Dear Amazon Chronicles Members,

Some of you have read (or have in your inboxes right now), the first Amazon Chronicles newsletter entry since December. That’s right, I am back at the steering wheel, with an update on the newsletter’s future and a short roundup of the best Amazon news from this week.

But this will likely be the last newsletter I write for Substack. I’ve decided to migrate the archives and the mailing list over to Revue.

I did this for a number of reasons. First, my agreement to publish on Substack had ended right about the time I put the site back on hiatus. I had to debate shuttering the newsletter altogether, restarting it under a different mandate, and/or changing newsletter platforms. Continuing it as it was on Substack was not a live option.

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I wanted to let you know that I’m putting Amazon Chronicles on indefinite hiatus. Paid subscribers should have billing paused as of Wednesday, December 8th. Free readers will have to suffer the charm of even fewer emails about Amazon for awhile.

I’ve never had an easy time keeping this newsletter to a regular schedule. And this month, something always seemed to be getting in the way of a new edition: an emergency, an illness, a holiday, a dentist’s or doctor’s appointment, you name it. Plus, there is all the behind-the-scenes maintenance of the site, weighing business demands, delivery, subscribers, and other opportunities. There’s also the tug of other projects, some of which were conceived or even promised before this newsletter was a thing.

Finally, I felt like the most responsible thing I could do was to close up the doors and pause billing indefinitely until I could figure out what to do next.

A weekly, reported newsletter about Amazon was and remains a great idea, and I hope to come back to it when the circumstances permit.

Until then, or for whatever’s next, the best places to find me are on Twitter, at my Patreon, or via my Tinyletter.

Jassy emphasized continuity, both for customers and leadership: “We’ve always said that when confronted with the choice between optimizing for short-term profits versus what’s best for customers over the long term, we will choose the latter—and you can see that during every phase of this pandemic.” But what, exactly, are the long-term investments that Amazon is making right now?

We’ve nearly doubled the size of our fulfillment network since the pandemic began. In the fourth quarter, we expect to incur several billion dollars of additional costs in our Consumer business as we manage through labor supply shortages, increased wage costs, global supply chain issues, and increased freight and shipping costs—all while doing whatever it takes to minimize the impact on customers and selling partners this holiday season. It’ll be expensive for us in the short term, but it’s the right prioritization for our customers and partners. — Andy Jassy

The cost that jumped out to me on a quick read of the quarterly report was property. Purchases of property were up from about $11B in the corresponding quarter in 2020 to almost $16B in this quarter, and $31B to $57B in the corresponding year. That’s the difference between a record quarter and a modest one, and a reminder that compared to most of its cloud counterparts, Amazon owns and operates a tremendous amount of property and equipment. It’s constantly building and planning to build new facilities, and in a turbulent real estate market, that costs real money (even with Amazon using its political connections and the hunger for jobs to help pull some strings).

The other top-line item eating into Amazon’s profits? Wages. I mean, on the one hand, this is obvious, a huge cost item for any business, and Amazon’s enormous workforce still earns only a fraction of the paper wealth Amazon generates. But apart from Jassy’s brief mention of it, and the gleanings we can find in the quarterly earnings report, Loop Capital analyst Anthony Chukumba sees wage growth as Amazon’s most important investment at the end of 2021:

"The most important investment that they're making is in wages," Anthony Chukumba, an analyst at Loop Capital, told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). Even after increasing workers' starting compensation from $15 an hour to over $18 an hour, adding benefits, and creating $3,000 signing bonuses, "they're still struggling," he added.

"We're seeing all the same stories ... from so many different companies — it's becoming increasingly difficult to hire unskilled workers as well as to retain them," Chukumba explained. "You need to have these people in the warehouse, you need to have them on the trucks. Otherwise, the whole system just breaks down, quite frankly."

Chukumba is bullish on Amazon, seeing the wage investment as a means for Amazon to position itself both through the holiday season and keep the company more competitive when the mad fulfillment rush for most companies is over.

Both of these added costs come on top of the unusual and extraordinary extra costs of fulfillment as the supply chains continue to break down. Investing in wages, property, and equipment can help compensate for those shortcomings, but they’re a long-term response to a short-term problem. Amazon might uniquely be in a position to put those extra assets to work, even in 2022.

Let’s start with a story that seemed a little silly when I first saw it: the Online Merchants Guild told David Dayen at The American Prospect that Amazon had sent emails threatening its third-party sellers that government regulation of Amazon’s marketplace could force it to shut down entirely.

The emails pushed sellers to register at an in-house website, supportsmallsellers.us, to “stay informed and involved on legislation that could impact your business”… The website asks for emails and physical addresses from sellers, and says that signing up will “afford you opportunities to communicate directly with your elected officials.” With physical addresses, Amazon could target messages from potentially thousands of seller constituents directly to their own members of Congress. This amounts to building a large lobbying army out of its seller partners, by asserting that their livelihoods are at grave risk from the legislative effort.

On the one hand, this makes sense; raise the specter of a worst-case scenario for your sellers, and then position yourself as the champion of small businesses, rather than be painted as their exploiter, especially before what could be a costly showdown with Congress and another unionization showdown (this time in a major media market that’s more labor-friendly.)

But even as a gesture, it feels unusually dramatic: could or would Amazon actually shut down its marketplace rather than oblige itself to relatively modest bills curtailing Amazon’s tendency to push its own products at its partners’ expense? (On this self-referencing, see Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin’s recent report at The Markup; on Amazon’s willingness to go a step further and clone its competitors’ products, then rig the search results to favor its copies, see the latest report from India. )

If anything, Amazon seems to be looking to expand its relationship with its third-party sellers. “Local Selling” is a brand-new set of services that facilitate buying online at Amazon.com and picking up in store (or fast local delivery) from its third-party partners. It gives bigger brick-and-mortar retailers more incentives to use Amazon’s storefront, while keeping a bigger chunk of the profit. And Amazon can head off both big retail competitors (Walmart, Target) and platforms like Shopify looking to offer the same service.

In his most recent Amazon Briefing at Modern Retail, Michael Waters argues that in-store pickup is a win/win on its face for Amazon and its partners:

[F]or Amazon and for third-party sellers, in-store pickup is especially tantalizing because it is so cost-effective. Target said last year that it saves 90% on costs when customers pick up products in its stores versus having them shipped to their homes.

“If you look at what the consumer trends are, the BOPIS model is becoming much, much more prevalent,” said Harvey Ma, svp of consumer and retail performance at NielsenIQ. For Amazon, with Local Selling, “what they’re doing is capitalizing on what is hot right now.”

But Amazon would keep a tasty slice just for itself:

Every customer who buys a product from a third-party seller is technically Amazon’s customer -- Amazon, rather than the third-party seller, keeps each customer's email address. Amazon has made the fact that it can handle everything from fulfillment to customer service on a seller's behalf a central part of its justification. In exchange, sellers have grudgingly parted with customer information.

But stores in the Local Selling program might end up doing most of the work on each order themselves -- including selling their own products and facilitating pickup for local customers. Even after that, they still won't retain any information on who their customers are.

Why would third-party customers take that bargain? Some of it has to do with Apple’s decision to wall off data sharing on its smartphone apps. This lowers the amount of data that can be gathered by companies like Facebook and Google, which in turn lowers the effectiveness and desirability of their ads. If you can’t reach your customers using search or social, then you have to go back to the one site where you’re downright sure a customer is trying to buy something: the great bazaar, Amazon.com.

This, at least, is Eric Savitz’s argument at Barron’s, and by Nivedita Balu at Reuters; both think Amazon has been the perhaps unlikely winner in the Smartphone Retail Scramble.

So to its third-party customers, on the one hand, Amazon portends doom; on the other, it offers opportunity. And all the while, the company knows that retailers large and small are pressing tighter against a ledge that’s getting ever closer, and Amazon might be their only way forward. For a company under as much external and internal pressure as Amazon, it’s a pretty strong move.

At The Verge, my old colleague/boss Nilay Patel has a new Decoder interview with Dave Limp, SVP of the devices group at Amazon. It’s available as a podcast or lovingly transcribed, and is well worth listening to / reading — I’ll be referring to the transcript throughout here.

As others have pointed out, this interview is about as candid as Limp has been about how he and the Devices group work within Amazon. But what caught my attention were Limp’s continual references to a well-known part of Amazon office culture: the six-page memo.

Jeff Bezos instituted the no slide decks / narrative memo requirement in an email to Amazon’s S Team back in 2004, and described it in an interview with Charlie Rose about a decade ago:

BEZOS: We have study hall at the beginning of our meetings… The traditional kind of corporate meeting starts with a presentation. Somebody gets up in front of the room and presents with a powerpoint presentation, some type of slide show.  In our view you get very little information, you get bullet points.  This is easy for the presenter, but difficult for the audience.  And so instead, all of our meetings are structured around a 6 page narrative memo…

When you have to write your ideas out in complete sentences, complete paragraphs it forces a deeper clarity… Time doesn’t come from nowhere. This way you know everyone has the time. The author gets the nice warm feeling of seeing their hard work being read… If you have a traditional PowerPoint presentation, executives interrupt.  If you read the whole 6 page memo, on page two you have a question but on on page four that question is answered… And so that is what we do, we just sit and read.

What began as a requirement for top executives became an Amazon institution. Instead of slide decks, narrative memos of slighly different types and genres became a core part of Amazon’s office culture. Junior executives write six-page memos; Bezos’s annual letter to shareholders is typically a six-page memo. It’s also a genre that’s taught (sometimes not entirely correctly) in writing programs, and one that’s been dissected online many, many, many times.

The two-page (or one-page) mock press release format is also a writing genre common to Amazon, although it’s less often discussed than the six-page memo. What’s interesting to me about Limp’s invocation of the six-page memo in this Decoder interview is that 1) he describes how the two writing forms are, at least for his group, a combined genre and especially 2) how the memo has actually become a roadmap for product development. In short, the Devices group not infrequently begins with the press release, expands into the six-page narrative memo, and uses that document as a tool to decide which new products to develop and release.

LIMP: The invention process is very different. It has a different decision-making framework, we use a thing we call the “working backwards process,” where we don’t use PowerPoint, or Keynote, that much inside of our business. We write narratives. And the narratives are six pages long, and a new product, any new product inside of Amazon, the first page of that product, that narrative is a press release, as if you were launching the product tomorrow. And then the next five pages are frequently asked questions; how is this going to be differentiated? How would it be priced? What invention do you have to solve to be able to do this, etc., etc. And there’s a bunch of those questions that go in.

