Amazon’s new employee chat app blocks “fairness,” “grievance” and “diversity”

”Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?”

Amazon has an Orwell problem. Back in 2009, Amazon surprised Kindle owners by reaching into their devices over the network and deleting their copies of Nineteen Eight-Four, along with their annotations. Amazingly, this was just a garden-variety screw-up and not a piece of self-critical theater to demonstrate the risks of connected devices that allowed their manufacturers to override their owners.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

The company’s love affair with Orwell never ended, and they never figured out that old George wrote those books as warnings, not suggestions.

Take the company’s forthcoming employee chat app Shout Outs, which will “gamify” performing grueling, low-waged work by rewarding workers with virtual stars when they “add direct business value.” Leaked minutes from a high-level Nov 2021 meeting to plan this app record that Dave Clark, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, believes that “some people are insane star collectors.”

The minutes of this meeting were leaked to The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein, whose reporting…