Life in One-Click America

Why it's time the tide turned against Amazon. Plus, how NYC residents built digital communities during the COVID-19 lockdown, and how "We Can Do This" could be the meta-meme we've been looking for.

Alec MacGillis’ terrific new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America is the perfect one to read as we await the results of the unionization vote at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. That vote, like the earlier national competition to be selected for Amazon’s second headquarters, has drawn attention to the giant tech conglomerate, only this time on terms much less favorable to the company. On top of all the celebrities and elected officials who have expressed support for the union effort, even President Biden has stepped into the fray, releasing a video denouncing Amazon’s anti-union propaganda. Centibillionaire Jeff Bezos has clearly been drawn in, pushing his lieutenants to take more aggressive steps to rebut charges that employees were doing things like peeing in bottles to meet productivity rules. (You know, by the way, that whenever you are arguing that you don’t make people pee in bottles, you are losing regardless.)

That said, the odds of Amazon losing this unionization fight aren’t great, for all the reasons that the giant company already stands like a colossus across America’s economic and political landscape. After all, as MacGillis illustrates in great detail, Amazon is already a company that has made an art form of avoiding taxes, squeezing tax subsidies from local authorities (the department inside Amazon in charge of that is brazenly called “economic development”), using economic blackmail to crush local efforts to get it to pay back taxes, perfecting the use of tech to track employee performance down to the length of bathroom breaks, segmenting its workforce into “engineering and soft-ware developer towns…data-center towns and … warehouse towns,” rigging government RFPs in its favor, all while currying the favor of top politicians from Barack Obama on down and blithely ignoring the needs of the communities it has hollowed out.

 If you’ve read Lina Khan’s seminal paper on Amazon’s monopolistic practices and all the ways it has harmed competition, you already know a lot about how Bezos has used Amazon’s power to undermine and exploit the many businesses that sell their own products on his platform. MacGillis’ book focuses elsewhere, on the human stories inside the collapse of independent, family-owned department stores and the transformation of cities like Seattle and Baltimore. In one of the book’s most stunning images, he traces how bricks that were once forged to build houses for unionized workers at Baltimore’s Bethlehem Sparrow Point shipyard are now being salvaged from demolished homes there in order to line the walls in the newly gentrifying quarters of booming Washington, DC, adding a critical twist to the whole picture: “People were struggling to afford small half-million-dollar apartments decorated with bricks from demolished homes forty miles away that could have been bought for ten to twenty thousand dollars.”

This is just one of the places where Fulfillment takes wing beyond the Amazon story alone and makes us question the ways that modern American capitalism is making nearly everyone more miserable. In another critical chapter, MacGillis recounts how the city of Seattle was whipsawed by Amazon in 2018, when local advocates allied with progressive city council members passed an ordinance that would have charged large businesses in its downtown core an employee head tax to raise funds needed to address homelessness. The tax aroused Amazon’s opposition, and as MacGillis shows, even after a compromise was negotiated knocking the cost to the company down to about $12 million (a microfraction of its $230 billion in annual revenue), it moved rapidly to fund a “No Tax on Jobs” referendum to torpedo the whole thing. The campaign was like Uber’s 2015 war against NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio, only uglier and more divisive. As the No Tax on Jobs campaign spread rapidly, charging that the city couldn’t be trusted to spend millions more on the homeless after leaving thousands in the streets, advocates discovered they weren’t just being outspent, they were standing on sand.

As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s campaign against the Seattle head tax hammered on critical weaknesses beneath the city’s seemingly progressive image, weaknesses rooted in hidden racism and classism. (Seattle voted 92 percent against Trump just two years earlier.) Wealthy tech workers chose to stand with one of the city’s richest companies against a modest effort to help the least among them. But there was something else at work: a backlash against what my friend Douglas Rushkoff calls Present Shock combined with people’s inability to see their own role in creating the shock. Listen to how Nick Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon who now focuses his own philanthropy on equitable economic development, described to MacGillis what happened to his hometown during the “No Tax on Jobs” war, as the council met to undo its own decision.

“It’s the fastest growing city and people are losing their minds. The head tax created just this crazy civil war in the city that all of us observed. Every one of us has friends who are otherwise good, rational, progressive people who just go off the rails about this. All of my friends are angry about something. They just are. All the wealthy soccer moms I know who do nothing but drive their children around are angry about the traffic, are angry about the bike lanes. My friends who own and run these giant fast-growing companies are bitching about the apartment buildings going up in their neighborhood, and the massage therapists I know who have never been busier are bitching about the Amazon people. People cannot connect the dots. People’s brains are not wired to process cognitive dissonance. People struggle to connect the benefits they’re getting with the harm it is creating, and their heads explode. Everybody here has benefited mightily, but they just cannot connect the fact that the things they are doing are creating the problem they hate. The ability to process that exploded on the head tax. People got bullied. Everybody’s been bitching about the traffic and nobody can afford a place to live, but then it’s ‘Amazon’s is going to leave, ohmigod what are we going to do?’ People are easy to bully.”

I’m rooting for the union to win in Bessemer, because if we don’t start building collective power, individual responses to the dilemmas created by Amazon leviathan will never be enough. One place to start is Bookshop, a nonprofit that makes it easy to buy books to maximize your support for local bookstores, one of the first victims of Amazonification. But if we want some hope of living in a world not driven by the power of heartless libertarian overlords like Bezos, it can only come from government taking strong action to limit his monopoly powers.

-Related: “In San Francisco, VC lives matter. We’re the ones employing people, bringing business, buying properties, you know, paying property taxes.” That’s Ellie Cachette, a tech exec who has donated to Jason Calacanis’ GoFundMe effort to hire an investigative journalist to dog San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, as quoted in an eye-opening story by Samantha Michaels and Lil Kalish in Mother Jones magazine. While murders and burglaries are up there, overall crime is down, a fact that hasn’t stopped Calacanis from shamefully comparing SF to “Escape From New York-level, Gotham City-level chaos.” (Cachette claims she was misquoted.)

