Podcasting “View A SKU”

A plan to turn Amazon into a dumb pipe.

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, “View a SKU: Let’s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe,” about how interop can help us demonopolize Amazon and tame its market power:

https://doctorow.medium.com/view-a-sku-32721d623aee

To explain this proposal, I need to start with an axiom: there are lots of problems with Amazon (lots!) but the fact that Amazon is really convenient is not one of those problems. Your use of Amazon isn’t a mark of your “laziness” anymore than your consumption of plastics is a mark of your indifference to the planet.

As Zephyr Teachout writes in her stupendous book Break ’Em Up,

“I like supporting local retail for shopping whenever possible. But I will not shame people for buying from Amazon the magic markers they use to write ‘Break up Bezos’ power’ on a big poster they parade outside their state attorney general’s office.”

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250200907/breakemup

The drive to “shop local” is great, but it shouldn’t become a hairshirt. If you buy something from Amazon, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you support union-busting, monopolization and creepy surveillance doorbells. It might just mean that you are out of time and live in a place where Amazon killed most of the retail that survived Walmart.

If you’ve enjoyed Matt Bors’s work, you understand this. It’s the essence of the Mr Gotcha gag. A downtrodden peasant says, “We should improve society somewhat” and Mr Gotcha replies, “Yet you participate in society, curious! I am very intelligent.”

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/13/theory-of-change/#mr-gotcha

The fact that Amazon has given us a single database in which you can search for a large slice of all the objects of retail commerce, read reviews, and explore alternatives is good, actually. The problem is in how Amazon abuses its workforce, crams its suppliers, self-preferences its own goods, and shifts wealth from taxpaying local businesses to its tax-evading coffers.