And those docs come, and we review them, but that process is much messier. It is very rare that I would see a working backwards document like that for any new product — could be the original Echo or the original Kindle — that we would approve the first time we saw it. Normally it takes many iterations of that. And what’s critical about that is that because we really want that to be as good as we possibly can make it, because as soon as we agree on that document, the decision is made. That project is green-lighted. The next step is to find a single threaded leader to run that project. Somebody that wakes up full-time, every day, their job is to make that product happen, because you never want to have somebody inventing part-time, that’s a very important thing. And so, that’s why that process tends to be more iterative.

Later, Limp describes how this type of “working backwards” memo has (to some degree) penetrated Amazon acquisitions like Ring, Blink, or Eero, including the decision to combine elements of the Ring and Eero together in the new Ring Alarm Pro:

The way you phrased it made it sound like there’s some dictatorship. What happened was exactly what I described in the invention process, which is, we wrote down a working backwards document basically about what the next version of the Ring Base Station would look like. And one of the things that came out of that was this idea, I remember having the conversation, this idea that you might want your internet to have backup. I live in Washington, we have wind, I have a generator because my power goes down pretty often. And so, I have power backup, but the internet is equally as important to me as my power, as we’ve gone through the past decade. I don’t know if it’s a human right, but it sure feels really important.

The idea of being able to back up the internet was, in the case of that product, to have LTE built into it so it can flip over from wired connection to cellular. And once you have to flip over, then you kind of go, “Well, how do you do that seamlessly?” Well, it made all the sense in the world that it would be on the back of a router, and we have a company, Eero, building world-class mesh routers. And so, it really started with the customer problem first, and led to a “better together” scenario. And I think that’s the better way to do it than just say, “Eero must work with Ring. Ring must work with Blink.” In my experience, those work in the short term but in the long term the organization will rebel against it because it is often not right for customers.

Later, Limp uses the six-page memo as both a metaphor and an example of how different technological paradigms don’t dispace so much as augment each other:

If I have to write one of those aforementioned six-page documents, that QWERTY keyboard, as old and as obsolete as it should be, is still the best way to write a six-page document. Now, did smartphones move us to another level? Yes. In the same way, ambient computing, Alexa and Echo and this ambient intelligence, is not going to supplant the computer nor the smartphone. It’s not going to. It’s doing something different, but I would argue that it’s already here and here to stay. It’s at scale, people are using it, they love it, they are adopting it.

There is so much more that has been said and could be said about Amazon’s internal (and occasionally external) use of the six page memo, the discipline of silent reading during meetings, and the important elements of timed discussion and iteration as a process after the memos are written. I may return to this topic again as soon as later this week.

But for me, what’s revealing in this interview is the use of the memo as a structuring document so early in the product development process, as early as invention and identifying a person responsible for product development. This is not just “this is why we should name our tablet the Kindle Fire and how we’re going to situate it in the market” — this is “here is why Amazon should be interested in having a tablet at all, how it could be used, and what services we need to package and/or develop to make it viable.” That is a big load for a six-page memo to carry, especially for a product (or even a product team) that doesn’t yet exist.

Maybe we’re just fools, but one reason why tech PR events announcing a new set of products and services have caught on as quasi-pop culture is that they offer a chance to see a vision of the future. We’re chasing that feeling we had the first time we saw the iPhone, or the MacIntosh, or even something as now mundane as Gmail. We want the experience of having someone open the lids to our heads again.

Amazon’s events rarely offer that feeling. It’s not that the company doesn’t have big ideas; it’s that they only occasionally come in the scale of a gadget. There’s the Kindle, there’s the various Alexa portals, and then there’s a lot of iterating around the edges, new variations on popular things we’ve seen before, either from Amazon or someone else.

As The Verge’s Dieter Bohn writes, “We expected AI to look like HAL 9000. Instead, it looks a lot more like a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.” Or as Shira Ovide writes for the New York Times, “Amazon is America’s silliest inventor. It’s Ron Popeil without a filter, plus Alexa. Amazon seems to be making any doodad it can dream up and seeing what people do with it.” This does not sound like a company whose vision of the future seems radically compelling.

That’s a shame, because a big vision of the future is worth chasing, not least because the details can change. Think about the debut of the iPhone. There was a lot of controversy around the edges of that device — on its expense, on control over applications, and over which global carriers would be able to offer it, among others. Within a few short cycles, the iPhone was available on more carriers, at lower prices, and with a burgeoning App Store. Even more changed in terms of design, specs, features, all generating their own controversies in turn. But the Big Vision of the iPhone largely stayed the same.

You could say the same thing about the Kindle; it, too, has gotten less expensive, with better storage and features, and a streamlined design, but the value proposition is basically the same: an entire electronic bookstore (Amazon’s) at your disposal any time, any place.

It is hard to see exactly what is the Big Vision animating Amazon’s new Astro Robot, easily its most gee-whiz PR moment from Tuesday’s big event. If anything, documents obtained by Vice suggests the device’s vision itself is both overbroad and half-baked.

Amazon's new robot called Astro is designed to track the behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties, according to leaked internal development documents and video recordings of Astro software development meetings obtained by Motherboard. The system's person recognition system is heavily flawed, according to two sources who worked on the project…

“Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw itself down a flight of stairs if presented the opportunity. The person detection is unreliable at best, making the in-home security proposition laughable,” a source who worked on the project said. “The device feels fragile for something with an absurd cost. The mast has broken on several devices, locking itself in the extended or retracted position, and there's no way to ship it to Amazon when that happens.”

In fact, the robot helper and accessibility aid turns out to primarily have a sentry function. This might have some use cases, but they’re not terribly compelling ones for a household. The Washington Post, too, notes that almost all of Amazon’s devices are for the home, and lacking much of a new raison d’etre for being there, revert to surveillance and security.

What started seven years ago with a microphone in a speaker has turned into a flying indoor surveillance drone and an autonomous robot with a telescoping camera in its “face.” The company framed the latest releases as technology to help with the burden of everyday life, solving problems like too much screen time, keeping track of an aging relative far away or leaving your fridge open. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

And the Post’s reporters are correct; the fact that Apple and Android, not Amazon, control the smartphone does constrain Amazon into taking a “stop looking at your phone” approach to home computing. The problem seems to be that instead, Amazon wants you to be looking at anything (and everything) else.

Smart home and internet of things reporter Stacy Higginbotham cinches the paradox here when she writes that “we are getting really close to the smart home of my dreams, and I’m increasingly unsure if I want it.”

On the one hand, it is a tremendous advancement in both AI and ambient computing to train a network of machines to recognize both voices and faces, to deploy in response to custom sounds, and to “see” into users’ kitchens and pantries to recognize when stocks are low. On the other, when one has entrustes so much private and personal information to a single company, well, the value proposition had better be slightly more compelling than “skip a step when you reorder your groceries.”

Amazon’s iterative approach doesn’t create many “aha!” moments where you can see how your life, or indeed how entire industries, can change in response to a new product feature. It happens by bits, and includes as much discomfort as wonder.

All this makes the company well-suited to succeed in certain fields. Astro is a weird home companion, but maybe a useful bot for a job site or small warehouse, or, yes, Disney World. (There are dogs and there are dogs.) Tech pundits salivated over the idea of an Apple television set, but it never came together; the television set industry’s and Apple’s preferred revenue structures just don’t go together any more. But they jibe pretty well with Amazon’s.

And it’s a matter of time and perspective. If your issue with Astro is that it’s too expensive, that will almost certainly change. If your issue with Astro is that it’s fundamentally weird to have an anthropomorphized cop-slash-pet-slash-slave living in your home, that’s not going to budge anytime soon.

Navneet Alang tweeted that “There must be technology somewhere, not released by trillion dollar corporations, that has the capacity to make one feel sort of amazed at what is possible,” adding that “I just feel like I've lost sight of one half of what drew me to tech in the first place — the sense that something might get a bit better. Instead, the basic structure of liberal capitalism doesn't seem to have changed. If anything, its downsides seem to have intensified.”

I think there is a lot of truth to this, in that we are as journalists, critics, users, and as a public much more likely to be critical of a large tech company’s goals and unaccounted-for externalities when it releases new products and services. We’re more skeptical of big capitalism and how our data was used. In 2007, the not-even-released iPhone was a privacy nightmare, a 24/7 Apple store in your pocket, but we were less likely to fixate on that. The dominance of Facebook and Google and the hollow promises of the advertising model are starting to wear people down.

But — and it may sound mean to say this — I don’t want people to lose sight of the specific ways Amazon is swinging and missing right now. These aren’t early days, and Amazon isn’t an upstart launching its first Android tablet. This is a major company with a huge footprint in consumer technology and lots of hardware projects (some successful, some not) under its belt. It’s a company that could use another big hit, a post-Alexa, post-Bezos franchise, and by all the impressions so far, it’s not finding one. That’s interesting to me.

The first-of-its-kind legislation, AB 701, gives Amazon and other warehouse workers new power to fight quotas, which critics say have fostered dangerous conditions by pressuring workers to skip bathroom breaks and skirt safety measures…

The measure requires warehouses to disclose quotas and work-speed metrics to employees and government agencies and prohibits penalties for stopping work to use the bathroom and other activities that affect health and safety. It also prohibits retaliation against workers who complain.

What strikes me about this new law is that while the bill regulates and prohibits some workroom practices (e.g., being fired for bathroom breaks or as retaliation for complaints), in other cases, the law simply asks that certain work quotas be disclosed to workers and the public, rather than kept hidden. In too many cases, advocates say, employees only learn about the work rule’s hidden quota (whether it’s for “time off task” or for a productivity metric) after they’ve been terminated for failing to meet it.

The law would also require companies that run warehouses to report to the government—and their own employees—the quotas and speed metrics they mandate for workers.

“Right now, it’s very secretive,” said Christian Castro, communications director for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, which sponsored the bill. “E-commerce has been growing exponentially, it’s gotten even more popular during the pandemic…. Workers are telling us about an increase in quotas, not even knowing their quotas.”

It’s an odd wrinkle, but it’s not without precedent in labor and legislative history: we knew very little about early 20th century factory work, whether in industry or agriculture, before government regulations disclosed how products were assembled and/or processed to consumers. And government includes a fact-finding component as well as a regulatory mechanism. (The press, too, for reasons that might be obvious, frequently relishes a mandate for public disclosure.)

More directly: it is nearly impossible for government to regulate, for workers to organize against, or for consumers to make informed decisions about supporting products when Amazon’s own employees don’t fully know the conditions under which they’re being made, processed, and delivered to the public.

Put another way: this is another case in which the size, reach, and inscrutability of Amazon and the companies in its wake defeats ordinary attempts to make sense of what it is up to. And this is not deep in the forbidden infrastructure of the internet, but in the ordinary days and nights of fulfillment workers. At the same time, they, too, can truthfully say “the algorithm fired me.”

A small news story slid in over the weekend, but I think it’s noteworthy enough to take a second look. It’s an interview with Bookshop.org’s Andy Hunter by Techcrunch’s Danny Crichton. There’s a lot of data here. For example:

• Bookshop’s sales are in 2021 are about even with where they were in the site’s annus mirabilis of 2020, when the site took off as physical bookstore sales dipped. This year, bookstore sales are largely back, but Bookshop’s sales remain strong.

• Bookshop is working (and helping its partner stores) to invest in human-curated book recommendations, rather than wrapping both arms around an algorithmic model. This could be a good differentiator going forward, both for Bookshop and between different bookstore partners.

• This ia also (we hope, and Hunter hopes) good for midlist books and ones by less established authors, which often get crowded out by blockbuster-driven algorithms and media hype.

All this is good. But here’s one item in particular that I wish had gotten more attention:

Amazon, of course, is the biggest challenge for the company. Hunter noted that the company’s Kindle devices are extremely popular, and that gives the e-commerce giant an even stronger lock-in that it can’t attain with physical sales. “Because of DRM and publisher agreements, it’s really hard to sell an e-book and allow someone to read it on Kindle,” he said, likening the nexus to Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer on Windows. “There is going to have to be a court case.” It’s true that people love their Kindles, but even “if you love Amazon … then you have to acknowledge that it is not healthy.”

There is a lot going on here! Let me try to spell it out.

Essentially, Amazon has the most popular e-readers and the most popular e-bookstore. These are not unrelated. While Amazon’s e-books do work on other companies’ devices (phones, tablets, laptops), they won’t work on other companies’ e-readers, nor will e-books from most other digital bookstores work on Amazon’s e-reader, and in both case, it’s for the same reason: DRM. Amazon DRM won’t work outside an Amazon device or application, and Amazon won’t let books with other companies’ DRM work on the Kindle.

So Bookshop (which doesn’t sell e-books, but perhaps someday could) or any other company with a digital bookstore can’t get their books on the Kindle as long as they’re packing DRM. And this isn’t just limited to Barnes & Noble or Kobo or Apple or other companies selling e-books: it means libraries have to make special accomodations for Kindles, digital subscription or streaming services have to target phones or tablets rather than Kindles. (On top of that, Amazon also uses slightly different formats for its e-book files rather than the EPUB standard, which makes it technically incompatible in another obnoxious way.)

For this reason, the e-book and e-reader marketplaces are very different from, say, smartphones or TV set-top boxes. While there are some incompatibilities and unavailabilities that drift towards ecosystem lock-in, for the most part, buying a device gets you access to a wide range of popular content options. E-readers are different. When you buy a device, you’re buying a bookstore, and vice versa.

There is — or at least, could be — an alternative. If e-readers and e-bookstores were not so tightly coupled, and a certain amount of intercompatibility were guaranteed, then someone with any e-reader could buy books from any e-bookstore, borrow them from any library, or subscribe to them from any service on their own machine.

Admittedly, that would still limit the field to companies who can afford maintaining the expensive overhead for DRM. If you eliminated DRM as a factor altogether, then any publisher that chose to be could also be a digital bookstore; every print bookstore could be a digital bookstore. Indeed, you or I could open digital bookstores and sell e-books at a small markup, competing on the best curation, the best recommendations, or the best additional services we could offer to justify our margins. (Piracy would almost certainly be a problem for these booksellers, but it could, in principle, be done. At this point, most of my digital book purchases comes from publishers who sell their books without any form of DRM.)

Part of the trouble is that the additional services offered by e-bookstores is so closely tied to DRM. Now, it is easy to point to DRM or to Amazon or to the major publishers who insist upon things being done a certain way as the villains, and I am not above doing that. But it is difficult to see how Amazon, for example, could sync a customer’s current pages read across devices on applications where it cannot exercise some sort of digital control over the app or object being read. That’s one of the benefits you lose without cross-platform DRM.

To a certain extent, though, this entire discussion is moot. Amazon has largely won the marketplace; alternatives exist, and customers are free to choose them, but Amazon certainly has no incentives to change how it makes its e-books available or to further open up its own machines. True! But perhaps a court of law might decide that such arrangements were anticompetitive and could change, whether prodded by a competitor (like Bookshop) or by the Department of Justice (which is taking a much different view of what is and isn’t anticompetitive behavior than it has in other administrations).

This is why Hunter’s admission that “there’s going to have to be a court case” is tremendously interesting, and suggests that the world of e-books, e-bookstores, and e-readers, placid as it’s been since the introduction of the touchscreen more than a decade ago, could very quickly get a lot more exciting.

I’m going to do something a little unusual for me and open this up for comments from subscribers. What would you like e-books and e-bookstores to look like? What changes would make them better? And which changes are more likely or unlikely to happen because of different stakeholders’ interests in the outcomes?

You can either comment below or reply to this email if you’d rather keep our correspondence private (although if you say something really interesting, I may ask for permission to quote you later on).

(This is the second part of an interview I did with reporter Alec MacGillis, author of the book Fulfillment, in the spring about Amazon and the evolution of mostly blue-collar work across the United States; see here for the first part of the interview.)

Tim Carmody: I wanted to ask about the relationship between Amazon and its workers and politics and politicians, whether it’s local or national politicians. I know that a complex relationship between politicians and a big employer and its workforce is nothing new. But despite a few high profile blow ups, like in New York City with HQ2, Amazon has been very savvy in terms of how they’ve courted local politicians, and the kinds of appeals they’ve offered.

Alec MacGillis: It starts with jobs and job turnover. Amazon does offer a lot of entry-level jobs, especially at the warehouses, even if it’s often for a short period of time, and often for a younger, blue-collar, blacker part of the workforce. And there’s a strong sense of, well, at least it’s something. That’s why area officials are so eager to get them in there, and often just shower them with tax credits, just being so incredibly obsequious in their overtures.

One of the things that most kind of astonished me in my reporting was that I put all sorts of FOIAs and public information requests to get the emails between the company and local officials who were courting them for both the warehouses and data centers. Local officials were so obsequious on the point of not just showering them with subsidies, but also in promising Amazon secrecy. They would promise to withhold as much they possibly could from the local media. At one point, one official in Ohio was even apologizing for having said something to a local reporter, saying “don’t worry, I didn’t agree to be interviewed by him; he just accosted me in a parking lot, and I just said something completely banal. But I didn’t agree to an interview and I’ll never speak to him again.”

Another moment that I saw firsthand was the first Amazon warehouse in Baltimore at the site of a former GM plant, where people have been making 30 bucks an hour just a few years earlier making Astro minivans. They had a grand opening ceremony there for Amazon, and the mayor of Baltimore and a local Congressman, both Democrats and both certainly pro-labor, people throwing themselves at Amazon’s feet in gratitude, saying things like, “I love you, Amazon, you are the one who brings me my deodorant on time,” said the Congressman,” “I love you, Amazon, you’re the one who gets me my skin lotion on time,” said the mayor. So to see our elected officials in that example, not only having become sort of desperate for the jobs, but also having adopted the exact kind of consumer mindset, that so many of us have for excusing anything, in return for that “convenience.”

Tim Carmody: One of the sections of your book, you talk about this community meeting in El Paso, where, if I understand it correctly, the city is using Amazon like a procurement center where the city can buy things through the Amazon site. City retailers or manufacturers are listed as preferred, but the city can actually buy from anywhere. And in the middle of the meeting, the Amazon officials and politicians are talking about “don’t you love Amazon?” They’re playing on the popularity of their retail service in order to justify this big other thing that’s happening to change government services and who they’re buying from.

Alec MacGillis: Yeah. They’re so blind about it; that’s what strikes you. They’re so completely confident now in the supremacy of their triumph, that there’s very little self-consciousness or self-awareness about how they might sound. There really seems to be an actual assumption that they are, in fact, loved by us all, because look at the numbers, right? I mean, all the numbers are through the roof. And they were through the roof this year. There’s just no notion that anyone would have a problem with it.

So, that’s what this scene in El Paso was, where I slipped into this meeting where they were pressuring these local office supply dealers to join the Marketplace and even if it meant losing a hefty commission to Amazon. It was just this assumption that “of course, you want to be a part of us; we are everything, everyone loves us, we are where it’s at.” So why wouldn’t you?

(Here is a short excerpt from the relevant chapter of Fulfillment. Mario Marin is a former Los Angeles government official who was then heading all U.S. government sales for Amazon Business. )

A hand went up. It was Julian Grubbs, from Express Office Products. “City customers used to buy from my website, and then we transitioned to the city website. Are we transitioning to Amazon and it’s going to replace the city website?”

The question cut through the fog of Lee’s pitch. With Amazon now approved as a channel for city government purchasing, would city employees simply be buying straight from the site? Left unmentioned was the clear subtext: if they were doing so, what was to keep them from buying from the countless other suppliers on the site, not just El Paso businesses?

Bruce Collins jumped up to dismiss Grubbs’s insinuation. Yes, he said, buyers could now go through Amazon directly. But, “as part of the synergy with the city, it’ll be coded” that an El Paso supplier is local, and thus preferable to use.

Daniel Lee offered more consolation. Amazon Business gave sellers a window where they could describe themselves, where El Paso businesses could tout their roots. “You can tell your story,” he said.

But Grubbs wasn’t satisfied. A few moments later, he raised his hand again and cut even closer to the main point. “What’s the tradeoff when they order from me directly and [from] me from Amazon?” he asked.

Lee acted as if he did not understand what Grubbs was getting at. “Tradeoff for you, sir?” he said.

“Tradeoff for me and the customers,” said Grubbs.

Marin jumped in and started talking again about Amazon guiding El Paso buyers to El Paso sellers. Grubbs wasn’t having it, and pushed even harder for candor. “My question is, I’m on the city’s website for a ream of paper for ten dollars. They go through the city website to purchase from me. When they go through Amazon, they’ve added another tradeoff, whether price, service, or convenience. What is the tradeoff?” He was practically begging now.

But the avoidance continued, from each of the three men.

