a big orb, too. You're so anti-orbs.

Anti-orbs, why don't you go live on an asteroid of any regular shape? Don't like it as a cosmos. No, you go live on a gas giant then. And where can people find primer? Yeah. So people can find primer either at, I have a Patreon and all the episodes are free on there that you could also subscribe. That's on patreon.com backslash primer podcast. And also it's part of Jacobin's suite of podcasts.

And so if you just search Jacobin radio on any, whatever, wherever people listen to podcasts, I wouldn't know. I don't really listen to podcasts, but Spotify, iTunes, whatever, you can find it on there. Well, a few people you met who's made more podcasts than I've listened to. I mean, that is actually probably true of some of us. Oh, it's definitely true of me. Yeah. So with all that being said, don't forget, we have a Patreon also.

But unlike Alex, we have decided to make ours cost money because we need goods and services because we are because we are dangling money to enter the orb. Yeah, we are all dangling. It's slightly cheaper to get a trash future podcast subscription than to pay the once was cost to go up the mound. They've made the mound free. Oh, fortunately. So well, they've devalued the mound.

Yeah. Now no one's going to care about the mound. And no one's interested in the mound. No, they're going to be spending that mound money on us. I've been told that Amazon is going to be acquiring the mound so that it can throw the people on and around the mound, rolling them down the mound. We're going to put like a big, a big trebuchet atop the mound. Yeah, exactly. Just throwing them off the top. It's a very, as far as I wonder.

Yeah. We've actually, we haven't removed the drone division. What we've done is we have relocated it. Medieval Amazon Trebuchet. That's cool. I want to see a police horse get killed by a fucking like box of sex. Dildos fired out of a trebuchet. Oh, anyway, I was riding the horse in a perpendicular fashion to the mouth, at which point the horse was struck in an equine manner by a

flying box of sexual dildo aids. So with all that being said, thank you very much for listening. Thanks again, Alex, for coming on. Don't forget to check out Primer. Don't forget to check out us on Patreon. Don't forget to check out the orb. Yeah, don't forget to check out the orb. See, that's good in there.

It's outside your window right now. Open your curtains. You can check out the... The orb is within you. Don't forget, the orb is not there yet. The mound is still there though. It will be soon. You only have a few short months to check out the mound.

They may dismantle it sooner because it's a massive boondah. What if they build the orb in time and then you'd be able to see the orb from the mound? Well, that's right. What if they build the orb on top of them? I think, look, we could get a lot of things going here, but I think... Yeah, like a snow globe. That's true.

But again, thanks everyone for being on. Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks everyone for subscribing. See you in a few days on the premium episode. Premium. Don't like it. There's the orb. Goodbye.