Behold, now behemoth … Behold, he drinketh up a river … The Book of Job, 40: 15 and 23.

‘Most of us don’t know 95 percent of what Amazon is doing,’ Amy Webb warns in her The Big Nine (2019). While Amazon Prime is diverting audiences with its rom-com, The Idea of You, the Australian Signals Directorate is paying Amazon Web Services two billion dollars to store secrets in three locations on the Cloud with a golden lining for Amazon which holds the largest slice globally, at around a third.

(Will the ASD sites need Dutton’s nuclear plants to power them?)

Jeff Bezos began by distributing books in July 1994 to customers with discretionary incomes to build into ‘The Everything Store,’ helping to put 2,500 bookshops out of business (Brad Stone, The Everything Store, 2013). First called Cadabra, as in the sleight-of-hand magic spell ‘abracadabra,’ then rebranded Amazon within a few months to match the mightiest river with its expansive delta.

The tributaries to Amazon’s reported income of $6.7 billion for 2023 have a common spring in the labours of 1.46 million ‘Amazonians’ employed as wage-slaves in warehouses, on piece-rates for the Mechanical Turk, or as ‘in/dependent’ delivery drivers for Amazon Flex.

In Management-Speak, Amazon warehouses are ‘fulfillment centres,’ which is true for packages but not for the pickers and packers who endure them as ‘hellscapes.’ Unlike chattel-slaves who could run off into the Amazon delta, wage-slaves have nowhere to hide from the all-seeing-eye of devices which have patrolled ‘Scamazon’ for twenty years.

The Wall Street Journal parades ‘Besozism’ as an advance on Taylorism and Fordism for its ‘mix of surveillance, measurement, psychological tricks, targets, incentives, sloganeering … and an ever-growing array of clever and often proprietary technologies.’

On the frontier of Telematics, Amazon patented a wrist-band which reports hand-movements, before sending vibrations back to nudge the workers into being more productive.

Along with other distributors, Bezos had rented the first-generation KIVA robots ‘to increase the output capacity of their warehouses; store and ship a wider range........

© Pearls and Irritations