Amazon & The End of Civilization
As I read the current claims and counterclaims, defenses and attacks circling Amazon and pointing towards their working conditions, I can’t help but notice that a line of reasoning as obvious as it is decisive is missing; decisive in the sense that if we were to focus upon it all the other conversations would be destined to disappear.
Let’s start by getting one small matter out of the way. It is inescapable — whether you like it or not — that no matter what goes on at Amazon the folks working there are choosing to work there for reasons that should be obvious to us all. They get paid well, often really well. It is a challenging environment that demands performance and creativity. You get to feel like you are part of something big, and you get to push yourself very hard.
And from the standpoint of Amazon, whatever they are doing seems to work for what they want to do.
Within this context, all the arguments back and forth strike me as confused and absurd. The provocative question instead is this: what does Amazon tell us about ourselves. Why are we so in love with the game of extraction, and why are we so willing to continue to create and recreate the plantation — over and over again?
We love companies like Amazon. We love how they pursue efficiency with a zeal that is uncompromising. We love how they have mastered the inner workings of the market to such a degree that they can extract money from almost everywhere. We love their technology, and we love better still to believe that the problems they are working on are the biggest and boldest problems that one could be working on.
But this love is like a teenagers love; full of passion and conviction yet a bit loose on the long-term viability of the relationship. What I am pointing to here is a critical distinction that we all ought to ponder long and hard.
What are the implications when the best educated and most ambitious members of a society are committed, heart and soul, to the job of making our lives more efficient? What is not being imagined, created, and invented in the world when such potent individuals are willing to sacrifice everything to create this machinery of efficiency? What happens to the very real and concrete problems we need to solve? You know the list: climate change, water and food scarcity, wealth inequality, top-soil devastation, and on and on.
Further still, what about asking the most difficult of questions? Is all this efficiency, cheapness, labor extraction, pyramidal wealth creation really the best we can do in 2015, let alone sustainable?
The free-market was created to liberate human beings from the tyranny of monarchy and feudalism. It was created to liberate the masses from poverty. To these external ends, the market has served a great purpose.
Yet, despite a million other options, we can’t seem to help ourselves as we — in a surreal act of negative alchemy — insist on living as if things have not changed in 500 years.
We continue to work in service to the king. The king’s name changes, as does the location of his kingdom; but the game is the same. Meanwhile, after we get the stock option bonus, the ipad from China in a day and walk around for a while holding to the not-so-compelling story that we are solving truly historical problems, we still have to live in this world. We still have to answer to this moment in time.
Is the work we are doing really building the world we truly want? Is this the best we can do, for ourselves and for our kids? Do these choices represent courage, and is our way of being in fact sustainable: from the hours we work, to the jobs we do, to the things we are driven to create?
Emerson, that solid and deeply American thinker, once wrote:
Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe.
Lest we allow ourselves to be confused by this debate around Amazon, we ought to consider these words from Emerson. The poles of the Universe are straining now under the weight of our very human and “stupendous antagonism.” We are living in an extremely strange and heavy world.
So as we race, laptop in hands, to our next deadline, perhaps a moment’s reflection is in order.
Why do I continue to be in service to the long-dead King?
And what else is there, beyond the race towards efficiency? What would the world look like if our professional commitments were to transition to the creation of something eminently more imaginative and dare I say…historically relevant?
Imagine, for a moment if those highly talented folks at Amazon, led by their authentically daring and capable leader, were to pour their energies into systematically solving the greatest challenges the world has to offer. More radical still, what if they were to discover in the process that such a pivot in focus actually yielded great economic return?
That they could in fact build a new civilization — a new world — instead of merely doubling down on the one we currently have.
