t byfield on 3 Feb 2001 06:09:55 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> amazon: "slaves to wall street" |
geert@xs4all.nl (Sat 02/03/01 at 09:55 AM +1100): > (It's hard to keep track about all the job losses announced this week. A few > months ago there were reports about Amazon undermining the right of it's > employees to unionize. Now they are fired, specially the Seattle customer > service department, one of the oldest parts of Amazon. Instead, Amazon is > opening a new distribution center in New Delhi. The question now is when a > customer boycot will set in. Or is Amazon still cool? A less primitive, more > sophisticated online book distributor would certainly have good chances. amazon has weathered several 'boycotts' and scandals so far-- over privacy issues, over suppressing anti-scientology books, over the one-click patent, over unionization, etc, etc. it's hard to imagine why a layoff would precipitate a boycott, in fact it's totally impossible to imagine such a trajectory. what, are 'consumers' going to rise up in solidarity with their laid-off compadres? heh, i'm *so* sure. and it's not like amazon customer service was famous for its pleasant work conditions. see this article published ~3 years ago in the _seattle weekly_: http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/9828/features-howard.shtml but what interested me about your message was more the implied claim that the or a primary motivation in buying from amazon was a 'cool' factor. dunno about that. i don't buy books from amazon, and more generally don't spend a lot of time trying to sniff out the 'best deal,' for the simple reason that actively supporting local shops is well worth the 'extra' cost. i doubt that's normal in ideological terms; but the objective behavior of buying locally probably is normal, so my ideological just- ification isn't especially interesting. if it were to become an ideologically motivated tendency on a mass scale, then that might be interesting. but only then would 'coolness' become a salient factor. buying over the net is, if anything, utterly banal. that much was clear, well, from the very beginning i'd hope; but failing that it was quite clear at least a year ago, when the pop media were dutifully whining about the failures of e-commerce, about how poor little junior wasn't getting his e- ordered toys in time xmas day and other such consumer crises. so, after a certain point, this fascination with numbers--who's clicking on what, how much they're spending, where the NASDAQ's at, etc--is really just a posh sort of size-queenism. even the dotcom media has totally sussed that. for example, _feed_ ran a parody a few weeks ago with a spoof in which the amazon of 2004 had been reduced to flogging a piece of wood with a nail in it and a potato: http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1573 the best spoof of the lot by far was this one: http://www.feedmag.com/daily/parstreet/ Let's look at what happened Thursday. The hedgies, mostly controlled by the Yakuza, are bearish on the Cigdaq. They're buying all the puts they can on Chinese Cigarettes (CHCG:Cigdaq - news - boards) on the bet that the CIGG downturn isn't just profit taking. Add to that Abby Cohen's analysis that the Yemenese tanker that lost contact somewhere in the Pacific had been hijacked by Burmese bandits, and it's clear that the Still-Smokeable Cigarette Butts (FCBT:Cigdaq - news - boards) boomlet can't last forever. that one collided with a joke i made on another list about the possibility of a LUDDAQ exchange, which elecited other such sug- gestions--SPUDDAQ, etc--for stock markets that catered to (what i regard as) the inevitable blacklash against 'rational' markets, once people grok the fact that they themselves are the middlemen they've been busily putting out of business. duh. how 'cool' fits into this is beyond me. but i digress. what interested me about your note was how (imo) it quite misses the fundamental point that amazon is *entirely* in keeping with the whole f---ing point of the web, which was more or less to make chasing footnotes down *convenient*. boring but true: read something, see a citation, and jump to it without having to haul your bum to the library. with amazon (and other online booksellers) the only modification to this model is that it involves an explicit financial transaction and the delivery of an object. from berners-lee to bezos: la plus ça change... does it really matter so much that a 'library' is 'free' (i.e., supported by taxation or philanthropy) and a 'bookstore' isn't 'free' (i.e., is supported by commerce)? i have a hard time get- ting my knickers in a twist over that distinction, given the fact that publishers generally aren't in the business of giving their products away for free; and nor are the vast majority of writers in that business either, at least not by choice. to lose sight of that cumulative chain of financial exchanges--say, by fixating on this or that aspect of 'amazon'--is to devolve into a critique from the standpoint of the consumer. hence, perhaps, your sugges- tion about boycotts. and you wrote: > A less primitive, more sophisticated online book distributor > would certainly have good chances. there are many. and, for the most part, they don't stand an snow- ball's chance in hell of having any impact whatsoever. i spent years working in and around books, from driving academic remain- ders around with a forklift to editing übertheoretical blabla. afaict, online transactions involving Physical Books has been a profoundly trivial factor in the the changing economics of pub- lishing. agents were already kings, and advances were forking into spectacular amounts or pathetic pittances; small publishers were already screwed long before the net came along because of changes in tax laws regarding inventory; indy booksellers were already in their death rattles, too; the conglomeratization of publishing was a well-established trend; and book distribution was already dominated by a few megaconcerns. so what's amazon actually done? it hasn't even pioneered the vertical integration of distribution through retail--that was already going on with the rise of national booksellers that gravitated toward suburban malls. the only thing it's really done is to make that vertical integration *visible* to the consumer. and, like the web, that's basically a good thing. fine, make it 'less primitive' and 'more sophisticated' (btw, what on earth does that mean?)--no big diff. what's remarkable, i think, is how *little* effect the net has had on the book industry. cheers, t _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold