How monopoly enshittified Amazon

Chokepoint Capitalism ruins everything.

Cory Doctorow
9 min readNov 28, 2022

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Jean-Leon Gerome’s painting Pollice Verso, 1872, depicting gladiators in an arena with noble onlookers giving a thumbs-down gesture. The tapestry before the nobles has been replaced with a US $100 bill in which Ben Franklin’s mouth has been replaced by an Amazon smile logo.

In Bezos’s original plan, the company called “Amazon” was called “Relentless,” due to its ambition to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Today, Amazon is an enshittified endless scroll of paid results, where winning depends on ad budgets, not quality.

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