“Global distribution,” said Bruce Collins. “When you go to Amazon Marketplace, you’re now a global supplier.”

“We’re not trying to replace your current business,” said Daniel Lee. “It’s not El Paso. It’s the Stanfords and GEs of the world that you get to sell to, in a pretty turnkey solution.”

“We take on the responsibility of negotiations” when it comes to overdue payments and other hassles, said Mario Marin. “It’s a phenomenal channel to think about.”

This was the Amazon vision in its essence, of commerce at its freest and most frictionless, a small business on the Mexican border able to sell its goods to any buyer in the world, without even having to worry about packing and shipping: What was not to like about that?

Grubbs couldn’t take it anymore. He had tried not to be too blunt. How could one be so crass as to inquire about price if the seller was acting as if there wasn’t even a pitch going on, that this was all about helping El Paso businesses grow? They had left him no choice.

“That’s great and sounds great to me,” Grubbs said. “I haven’t seen what it’s going to cost me for this convenience.”

And finally, with that, nearly forty minutes into the pitch, Lee told his audience that for the privilege of selling on Amazon, they would pay a $39.99 monthly fee. “And,” he continued, “there’s a referral fee that spans from six to fifteen percent depending on product category.”

It was vague, and Grubbs called him on it. “Those categories go from six to fifteen percent. How do I, as a businessperson, identify my product category?”

“That’s something we’ll walk through with you,” said Lee.

“That’s something we’ll come to terms with before we come to terms?”

“Kinda sorta,” said Lee.

With the real terms of the deal finally on the table, there was little left to be said. A while later, Mario Marin wrapped things up, neatly as he could. “You heard two stories,” he said. “One is, there’s a play on suppliers on the sell side, onboarding, recruiting, helping you sell on this marketplace. And then you heard my story, on how we’re teaching, showing, demonstrating how you can use this site, you can buy and mirror your procurement processes in such a way that you can help fulfill your socioeconomic goals.”

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s our story.”

Tim Carmody: The marketplace is just another example where even if you’re not directly working for Amazon, Amazon has this outside effect on other businesses, which in turn affects companies and their labor practices. You find yourself in a position where you are this local or regional business and now you are in effect working for Amazon, you’re making their sales your sales through the Amazon Marketplace, subject to their terms, selling at their rates. Could you talk about that sort of umbrella/waterfall effect that Amazon’s dominance has on these other companies?

Alec MacGillis: It was just really kind of heartbreaking to watch these companies in El Paso, who were basically the local Dunder Mifflins — they have 12-15 employees and have just been doing their work there selling to local governments, local schools, local businesses, priding themselves on their customer service, picking up recycling, ink cartridges from their customers, working with them even if they might have bought one or two supplies from Staples, because their customer is on the line saying “oh I’m under the screw, I’m gonna lose my job, can you help me out?” Just this human interaction. And then along comes Amazon and gets a lot of their clients to buy through them, on the argument, “don’t worry, you can still support your local business; you’re just going to be doing it through us now, it’ll be easier, more convenient, it’ll be seamless.

And of course, what’s missing in that is that the local businesses are going to lose a hefty cut to the middleman. And also, it’s not just that: the local businesses understand that there’s something else that’s been lost. It’s going to affect a local tax base, and the local fabric is hurting other ways by having everyone just become sort of a third-party merchant in the Amazon service. In that scene, these are quite high level Amazon people who’ve come in from Seattle and California to make that push. And it took about 40 minutes into this meeting before Amazon just finally got really pressed by this one office supply dealer who was there before they would finally admit what the costs would be.

There’s no reason for this local El Paso company to want to sell to Philadelphia. But now, Amazon is asserting itself into this relationship with the Marketplace.

Tim Carmody: At the consumer level, the reasons for gravitating towards Amazon seem relatively clear. As you say, it’s a heightened convenience at a lower cost. Not always, but the asymptotic trend is for lower and lower costs. But in terms of the politicians or governments or companies who are making deals with Amazon, what are the incentives for them to align themselves so closely with Amazon?

Alec MacGillis: I think it’s the popularity. You get to be part of this cool thing that everyone levels. And even for them, it’s convenience. If you’re that local municipal school system official, and you’re buying everything at home from Amazon, and you can just keep doing that on the job, and not having to go through whatever system your agency or department has set up for procurement, it’s not so different from what you would do at home. So it’s really not so dissimilar in its appeal to the individual consumer.

Tim Carmody: Looking ahead with these labor conditions, where do you think things are trending? What’s it going to be like in two more years, or five more years? (It feels hard to project even further out than that.)

Alec MacGillis: Gosh; I may not be the best person to wager on this, but I would say this partly depends on the outcome in places like Bessemer? It also depends partly on what kinds of advances they can make on the robotics, right? How much can they displace even more of the work that’s still being done now by humans. How much can they teach robots to grab better?

The main thing about the conditions is that they’re going to be even more prevalent, because if they keep growing at anything like this kind of scale, there’s just going to be more and more and more of us doing this. And I don’t think we’re really grasping just how insane the growth of the last year has been — partly because the numbers are so large, and also because we all feel a bit implicated in it.

My book was already basically reporting on their massiveness before this past year. And then we saw a 40% growth in sales, 500,000 or more empoyees hired, not counting the hundreds of thousands of drivers. 50% more warehouse space.

I’m not an absolutist about this; I don’t myself boycott. I use [Amazon] occasionally, if I have to, but the alacrity with which Americans embraced the one-click lifestyle this past year, on all sorts of fronts, but Amazon especially, has been something to behold. It’s almost as if we had been holding back somewhat all along, by some sense of compunction, some sense of stigma. Then this year, we kind of got the go-ahead from above, and we just went for it.

Tim Carmody: I rememember it used to be a big deal if Amazon announced a new fulfillment center or a new warehouse or a new comething, and now it’s like, every week, every couple of hours, there are hundreds of thousands of square feet, in every part of the country and all over the world, places that haven’t even been built yet.

Alec MacGillis: I can’t even keep track of it. The one at Sparrows Point, the steel mill [in Baltimore], they’ve already built and begun operating a second facility there. It’s just been a matter of months. It has this gorgeous view onto the harbor and bridge, but no one sees the view because it’s all windowless. 500 more workers, boom; right there.

Back in the spring, I interviewed Alec MacGillis, author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. This was while union elections were taking place at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemmer, Alabama; I was just starting to think about a series on how Amazon was transforming work worldwide, and lo and behold, that’s what MacGillis’s book was/is all about.

Even now, months later, the transcript still pops. Here are some selections of what we talked about; there will probably be another installment later this week.

Alec MacGillis: To be quite honest, the book didn't even start as an Amazon book. I don't even really think of it entirely as an Amazon book, although, of course, it makes sense to shorthand it that way I really started out wanting to do a book about inequality in America and regional inequality, to come at it from the perspective of place, not just the income ladder that we usually talk about. Traveling all around with my reporting and just being so disheartened, depressed, and kind of alarmed by the rising levels of inequality between places. For years now being struck by this, and it's getting worse and worse and worse, to the point where you travel between some of these places now, and you get vertigo, because they're so crazily different.

So I wanted to figure out a way to write about it, and then I chose Amazon as a handy frame for it, both because it's so ubiquitous, so it serves as just a natural thread to take you around the country; it's kind of everywhere. If you follow Amazon around the country, you kind of get the whole the whole country; but then also, because it itself helps explain for the inequality, because so much of our regional inequality is linked to economic concentration. That's how I came to Amazon.

But then by coming to the company, by that route, you do get into all these different aspects of it, including the workforce and work conditions aspect. I had no idea that, that it would be that the book would be coming out in such an incredibly timely moment, not only with the company having gotten so explosively larger in the last year with the pandemic, but then also with with a major labor fight, like what we're seeing in Alabama now.

Tim Carmody: One of the things that Amazon tends to do is to talk about how good its own wages are relative to what the minimum wage, or contrasting it with sort of entry-level positions, either at other warehouse companies, or in retail; what UPS pays, or McDonald’s pays, or Walmart pays. But that kind of skips over the fact that there is this erosion of very well played well paid middle-class, but blue-collar work. That's vanished. And so on the one hand, you have Amazon presenting itself as a savior in these towns or in the cities where everyone notes that the good blue collar jobs have vanished. Maybe I could put the question this way: is that story vastly different when you look at like industrial centers, like Baltimore, versus other parts of the country that had different kinds of labor forces, whether it's agricultural or service sector, or between places that have a history of very public labor activism versus places that are not thought of that way?

Alec MacGillis: What you’re comparing it to is so important. Noam Scheiber had a recent piece in the New York Times that was about exactly this; Amazon likes to talk about how they pay double the minimum wage in Alabama, but if you compare what they pay to what local warehouses pay, the warehouses pay more, like $20-25 an hour. Those warehouses are not nearly as short turnover. Some of them are even unionized. Amazon might be paying more than an entry-level job a teenager might get at a restaurant, but not what a middle-aged manager might have gotten, say, managing the jewelry section at a department store, or any of those local and regional stores that have been blown out by companies like Amazon.

Is the 55 year old Bon-Ton employee really going to go now to the Amazon warehouse, and is she even going to be able to handle that completely different kind of work? I mean, it's just it's way more physically taxing and way more isolating.

Tim Carmody: That gets at one of the other ways in which the work is different; while capitalism has always been surveillance capitalism, in the sense that workers are being watched, whether it's monitored for productivity or monitored for staff or monitored for labor organization, but Amazon’s surveillance is a little bit different. 21st century surveillance is evolving and weird that we, we kind of understand that on one level, but Amazon workers must experience it pretty directly. I wonder if you could speak to how that has changed as these workers move from other fields into working for Amazon.

Alec MacGillis: It's so dehumanizing. In that sense, there's so much, so much less. There's a reason why I call the the chapter about the evolution of work from Sparrows Point [in Baltimore] from the steel mill to the warehouse; the reason why I call it dignity, is because it's the loss of that, that is one of the things that is most keenly felt.

There is a man in that chapter who goes from working 30 years at that steel mill, to then working at the warehouse driving a forklift. And because he's older, having an active bladder and not having enough time to make the long walk to the bathrooms and using Office time and getting chided for it and being called to pay for it because they keep track of these things. Then occasionally having to sneak behind his forklift in the corner of the warehouse: that's the, the lack or the loss of dignity that that involves.

And yes, the constant, this incredibly constant surveillance. Again, actually, it was Noam Scheiber who pointed this out a couple years ago, and I credited him for it in the book: that as the robots have increased in the warehouses, the work has gotten more robotic, because it actually it takes away a lot of tasks that involve some semblance of initiative and freedom.