What Happens When We Are Left to Our Own Devices?

How has the Great Pandemic changed the ways we live through digital means? Terra Incognita NYC is a fascinating new report from New_ Public that “examines how, in the summer of 2020, local communities in NYC’s five boroughs maintained social ties and interaction despite social-distancing mandates.” It finds that during COVID there was more local social interaction, but that all the fault lines and inequities of the physical city were reformed in the digital city. A group of researchers led by Mona Sloane of NYU studied a mix of 15 different “places” spread across the city’s five boros, including an open mic poetry night, a yoga studio, running clubs, mutual aid groups, church and synagogue services, an LGBT caring network and Facebook groups. “We saw radically scaled experiments in virtual community- and public-space building across the city, across communities, across practices,” she writes. But there wasn’t any kind of transformative expansion of connections, unfortunately.

“Ultimately, Terra Incognita NYC found that while digital public space opened new doors for connection and experimentation and evolution, the overwhelming focus remained on continuity. Neighborhoods mattered more, not less; those with existing affluence and access continued to enjoy both. Communities that existed beforehand found ways to stay together; those who were systemically affected by discrimination and the lack of social capital or technological infrastructure were largely still denied both.”

I’m not surprised by this finding, because without deliberate public interventions aimed at knitting people virtually when they couldn’t connect physically, of course existing structures and networks, patterns of privilege and deprivation would be reinforced. The collective civic muscle called government has been starved of resources and legitimacy since the 1980s of Ronald Reagan. So, to borrow a phrase, when COVID hit, people were left to their own devices. Communities with their own resources, like a reform synagogue in Queens, bought webcams and offered to install them in the homes of their more senior members, reducing their isolation. Not everyone could do that. One of the report’s key recommendations for policy makers zeroes in on how this gap affected families hit by the twin challenges of homeschooling and caretaking of ill members:

“There needs to be better citywide coordination between educators, care-providers, city administrators, and families. The pandemic has been particularly difficult for families with members in need of care, and parents of young children. This sudden burden—homeschooling children, or supervising remote learning of children, or caretaking for sick or elder family members, all while maintaining a regular work schedules and responsibilities—has exhausted communities. Technology, combined with focused coordination of resources through city officials, has the potential to alleviate that burden. But in order to make that work, there needs to be better city-wide coordination and inter-action—between families, city officials and providers—about how technology can be a facilitator, and what policies are needed (e.g. family leave, or trainings for parents who become teachers).”

Filling in the gaps created or exacerbated by social distancing measures also requires more than physical tech devices. New_ Public’s report also notes how much digital public spaces require facilitators and moderators in order not only to work but to emerge in the first place. This “continuous and multi-layered labor” is a hidden but required ingredient, not unlike the maintenance and patrolling that makes a public park a vibrant community hub.

“Moderators and administrators tend to be a small group of dedicated individuals. Those in the group often see their work within these digital spaces as a service to the communities they are part of, sometimes even as a calling. This ‘service’ aspect of moderation and facilitation is strongly linked to the collective experience of the pandemic.”

Interestingly, in a number of cases in the report, moderators realized that the rules of their community had to be loosened to embrace their members’ needs. A Brooklyn runner in charge of a running group said, “My restriction—it has to be running related—just completely went out the window. But I thought: any activity that helps keep people in touch, that gives people a reason to interact with someone else new, draws you out: I'm ok with it now. And that's actually been really fun and liberating, because it never would have happened before the pandemic.”

Ultimately, Terra Incognita unearthed several interesting examples of communities expanding their reach or range because of the shift to digital. The Brooklyn library system found itself reaching people who were normally unable to come to the library. And a walking tour organizer on Staten Island started connecting with people all over the country. But at the same time, “technical vulnerabilities became social vulnerabilities; when the technology broke down, the digital public space broke down.”

What I most appreciate about the research in Terra Incognita is how much the information unearthed exposes the critical but mostly hidden layer of our digital lives: the local digital sphere. As I wrote last summer, on the Internet no one knows who is nearby. And yet, as this report reminds us, there are many local communities, either of geography or interest, that we may participate in with the help of tech. As far as I can tell, the only Big Tech tools that work explicitly to connect people to other people nearby are dating apps; neither Facebook Groups nor a Google search would point someone to the many local examples of community life that Sloane and her team of researchers explored. And yet these connections are vital to binding us, like the colonies of fungi and bacteria that help trees connect up through their roots into a larger forest.

Odds and Ends

-The Biden Administration has launched a $10 million ad campaign along with a broad network of hundreds of local grass-roots leaders and national civic, faith, sports and other organizations to promote COVID vaccinations to hesitant Americans. Two things about this interest me. First, that the “Covid-19 Community Corps” is inviting ordinary Americans to sign up to volunteer to be message-sharers. And second, that the overall frame for the campaign, which is called “We Can Do This,” could maybe be the nucleus for a wider, ongoing effort to remind Americans that the “we” who is doing this is “us,” also known as “government.” The building blocks for the New American Story we need could be right here.

-Wanna see crumbling infrastructure, specifically bridges, in need of repair near you? Philip Bump of The Washington Post has built you a searchable map.

-Some guy named Sifry is quoted in this smart story in the Washington Post by Ethan Davison about how rightwing politicians like Rep. Madison Cawthorn are hoping to us the gaming platform Twitch to “humanize” the GOP with the young-uns.

-End times: PopVox’s 2016 April Fool’s Joke, to create “Filter Bubble Wrap” to allow its more partisan users to self-sort, cut too close to home for its maker, Marci Harris.