If I’d bought s share of Amazon stock every time I bought a used book from the cool little online bookstore I found out about a couple decades ago, I could be waiting for the end on a beach in paradise and voting for anti-tax Republicans. Instead I’ve just made the company richer by sitting alone at home and buying more books, streaming video, and household necessities delivered to my door so I don’t have to drive a couple blocks to a store.
Who knew the everything store would conquer the world? As usual, however, with every world-changing innovation there’s a downside to go with the upside. Steel, coal and oil made America great, beginning 150 years ago.
But the concentration of wealth by monopoly control and strike-breaking massacres at places like Homestead and Ludlow eventually sullied the names of Carnegie, Frick and Rockefeller. They also led to progressive-era legislation to protect unions, bust trusts, improve working conditions, and make America great for more than a plutocratic few
A “New Yorker” examination of Amazon, “The Unstoppable Machine” (Oct. 21) reveals the genius of the contraption, but also the unpleasant underbelly. Growth at all costs has resulted in workers chewed up in its cogs and discarded thanks to heat stroke in warehouses without air conditioning and repetitive motion injuries.
Inadequately vetted delivery subcontractors have been involved in dozens of accidents and several fatalities. The company hosts third party vendors but doesn’t police what rhey sell, including products that violate government safety warnings or shoddy counterfeits posing as branded merchandise. When Amazon algorithms discover a best seller on their site, they have been known to duplicate it and undersell the original.
Libertarian hubris, the besetting vice of the tech world, is to blame. Sites like Amazon, Facebook, and Google pose as faux communities, but are anything but communitarian in orientation. The behavior of their owners suggests nothing but contempt for the losers — also known as customers — whose dollars or data have made them among the richest people on earth.They are arrogant, elitist, greedy, lawless, and rapacious. They are anti-tax, anti-labor, anti-regulation throwbacks to the Gilded Age.
They are also notoriously bad corporate citizens. Amazon, for example, was faced with a tax in its Seattle hometown to fund homeless shelters and affordable housing. Bezos threatened to move headquarters elsewhere if it passed. It was dropped. Zuckerberg’s obliviousness to his part in the corruption of American elections is typical. “Go fast and break things” is a cool motto in a dorm room, not so funny if people’s lives and our form of government are the collateral damage of careless capitalists.
“The New Yorker” quotes historian David Farber who suggests that several times in American history a similar pattern has repeated itself. An economic revolution allows companies to seize the opportunity to “become so powerful that the people revolt…then we have an era of constraint enforced by the federal government.”
Such a backlash may be underway now. Governments across the globe are beginning to more aggressively regulate online excesses, and several American presidential candidates are speaking the language of trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt.
Recent events in Chile ought to alarm the online magnates as well as elected representatives here. It could be a kind of canary in the coal mine warning. Chile has a toxic combination of ingredients which sounds familiar. Costs are rising. Wages are not. And the country has one of the worst cases of income inequality in the world.
Such environments can’t be endured forever. As Langston Hughes said, dreams deferred can simply sag like a heavy load, but can sometimes explode. Recently, the government raised the price of subway fares in Santiago by a seemingly trivial four percent. But it’s the lower and working classes that depend on mass transit to get to their ill-paid work and back.
This was the spark that ignited a keg of dynamite. First students began turnstile jumping, then protesters took to the streets. Soon, according to reporting from “Business Insider,” “buses and subway stations [were] engulfed in flames, and protesters clashing with armed military soldiers in charge of restoring order. The protests have resulted in at least three deaths after a supermarket near the capital was reportedly looted and burned. Even after Chilean president Sebastián Piñera announced…the subway fare hike would be suspended, the violent and fiery protests have continued.”
Perhaps the oligarchs on their private islands don’t really care about inequality and violence in the streets as long as their taxes are low and their businesses unregulated, but at some point a little reform may be less expensive than the cost to businesses of being on the wrong side of history as far as their customers are concerned.
Or not. if push comes to shove, Facebook can probably make a buck hosting the plotters of revolution while Amazon sells them survival guides and gear.