[For earlier Amazon warehouse workers,] walking the aisles, all those aisles, looking for the items in the stacks or in the shells was incredibly physically taxing, and left you with incredibly sore feet and blisters. But there was a little bit of independence involved in that you were kind of least kind of off on your own in the stacks, in a sense. And now you're just planted there for the day, because those robots are bringing the things to you, and you're simply pulling them off the shelves as they're brought to you. And you are only still being used rather than the robots because they still haven't figured out how to make the robots that grab; the hard thing [for a robot] is grabbing things of different sizes and shapes. And so it's you're even more just in that sense kind of a cog.

One other small detail on surveillance is the fact that that the only one of the only places where workers can express themselves where there are no cameras are is actually inside the trucks, the ones that are outbound, trucks that are taking orders out. One of the workers mentioned to me that, that as in this past year, as the conditions got worse and worse, and the pressure built up more and more, and there's more and more fear of COVID, even as the profits soared, and Bezos's wealth soared -- one of the few ways that workers would be able to express themselves outside of the reach of the cameras was was to write graffiti inside those trailers. So, you look inside those trailers, and they're often scrawled with, you know, Jeff Bezos and the like, and, you know, "Amazon Hell "or whatever. Otherwise, you know, anywhere in the warehouse, the camera would pick that up.

[Note: in February 2021, CNBC reported that Amazon had begun equipping delivery vans and trucks with AI-equipped monitoring cameras.]

In the next installment, come back for more on how that constant surveillance impacts Amazon’s workers’ ability to organize or establish any kind of common culture, and how Amazon’s impact is sufficiently large that its practices affect people who don’t even work for or subcontract to Amazon.

Amazon’s creative problem is a difficult one, but its reasoning is fairly straightforward: it’s buying into the least developed, least zealously guarded material where it has the most room to make up whatever stories it chooses so long as they are broadly coherent with the published texts. Essentially, Amazon has the right to make Númenorean fan fiction. The main problem here is that you actually have to develop coherent characters and stories viewers want to follow along with, which is no easy task, whether your background mythology is a rich or a murky one (in this case, it’s both).

The Tolkien Estate’s reasoning, however, is less obvious. Apart from the already published, already popular books of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, whose TV and movie rights were already sold during J.R.R. Tolkien’s lifetime, the stories of the First Age were seen as central to the legendarium, so much so that J.R.R. Tolkien strongly desired The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings to be published together, perhaps as a single volume. (Then, largely as now, nobody wanted anything to do with The Silmarillion; it was weird, it wasn’t entirely finished, it wasn’t a sequel to The Hobbit, and it didn’t even have any hobbits in it.)

Tolkien knew there were problems with updating his older stories and making them suitable for publication, but he also thought the two books were incoherent without each other. As he wrote in a letter to his publisher at the time, he believed that The Lord of the Rings, far from being a simple sequel to The Hobbit, had actually become a sequel to the unpublished Silmarillion.

After the publication of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien continued to work on these First Age stories, but eventually abandoned them in various states of completion. The evidence suggests that some time before ill health made it difficult for him to continue to work on the stories, he despaired of them ever being published.

It was up to his son Christopher, himself a scholar, translator, and literary editor, to assemble the texts that remained, which he did in different ways. For The Silmarillion, he blended multiple sources to produce a coherent a story as possible. For Unfinished Tales, he combined the texts with scholarly notes to show breaks and inconsistencies in different drafts. And in The History of Middle Earth, he included varying drafts, more or less chronologically across decades, showing the evolution of various parts of the story as they began to click together.

Largely, all of this happened before the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies led to a new wave of interest in the stories, new disputes about money, new deals at the table, and perhaps a sense that at least some business with the family legends remained unfinished.

Finally, near the end of his life, Christopher returned to three of the major stories from The First Age, each of which had been treated in different ways in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-Earth, and repackaged them. These were The Children of Húrin, Beren and Luthien, and The Fall of Gondolin, the last of which appeared in 2018, coinciding with Christopher Tolkien’s retirement from the Tolkien Estate and the sale of TV rights to Amazon.

While all three stories are deeply connected to the broader mythology (and to each other), each story is a kind of stand-alone romance in the medieval sense, heroic-tragic tales of love, adventure, magic, war, and betrayal. Indeed, Tolkien seems to have composed each story as a kind of stand-alone yarn, a la The Hobbit, and gradually worked in connecting tissue to tie them more closely together.

If you were going to make three not-yet-seen Tolkien movies, or mini-series, these would be the ones you would make. Why wasn’t the Tolkien estate interested in having Amazon make them?

Here, I think there are some idiosyncrasies at work. First, Christopher Tolkien was broadly dismissive of the movie adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, calling them a gutting of the book and “an action film for 15 to 25-year-olds.” Finally, it’s important to note how protective Christopher in particular was of the First Age material. In his preface to The Fall of Gondolin, he writes:

Looking back over my work, now concluded after some forty years, I believe that my underlying purpose was at least in part to try to give more prominence to the nature of ‘The Silmarillion’ and its vital existence in relation to The Lord of the Rings – thinking of it rather as the First Age of my father’s world of Middle-earth and Valinor.

He also notes that his father, J.R.R. Tolkien, never actually completed the final draft of The Fall of Gondolin, although it was among the first of his stories he ever wrote. His last attempt ends as the hero Tuor arrives at the legendary city itself, and we are left with earlier, more cursory attempts at describing the actual destruction of the city.

It is the remarkable fact that the only full account that my father ever wrote of the story of Tuor’s sojourn in Gondolin, his union with Idril Celebrindal, the birth of Eärendel, the treachery of Maeglin, the sack of the city, and the escape of the fugitives – a story that was a central element in his imagination of the First Age – was the narrative composed in his youth.

His father abandoned the story, leaving only a glimpse of the city.

This is all speculative — maybe in ten years, after the Amazon series is a huge hit, the Tolkien Estate will do a gruesome movie version of The Fall of Gondolin, and I’ll be proven wrong. But I have two theses I’ll put forward, which can’t really be confirmed or denied now that Christopher Tolkien himself has died.

1. Christopher saw the real work of the legendarium after his father’s death as the scholarly collection and editing of the texts his father wrote. This nicely coincided with both his own interests and his sense that films and television were a potentially lucrative but ultimately disappointing sideshow.

2. It suited Christopher’s sensibilities that both he and his father ultimately left the First Age stories unrealized, that they did not become fixed in the imagination, despite finally having the movie-making technology to do so.

Ultimately, the deciding members of the Tolkien family were perfectly comfortable that the mythical city never be reached, that its walls never actually fall. There is, indeed, a tragicomic justice to the whole enterprise.

Anyways, that’s my take.

Amazon is spending a huge amount of money on its new multi-season television series set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy universe: an estimated 250 million USD for the rights and 465 million USD just for the first season, making it quite likely the most expensive television series in history. This raises the question: just what is Amazon buying with all that money, or rather, what does it expect in return?

If the new Lord of the Rings-verse series is a tentpole, it’s a tentpole of a different kind: it’s not necessarily driving subscription numbers like an HBO series, and it’s certainly not anchoring an evening of programming like a network TV series. In 2019, Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke outlined Amazon’s strategy this way:

We have a very unique business in the sense that our entire north star is to entertain and delight Prime customers all over the world, so there’s a different strategy there… We will curate shows to bring to that global, diverse audience. We’re not in the volume business. We’re in the curated business… I came from the network business, as did all of us, where you’re used to being able to go out and talk about success in viewership numbers. Our company doesn’t embrace that strategy.

In other words, Amazon is looking for a halo effect: a boost in subscriptions and sales, sure, but also buzz, awards, a reputation in and around Hollywood and worldwide that Amazon is a good partner and a good place to do business. It’s the same thing as always, but more.

It’s also looking, as much as possible, for tie-ins across the Amazon line — and in this sense, the Tolkien universe is uniquely well-suited. While the Hobbit films are for the most part not greatly admired, they did good business despite an awkward production, and the Lord of the Rings series has won major awards and been an icon for two decades. And the books’ reach remains deep, not just the single Hobbit book and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the headier stuff of the First and Second Ages from the appendices, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the History of Middle-Earth, which the new series is (partially) opening up for nearly the first time.

Nearly all of these books are available for Amazon Prime readers on Kindle Unlimited. It’s quite possible that no movie or television series in history comes with so much reading material via a single subscription.

However, this is where the rights situation gets a little awkward. If you’re unfamiliar with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, a quick summary might be useful.

In his lifetime, J.R.R. Tolkien published two works of fantasy set in a section of the planet Arda called Middle-Earth: The Hobbit and then its multi-volume sequel The Lord of the Rings. While there are hints of other lands and ages in The Hobbit, it’s really in The Lord of the Rings that it’s decisively revealed that these stories take place at the end of the Third Age of Arda, and there are other parts of that world, most now lost, including Beleriand, Númenor, and the heavenly Valinor, among others.

The characters Aragorn, Boromir, and Faramir are descendants of the Númenoreans, wise and long-lived human beings whose Atlantis-like island continent was destroyed by the gods in the Second Age of Arda when they dared to sail to (and make war on) Valinor. The new Amazon series is about those Númenoreans, who traveled all over the world during the Second Age while under a ban never to sail west to the land of the gods. They (and in some cases their descendants, or their slaves) are responsible for much of the legendary architecture encountered in The Lord of the Rings. (If it wasn’t built by elves or dwarves, it was the Númenoreans.)

Over his life, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote and revised many stories about the First Age. These were collected and edited after his death by his son Christopher, and published in the books The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Beren and Luthien, The Children of Húrin, The Fall of Gondolin, and others. It’s a rich and full mythology, and a television studio could take years to tell those stories.

Amazon has the rights to none of them. The Tolkien estate didn’t sell those. (And Amazon doesn’t have the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings-era stories either.)

What the Tolkien estate sold was the rights to the Second Age, but reportedly not the parts of those stories told in the books primarily about the First Age (the Silmarillion, etc.) At the same time, Amazon cannot contradict those stories either. Amazon’s series will have to be consistent with the Tolkien canon, while at the same time drawing on the vaguest, least detailed portion of it: genealogies, a few outlines of stories, and not much more.

On the one hand, this gives Amazon a remarkable degree of freedom in creating and new characters and defining ones only briefly sketched. And it also allows for a degree of suspense that would be absent from a retelling of the stories of the First or Third Age; while we might know the whole thing ends in catastrophe, we know much, much less about how we arrive there.

