Three reasons to avoid Amazon

What follows are three reasons I avoid shopping on Amazon's web store, and try to buy local, from a specialist, or secondhand as much as I can:

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a) They have a highly negative view on employee attempts to improve work conditions and attempts at unionising.

A company that treats its workers not as equal participants in their growth and success, but as automatons to drive harder and harder with unrealistic efficiency quotas has surrendered itself to a dehumanising role in our society. Workers have been reported to urinate in bottles to keep to the schedules they've been set, breeding a zero hours working culture Ken Loach brilliantly depicted in his film, Sorry We Missed You.

The way Amazon fights unionisation, such as in April in a depot in Alabama, shows clear disregard for the importance of allowing workers to organise to help ensure better working and pay conditions. For example, Amazon coordinated with the U.S. Postal Service to install a mail box on warehouse property and then pressured employees to use it to vote. The union in a statement called this "unlawful ballot harvesting" and said it "allowed Amazon to determine who supported the Union" by seeing who declined the drop box's use.

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b) They have lubricated the wheels of consumerist culture to such an extent that "One-Click" purchasing and seeing an item arrive the next day has become the norm for online shopping.

It has incentivised a race to the bottom in which the time and distance between a customer deciding on a purchase and receiving it is less than 24 hours. It encapsulates the brilliant dystopia which tech companies have created in which we can have whatever we want, whenever we want it, without questioning whether we really want it, or whether this is a decision that is actually good for our long term well being.

Just as sex loses its novelty in a hedonistic society, our "stuff" gradually loses its value when it can be acquired on a whim. Principles our ancestors would have held dearly such as craftsmanship, the meaning & narrative behind a specific object, and the ritual within their purchase or exchange, have been discarded for immediate, efficient, robotic efficiency. The human drones (soon to be non-human) who construct, package, and deliver these objects are nameless, faceless, and therefore worthless in our implicit and ravenous demand for convenience above all else.

Economies of scale present in the Capitalist system have divorced us from our money, our food, our clothes, and the things we use day to day. This might represent the pinnacle of the modern efficiency-driven dream that Western society created throughout the 20th century, but we're now realising just how much this separation from the natural world has caused us to run astray.

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c) They are too big.‍

Monoculture in food growth destroys soil and produces nutrient-deficient crops blasted with poisonous pesticides. Monoculture in business leads to omnipresent management of multiple areas of the economy, and therefore our lives, allowing destruction or consumption of any consumption that might represent an alternative. The company has dominated, undercut, and out-competed local businesses beyond the point of helping the customer. Their mining of data and use of it in predicting our purchase patterns, alongside their ubiquitousness in the cloud computing industry, mean that we are living in Jeff Bezos's digital world, whether we like it or not.

The worship of major Silicon Valley companies, just like the worship of the banks and deregulation in the 80s and 90s, is palatable as long as they are playing ball and helping lubricate the gears of communication and commerce within our lives. The problem is when they turn the screw, we suddenly find out just how much we've already given them, and how hard it is to go back. The politician, author and economist Yanis Varoufakis's idea that large tech companies have become not just oligarchies but "private fiefdoms", part of a Techo Feudalistic world in which we live, in which a small number of elites control both the buying and selling, what we see and what we don't, and predict our future behaviour, holds weight here.

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