Tolkien biographer Tom Shippey (who at one point was involved with Amazon’s production) puts it this way:

Amazon has a relatively free hand when it comes to adding something, since, as I said, very few details are known about this time span. The Tolkien Estate will insist that the main shape of the Second Age is not altered. Sauron invades Eriador, is forced back by a Númenorean expedition, is returns to Númenor. There he corrupts the Númenoreans and seduces them to break the ban of the Valar. All this, the course of history, must remain the same. But you can add new characters and ask a lot of questions, like: What has Sauron done in the meantime? Where was he after Morgoth was defeated? Theoretically, Amazon can answer these questions by inventing the answers, since Tolkien did not describe it. But it must not contradict anything which Tolkien did say. That’s what Amazon has to watch out for. It must be canonical, it is impossible to change the boundaries which Tolkien has created, it is necessary to remain “tolkienian”…

The First and Third Ages are “off-limits”, you can’t have the First Age. Events could be mentioned at the most if they explain the events of the Second Age. But if it is not described or mentioned in the Lord of the Rings or in the appendices, they probably cannot use it. So the question is to what extent they may hint at events that took place, for example, in the First Age, but still continue to affect the Second Age. There are several maps authorized by Tolkien, not just the ones we’re are familiar with, and some of those maps have places on them which are not in the other maps. But if Tolkien authorized them then that’s okay. So it’s it’s a bit of a minefield. You have to tread very carefully but at the same time there is quite a lot of scope for interpretation and free invention.

So Amazon on the one hand has this rich tapestry of texts for viewers to call on in order to understand the television show; but on the other, there’s very little in the texts that will give them a definitive answer one way or the other.

Here’s an example of the kinds of reading that we’re likely to see. Look at the promotional image Amazon Studios has offered again, reportedly from the first episode. There’s an ancient city and a tree with a bright light. But which city and which tree is it? Here’s a relevant section from Akallabêth, the short history of Númenor from The Silmarillion:

Of old the chief city and haven of Númenor was in the midst of its western coasts, and it was called Andúnië because it faced the sunset. But in the midst of the land was a mountain tall and steep, and it was named the Meneltarma, the Pillar of Heaven, and upon it was a high place that was hallowed to Eru Ilúvatar, and it was open and unroofed, and no other temple or fane was there in the land of the Númenóreans. At the feet of the mountain were built the tombs of the Kings, and hard by upon a hill was Armenelos, fairest of cities, and there stood the tower and the citadel that was raised by Elros son of Eärendil, whom the Valar appointed to be the first King of the Dúnedain…

But the wise among them knew that this distant land [to the west] was not indeed the Blessed Realm of Valinor, but was Avallónë, the haven of the Eldar upon Eressëa, easternmost of the Undying Lands. And thence at times the Firstborn still would come sailing to Númenor in oarless boats, as white birds flying from the sunset. And they brought to Númenor many gifts: birds of song, and fragrant flowers, and herbs of great virtue. And a seedling they brought of Celeborn, the White Tree that grew in the midst of Eressëa; and that was in its turn a seedling of Galathilion the Tree of Túna, the image of Telperion that Yavanna gave to the Eldar in the Blessed Realm. And the tree grew and blossomed in the courts of the King in Armenelos; Nimloth it was named, and flowered in the evening, and the shadows of night it filled with its fragrance.

So which f—ing tree is it? It’s probably not Telperion, the original white tree, the one Morgoth destroyed, because there were two of them. But it could be any of these seedlings, from Galathilion on down to Nimloth. My money’s on Nimloth. But do we know? We don’t really know, and aren’t going to until (maybe) the show airs.

So we have the opportunity for a lot of fan service, a lot of hints and nods and winks to stuff from the First and Third Ages that fans of the books will enjoy. But very little of it might be resolved decisively in terms outside of the show itself.

This seems like a tricky dance, and it’s hard to say exactly what sort of pleasure fans will derive from it. After all, millions of people who greedily watched The Lord of the Rings in movie theaters (remember movie theaters?) and then bought the movies in special extended editions on DVDs (remember extended editions and DVDs?) knew more or less exactly what was going to happen in the stories. They were watching to see how those stories would be brought to life, to have familiar tales told to them again, in a new way.

If Amazon is going to pull this off, it has to hope that both hard-core and Tolkien fans will be equally devoted to what the studio is offering, either because of the nature of the source material or the quality of the storytelling, and equally eager to learn more. This is, after all, the difference between a series and a franchise: a franchise gives you room to return to it again and again, from a thousand and one angles, over space, media, and time.

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It’s a tricky thing when you’re writing and reporting a newsletter about Amazon, perhaps especially when you’re writing about Amazon in a very broad sense as both a company and a cultural phenomenon, to avoig getting caught up in Amazon’s own news cycle. Amazon produces a lot of media fireworks that everyone is intended to chase: Prime Days is one of them, and Jeff Bezos’s side ventures like Blue Origin have been another. Even if your take on them is critical or humorous or dismissive, you’re talking about them. And that seems to be part of the point: they’re like countermeasures designed to baffle anyone who’d make other aspects of Amazon a target.

That at least, is part of what’s going on. But Blue Origin is a little different. (It’s not an Amazon project, for one thing; like the Washington Post, this is Bezos’s own thing.)

This is Blue Origin’s mission statement: “We're committed to building a road to space so our children can build the future.”

Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth. In order to preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space. Blue is working on this today by developing partially and fully reusable launch vehicles that are safe, low cost and serve the needs of all civil, commercial and defense customers.

This is a weird paragraph. It starts with the biggest, wildest idea — the upshot — and then winds itself down to a very concrete, first-step vision of what that wild idea would look like in practice. Most paragraphs don’t work this way, except in nervously written student essays: usually, the writing builds to a crescendo, with the upshot usually coming at the end.

There have been essentially two critical approaches to understanding what Blue Origin’s mission is all about, both pretty cynical, but in different ways. The first sees the “vision” of millions of people living off-planet (the beginning of the paragraph) as a distraction; this is about money, plain and simple, the “civil, commercial, and [especially] defense customers” of the end of the paragraph. It doesn’t matter if barely dozens of people make it to space, so long as Blue Origin can get the contracts for those who do.

The second critical/cynical approach sees the end of the paragraph as a ruse, and the beginning as the company’s true goal: there are no real efforts here to democratize spaceflight by making it less expensive, so long as some people — certain wealthy and connected people — have a route off-planet if that becomes desirable and feasible. The planet is dying, and billionaires are looking for a parachute. It doesn’t matter how civilian spaceflight becomes possible, as long as dozens or maybe hundreds of people do (Blue Origin’s founders, investors, and customers first).

As always, I don’t know whether we’re being too cynical, not cynical enough, or cynical in the wrong direction. It’s quite possible, albeit paradoxical, that we’re simultaneously all three.

So, just what is going on in the middle of this paragraph?

In order to preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space.

This is even weirder. The core is four verb clauses, two of which have objects (find new energy and material resources, move industries) and two of which don’t (expand, explore). If you try to read “expand” or “explore” as applying to “industries” the whole sentence falls apart.

“Move industries that stress Earth into space” is pretty bizarre; both verb choices seem intentionally vague. But it does seem to suggest that Blue Origin (not unlike NASA) is as much about the industries that can be built around spaceflight as it is the big show of spaceflight (or near-spaceflight) itself. And the other nouns are just as important: energy and material resources.

So, suppose that’s the play: harvest, contribute, and (if possible) control the energy, material resources, and industrial tools and knowledge that enable human spaceflight, regardless of who the end customer is (civilian, commercial, or government) or who Blue Origin’s manufacturing and procurement partners might be.

That would be a very Amazon move — Blue Origin as a logistics company, an unavoidable in-between, a marketplace — as is offering as much as possible of the whole stack yourself, right down to the first group of commercial astronauts — Blue Origin as a well-known, well-trusted front face to an entire end-to-end process.

It may make more sense to combine the wry jokes about billionaires fleeing Earth with a closer look at just what Earth-bound supplies are being gathered together — not just money, but those all-too-scarce energy and material resources — to support these off-world expeditions, and try to explain what else we can do with them — the money, the energy, the rare materials, all of it.

That might turn out to be more important than who, if any of us, gets to leave Earth. Because what today’s launch, along with every human spaceflight launch ever made in more than sixty years of doing it, shows is that regardless of how many resources are put behind them, not one of us, no matter how rich, how famous, or how determined, is going to get very far.

I generally dislike writing about Prime Day (or Black Friday, etc.), or any Amazon sales or deals because I don’t see the job of this newsletter as helping Amazon move products, even (or especially) when they’re things I use and like. I’m not an Amazon expert or watcher in that sense, at least not professionally.

But you really cannot deny that Amazon has been largely successful in turning Amazon Prime Day(s) into a media event, at least for online media, and to some extent to television as well. Online news covers the sales, both as service journalism (here’s what to buy, from Amazon or elsewhere), and as a business event (here’s how Prime Day sales met/beat/fell below expectations, and what that means for Amazon’s stock/online retail). And both of those kinds of stories push commerce for (and interest in) Amazon.

Social media, too, drives Prime Day sales, as people share deals they’ve found (or less often, warn their readers away from a sale that looks generous, but really isn’t).

The trouble with Prime Day, though, is that the sales can change in real time. Deals unveiled one day can expire before the day’s over, or sometimes before noon. So even the sites recommending a sale can get burnt if Amazon runs out of product or decides (for whatever reason) to end or change the discount.

Here’s an example. The New York Times/Wirecutter’s post “The Prime Day Deals Wirecutter Staffers Have Actually Bought” updated several times before wrapping up at the end of June 22. (Forgive me, I don’t have screenshots, but you can see that the story has been updated and there’s an editors’ note declaring that “As Prime Day 2021 winds down, we’ve stopped updating this post and can’t guarantee that all deals are still in stock.”)

At one point on June 21st, this story recommended a Zojirushi thermos, on sale for less than $20. I know, because I bought it. I also know that shortly after I bought it, I refreshed the page to send the link to someone else and saw that the price had changed: now it cost closer to $30. The sale had ended without warning or fanfare.

This is different from a Black Friday blockbuster sale. Those are also driven by media attention and false scarcity, but you can usually be fairly sure that if the item advertised is available, it will be available at the sale price, and not some other price algorithmically adjusted when it’s become clear that the new price is moving too many units and a thicker margin is possible.

To me, that’s what’s ultimately so uncanny about Prime Day: the instability of all of it. The timing, the prices, the links, the influencers and affiliates helping to drive the sales, the retail partners willing to participate (but only so far), even the media attention. It feels like The Music Man, with Harold Hill breezing into town offering deals on musical instruments.

Here’s one problem. The sale itself is so big, especially when you factor in competing sales from other retailers, it’s too difficult to navigate. So there actually is some value in specialist sites like the Wirecutter helping to identify the best deals. But ultimately, the sale is so volatile, with deals changing by the hour, that the “what to buy” links as often as not dump you back on the retailers’ own homepages.

The Amazon homepage during Prime Days is now itself organized as a media event. There’s an autoplaying livestream of Amazon-approved influencers pushing particular deals, like a mildly updated version of a late-night infomercial crossed with the Home Shopping Network. There are countdowns to deals that will only be fully active later. There’s an insistent demand for attention, but it’s not a constant attention, more like an ambient attention, the same way a social media timeline or casual mobile game is continually pinging you to open it, knowing and promising that you can put it down at any time.

It’s a big funnel, or an inverted pyramid. And while Amazon needs other brands to participate, and other websites (whether they’re benefitting from affiliate sales fees or not) to help drum up interest (and to some extent, even the competing sales ultimately help drum up interest in retail on those dates), the real driver is Amazon’s own site and the deals it offers on its own products, which it pushes very successfully.

But this feels only quasi-stable. It depends on slow news, slow sales, an abundance of attention. Constantly monitoring the site for deals that have already been recommended (but which have been later pulled) takes more labor than most news sites are willing to spend on a story that’s supposed to be a quick freebie.

I would guess that in the future, either the sales themselves will stabilize (even if, like on Black Friday doorbusters, they limit themselves to N per customer or for a predetermined limited time) or the media partners Amazon relies on to help drive attention will focus on recommendations they can guess will be reliable to the end of the sale. It’s okay for the festival to run through, but you want some idea of how things will go from start to finish.

The alternative is that the show will increasingly start and finish at Amazon’s home page itself, which will (ideally) get better and better at recommending its own sales to its customers, whether those products are Amazon-branded or not. The home page will find more, better, and different ways of attracting attention: perhaps some kind of bundled entertainment package on Prime Day(s), in the manner of a public media pledge drive, with a mix of eye-catching performances and sales. It will become more of a self-contained extravaganza and less of a distributed one. And, ultimately, that might end up being better for everybody.

First of all, it doesn’t mean the books Oxford publishes will no longer be printed. It just means they’ll be printed by a different printer, one not owned by OUP. Oxford isn’t going to give all their business to Amazon, or anyone else in the world of digital-only books.

In fact, printer outsourcing has been the case for the vast majority of books and other material printed by OUP for a long time (more than thirty years). That long history of outsourcing is one of the main reasons Oxuniprint is in financial trouble. This is right in the story by The Guardian on Oxuniprint’s closure:

[OUP] has outsourced the printing of its own books since 1989, with subsidiary Oxuniprint in Kidlington the last vestige of its rich printing history, working for clients including Oxford University and the NHS, as well as supplementary material for OUP itself.

Little, if anything, is actually going to change for books published by OUP.

If your main business partner (so to speak) won’t give you their business, it’s really hard to stay in business. At the same time, just as the economics of the publishing industry have concentrated power in the hands of a small number of retailers, distributors, and publishing houses, they’ve concentrated power among an increasingly shrinking number of printers, who are handling the bulk of the print trade worldwide.

Oxuniprint’s closure was condemned by Unite, which blamed OUP’s increasing outsourcing abroad and its failure to take up the government’s furlough scheme.

“This is the final chapter in a distinguished printing history at the OUP, but we feel that there could have been a different outcome if OUP bosses had not been hell-bent on pursuing their outsourcing agenda,” said Unite regional officer Kevin Whiffen. “There is not much loyalty to the centuries-old printing heritage, and those who have given their working lives to it.”

So if you’re going to be upset about the latest harbinger of doom in the book industry, don’t let it be any mistaken idea about a shift away from printed books to digital ones. It’s actually a much grimmer story about global consolidation being used to break local labor.

In short, it is a story about Amazon. Just not in the way you might have originally thought.

You’ll notice that the newsletter has a new design this week! This is something we’ve been working on for a while; the actual work was done by Tara Slade, who somehow incorporated my crude, Pixelmator-made designs into something new and professional. Thanks Tara!

I’ve been writing and reporting about Amazon’s labor issues, from warehouse workers and delivery drivers to content moderators and cloud programmers. It’s my belief that as much as Amazon is a harbinger of change in how we shop and consume media and other goods using the internet as a go-between, it’s equally significant for showing how work is changing in the 21st century.

Above: Amazon employees Traci Washalla and Derek Palmer. Any time the paper of record has photos of your employees animated with fancy spinning graphics, you’re in for a bad time. (Photo by The New York Times)

Of course, this week, two big stories hit about Amazon. The first is a well-promoted, well-reported, triple-bylined (Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, Grace Ashford), interactive, multimedia, push-to-mobile showpiece festival from The New York Times titled “Inside Amazon’s Employment Machine” (another title used is “The Amazon That Customers Don’t See”). The focus is on a single distribution center in Staten Island, called JFK8 for its proximity to New York City’s JFK Airport, over the year-plus since the onset of the pandemic.

The stories it tells (of Amazon and its employees struggling to regain footing during the pandemic, of systems that treat workers callously by reducing them to their expected optimal output, and mid-level executives who feel conflicted about the systems they’ve helped create) are not unexpected if you know this genre well at all. What’s unusual is the level of detail, the access to documents, the number of current and former Amazon employees who were willing to speak on the record, and how it ties personal anecdotes to company (and increasingly industry) policy.

Here’s a revealing observation (forgive the long quote; the emphasis in bold is mine):

When [Derrick] Palmer last sought a promotion, in early 2020, he was among 382 people who applied for the position. Though he didn’t know it, the odds were steep by design, an outgrowth of Mr. Bezos’ management philosophies.

Amazon intentionally limited upward mobility for hourly workers, said Mr. Niekerk, the former H.R. vice president who retired in 2016 after nearly 17 years at the company. Dave Clark, then head of operations, had shot down his proposal around 2014 to create more leadership roles for hourly employees, similar to noncommissioned officers in the military, he recalled.

Instead, Mr. Clark, who is now chief executive of Amazon’s consumer business, wanted to double down on hiring “wicked smart” frontline managers straight out of college, Mr. Niekerk said. By contrast, more than 75 percent of managers in Walmart’s U.S. stores started as hourly employees. Following a pattern across Amazon, JFK8 promoted 220 people last year among its more than 5,000 employees, a rate that is less than half of Walmart’s.

Amazon’s founder didn’t want hourly workers to stick around for long, viewing “a large, disgruntled” work force as a threat, Mr. Niekerk recalled. Company data showed that most employees became less eager over time, he said, and Mr. Bezos believed that people were inherently lazy. “What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need.” That conviction was embedded throughout the business, from the ease of instant ordering to the pervasive use of data to get the most out of employees.

So guaranteed wage increases stopped after three years, and Amazon provided incentives for low-skilled employees to leave. Every year, Mr. Palmer saw signs go up offering associates thousands of dollars to resign, and as he entered JFK8 each morning, he passed a classroom for free courses to train them in other fields.

Mr. Agboka, the H.R. leader, said while the company offered training and careers at Amazon to those interested, it was proud to also provide people short-term employment for the “seasons and periods of time” they need.

And later:

[David] Niekerk said Mr. Bezos drove the push to remove humans from the hiring process, saying Amazon’s need for workers would be so great, the applications had to be “a check-the-box screen.” Mr. Bezos also saw automated assessments as a consistent, unbiased way to find motivated workers, Mr. Niekerk said.

Amazon boasted about the jobs it created, calling itself a force for growth and sustenance. What the numbers masked was that many workers cycled out of Amazon within months or even days.

That’s the system that’s being created in industrial (and not just industrial) labor today: not careers but gigs, with better pay and benefits than the worst jobs, but also even less room for advancement or scrutiny on how and where you’re hired. The assumption is that low-level employees will cycle out, even if serious injuries, chronic humiliations, or (unlikely, but) a global pandemic forces you out of the workforce sooner than expected.

This high rate of churn is somewhat paradoxically considered, from a top executive’s perspective, a good thing: the lost costs paid for worker acquisition and training are more than made up for by making it difficult for long-term workers to socialize, build up relationships with each other, and organize (formally or informally) to transform the job.

Or, as Vox’s Jason Del Rey writes in another story this week [see below], “Amazon corporate managers have goals for “unregretted attrition” — basically a percentage of their staff that should leave the company each year, either voluntarily or by being forced out.” It’s just like Adam Serwer put it in a different context: the cruelty is the point.

But if you’re an Amazon employee responsible for directly training and managing those workers, or thinking down the road at what might happen when and if you’ve exhausted a small town’s supply of blue-collar workers, you might feel differently.

Let’s suppose you’re charged with hiring Black employees to work at Amazon, up and down the organizational chart. Amazon’s reputation isn’t great for any of its employees at any level, and I think it’s fair to say that both Big Tech and Big Blue Collar jobs, like most professions, have done better by white men than they have anyone else. Again, here too, Amazon is pushing uphill, but Del Rey does an excellent job getting sources on the record to show that here, too, Amazon’s corporate policies and HR culture actually help keep the company from doing right by its employees.

The story here synthesizes complaints from five different lawsuits brought by women of color against Amazon for racial discrimination in recent months, but it goes further:

Over the past few months, Recode has interviewed more than 30 current and former Amazon employees who detailed allegations of racial bias and discrimination on the job — and many of them said the company’s HR department was part of the problem. 

More than a dozen of those sources, all of whom have worked in diversity, equity, and inclusion roles inside Amazon, told Recode that they believe Amazon’s HR leader, Beth Galetti, who is white, was for years one of the main barriers to Amazon becoming an equitable workplace for employees of all races. 

In particular, the Vox story quotes employees in charge of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at Amazon who say that the head of HR has made it impossible for them to do their jobs. And one of the five lawsuit plaintiffs, Pearl Thomas, was a business planner for Amazon’s HR department.

Again, this is upsetting but not unheard of. Far, far too many contemporary human resources departments are constructed to protect the company and powerful people within it than they are the employees they are in principle bound to help. But the analysis in this story suggests there is nevertheless a sense that Amazon is ahead of the curve in deliberately creating a workplace development designed to increase churn, prioritize operational success over employee happiness, promotion, or retention, and push people out who might agitate for change.

In DEI jobs, much like on the warehouse floor, Amazon seems to consistently prefer less experience to more. After a renewed focus and some progress made on DEI efforts last year, following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis and worldwide protests against racial inequities, Amazon seemed to backslide:

When Amazon’s former head of the global diversity team, Elizabeth Nieto, left the company in early 2021, Galetti replaced her, at least on an interim basis, with a longtime vice president in charge of a large technical team focused on recruiting. But the actual day-to-day management of the diversity team shifted to one of the employment lawyers who had just a few months earlier joined the diversity organization — she had no other prior DEI experience. (Amazon has two structures for diversity work at the company. The majority of diversity employees work within different business divisions like Amazon Web Services or Amazon Studios, while a smaller group of employees work on a central global diversity team under human resources and Galetti that’s intended to work on company-wide initiatives versus division-specific ones.)

Sources told Recode that once the employment attorney took over the diversity team, she moved members of its research, analytics, and recruiting units to other divisions of the company. An internal memo announcing the restructuring said the departing employees would still be “closely tied” to the central diversity team, but the shake-up was nonetheless a shock to DEI employees across Amazon.

Then, just two days after Recode notified Amazon about the content of this story, the company announced yet another reshuffling: The employment lawyer who had been the day-to-day leader of the diversity team on an interim basis was now moving with her staff off the diversity team. The new employment lawyer is becoming Galetti’s pseudo-chief of staff, according to sources — a role known inside Amazon as a technical adviser or “shadow.” With this change, the group’s actual DEI experts would remain on the diversity team but begin reporting to a new temporary boss until a permanent vice president is hired to head up DEI work across Amazon.

Even before this latest overhaul, around two dozen members of Amazon’s central diversity team had either left the team or been pushed out over the past two years, according to sources. Today, the team has fewer than 10 employees, sources say. 

“You can’t say you’re committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion and then start dismantling the DEI team,” a person who has worked in a diversity role at Amazon told Recode.

There are clear common themes to this range of stories. As Shira Ovide of the NYT wrote for a follow-up newsletter, “Amazon Is Brilliant. Why Not at H.R.?” This is posed as a contradiction, and it probably should be. But I want to unpack it a little bit.

First, it seems clear that at least among some executives and managers at Amazon (including, the reporting suggests, Jeff Bezos and his inner circle), high churn, arbitrary (but almost always numerical) metrics for success, and a grim, possibly cruel assessment of human nature is not some unfortunate accident, but a business strategy. The point is to privilege business operations over everything else. Maybe this approach to employee promotion and retention is too chaotic and self-destructive to survive. Maybe it brings too much unwanted attention from news organizations and politicians. But at least right now, Amazon is doing this on purpose. They’re not just overprivileged screw-ups who don’t get it. They have a plan. (NB: This is probably worse.)

The other thing is that among Amazon’s peers, whether in tech or in logistics or retail, none of this is wild. This is all awfully close to The Way Things Are Done Now. Ask your non-tech, white collar peers, folks who work in media, or at a hospital, or a university, what their experiences have been like dealing with HR, following a workplace injury, or navigating upper management as a Black woman? Now try Wal-Mart, Costco, or FedEx.

Sorry to keep beating this drum, but Amazon might be an egregious abuser, AND might also just be slightly ahead of the curve.

(This is actually way Karen Weise’s response to Shira Ovide in the last newsletter is so interesting: it suggests that other industries might have some ways to mitigate the problems Amazon is facing.)

Are there successful companies that manage hourly workers differently than Amazon?

Costco’s chief executive testified to Congress that its hourly workers tend to have long tenures. That’s a source of pride for Costco.

Walmart is often criticized for its labor practices and it generally pays less than Amazon, but it says that more than 75 percent of managers at its U.S. stores started as hourly employees. It’s extremely challenging to make that jump at Amazon.

Sam’s Club, which is part of Walmart, trains workers to do multiple jobs in a store. That’s partly to keep people feeling fresh in their jobs and learning new skills. Amazon warehouse employees might do the same type of work for 10-hour shifts every day.

I do think, however, that the most likely way Amazon’s labor practices change is through a mix of internal and external pressure: labor organization, news stories, and legislation. If done well, this could have the added benefit of not just changing Amazon, but an entire slew of industries where Amazon is looked to as a leader.

But in Bessemer, the union was not approved at the ballot box. Two solid stories that have appeared in the past few days that describe how and why this happened are CNN’s overview, including several interviews with anonymous voters in that election, and Labor Notes’s interview with Joshua Fuller, one of the lead organizers from RWDSU, the union seeking recognition in the election. Together, they describe a workplace strongly motivated to unionize, but also one facing both procedural hurdles and a well-funded, impossible-to-ignore campaign by Amazon to defeat the unionization effort.

There will be court challenges arguing that Amazon illegally interfered with the election. There will also be a renewed push to pass the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act in Congress, a change that could make it easier to organize other Amazon workplaces. And other unions and labor activists, like the Teamsters (who are organizing delivery drivers in Iowa) and the SEIU, are proposing using different tactics against Amazon that are less dependent on winning union elections — a battle unions never won, despite great efforts, against Amazon’s predecessor, Walmart:

The idea is to combine workplace actions like walkouts (the ground war) with pressure on company executives through public relations campaigns that highlight labor conditions and enlist the support of public figures (the air war). The Service Employees International Union used the strategy to organize janitors beginning in the 1980s, and to win gains for fast-food workers in the past few years, including wage increases across the industry.

For its part, Amazon’s leadership seems to be aware that bad PR and public fights with politicians could leave it vulnerable going forward (which is one thing that made its social media strategy during the Bessemer election so bewildering — that move seemed likely to backfire, and difficult to sustain, Walmart-style).

In his final annual letter to shareholders, founder/chairman/outgoing CEO Jeff Bezos writes that Amazon needs to repair any perception (by the public or its employees) that the company is an unsafe or unhappy place to work:

If we want to be Earth’s Best Employer, we shouldn’t settle for 94% of employees saying they would recommend Amazon to a friend as a place to work. We have to aim for 100%. And we’ll do that by continuing to lead on wages, on benefits, on upskilling opportunities, and in other ways that we will figure out over time.

But the message here is twofold: sure, Amazon would like to reduce workplace injuries and employee unhappiness — but the company’s leadership would like to do that on its own, as an executive measure led by Bezos and his team of experts, not as part of a political process or labor negotiation.

Later in the shareholder letter, Bezos cautions against Amazon behaving like other companies, comparing a reversion to the mean/default to death itself. But does that mean that Amazon shouldn’t behave like 20th centry Big Labor (whether the Big Three or Walmart), or that it should continue to confound expectations that Amazon itself has helped to set?

Until and unless the fundamentals of union organization change in the United States, the actor with the most control over the future of labor at Amazon’s warehouses — and not just there — remains Amazon itself. And that means our future is a little less predictable, a little more bewildering, and (despite Bezos’s protestations), fundamentally more geared to benefit Amazon’s leadership than its warehouse workers or even its customers.

This next week, I have a series of posts planned on labor at Amazon, starting with the warehouse workers, delivery drivers, and third-party employees, and how that labor continues to change as Amazon continues to dominate the retail and infrastructure business. My plan is to collect some threads on where things have been going, so readers of this newsletter can better understand where they might be headed. I hope you’ll enjoy them.

For the last year, I’ve disabled new paid subscribers to this newsletter, since I wasn’t posting often and didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with the subscriber list going forward. HOWEVER, that does not disable autorenewed subscriptions, and many of my first wave of paid subscribers from back in January 2019 ha…

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I’ve been writing about the history and future of media and technology on the web for about twenty years now — earlier, if you count some stuff that might be considered juvenilia. I’ve been writing about it professionally for well over ten years. Over that time, I’ve accumulated a pretty extensive body of writing that is, well, all over the place.

I mean, some of you were there from the beginning. (Maybe five of you.) Some encountered me along the way, or when I started writing for what used to be your favorite publication (unless you think I’m the one who ruined it). Some of you became my friends after most of my public writing was over. And some of you just got referred to this newsletter, or just graduated from college, or you’re not even sure why you’re reading this or why anyone might put any weight into what I think about this stuff. None of you remember everything. (Even I don’t remember everything.)

And now I’m wondering whether it’s time to gather the limbs of Osiris, so to speak: take all of that writing and put it back into one place, where anybody who wants to see what it was like for a person who was studying and reporting on how all of this happened while it was happening.

It’s also a chance to give something different to you, my readers; something other than my latest take on what Amazon just did. To dig up the past, and make it new.

To that end, what I’d like to do is put together an anthology of my writing, and make it available to anyone who wants it. I’ve been thinking about this since 2014, at least, and I have a lot of thoughts about how I’d like to do it.

What I’m wondering about is how best to bring it to you, my readers. What do you want to pay for it? Do you want it to be more like this newsletter (reader-supported but available free to anyone who wants it), or more like a fine printed book, exclusive and eternal? Of course I bet some of you want both, or neither, or something in between. Some of you want audio, or a podcast, or would rather I did a completely different kind of project. This is your chance to tell me what you want most.

I’m also curious about what you think about what I’m doing right now. I’ve been back at the Amazon Chronicles for a few months now, on something of a reduced schedule, but I would like to change that soon. I’m thinking about experimenting with different media, other platforms, and in general doing a soft relaunch to welcome new paid subscribers (while still, I think, keeping most things free for everybody). Here, too, I need to know more about what you want to see from me going forward.

With all that in mind, I have done the unthinkable: I made a survey. If and when you have time, please answer it. It’s just about all multiple choice (with some checkboxes and optional short or long answer). I’m not collecting your data, but Google might be doing things with it I don’t understand. If you’d rather tell me yourself what you’d like to see instead of filling out a form, please give the survey a quick read and just email me back to tell me what’s on your mind.

Here is the thing itself: Tim’s Book and Reader Survey for Fans and Friends. (Substack might scramble that URL for its own tracking, so this is what it is: https://forms.gle/kgo7CxhAc5h55KpK7 )

And as always, if you have something else you want to tell me about what I’m doing or not doing, or tips to give me about what’s happening with Amazon or anything else at the intersection of media and tech (or anything else I’ve professed an interest in talking about), just reply to this message. I’ll always read it, and as likely as not, I’ll send you a note back. We’re in this together, all of us.

Thanks for helping me out.

Tim Carmody