Amazon
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Big Technology
Amazon delivery drivers and liberal city dwellers vote together. But for how long?
In his new book, Fulfillment, Alec MacGillis writes of an Amazon distribution center in Sparrows Point, Maryland that sits on land once occupied by a Bethlehem Steel plant. The story underscores how dramatically the U.S. economy has transformed in recent years. Instead of making things, many of our biggest companies now distribute things made elsewhere. We’ve moved from an economy of production to one of dispersion.
The shift from factory to fulfillment work is core to the American story right now. For the American worker, a factory job like one at Bethlehem Steel was dangerous, but it paid $30 to…
BIG TECHNOLOGY
‘The main thing is you just never underestimate Amazon’
Last week, Amazon announced it would expand Amazon Care — its employee-only health care service — to the public. The service lets you chat with nurses, move to video, arrange home visits, and get medication prescribed. Amazon delivers the medicine.
The company began piloting Care internally in September 2019, and it’s now opening it up to employers in Washington state, who can offer it to their workers as a benefit. Some already seem eager to jump in. “We’re in discussions with a number of companies,” an Amazon spokesperson told me.
‘Alexa, Call Mom!’ watches, listens, and exploits your grief for capitalistic gain
I live in the curious intersection of art, design, and code. For the past two years, I’ve worked with a small group of artists to develop Alexa, Call Mom!, an immersive storytelling installation using Amazon’s Alexa platform. Our project is far from the type of third-party apps you typically see for Amazon’s voice assistant — “Alexa, Play Jeopardy!” and “Alexa, Ask Pikachu to Talk” are two popular examples — as it invites users to engage with Alexa in a way that’s just a bit… off.
Alexa, Call Mom! leads participants through an immersive séance experience. It is a parodic reimaging…
Big Technology
A conversation with Recode’s Jason Del Rey
OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts — edited for length and clarity — with notable figures in and around the tech industry.
To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.
Jeff Bezos is resigning as Amazon CEO. And because 2021 is the craziest news year on record, we mostly haven’t stopped to consider this seismic story and what it means for the business world. …
General Intelligence
Andy Jassy is a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence
On July 1, Amazon will have a new CEO. Andy Jassy, who is replacing Jeff Bezos, helped build the company’s cloud business from scratch, cementing its servers as a cornerstone of the internet.
But not all of Jassy’s work has been inside Amazon. The incoming CEO is also a commissioner on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which was created by Congress in 2018 to advise on how best to use A.I. for war and defense.
The commission is now approaching its final report, which will be submitted to Congress as official recommendations from the 15 commissioners. The…
The company’s $62 million FTC settlement shows ‘corporate crime pays’
One of the world’s richest companies was accused of systematically shortchanging some of its lowest-paid, most precarious workers. It got sued by the U.S. government. It eventually agreed to pay back the money it had pocketed. And it came out billions richer in the end.
That’s the ugly bottom line of Tuesday’s news that Amazon has agreed to pay $62 million to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to settle charges that it essentially pocketed customer tips intended for contracted Amazon Flex drivers — conduct that FTC commissioners called “outrageous.” The money represents the amount it diverted from those drivers, and…
In another era, Parler would have owned its servers—and remained online
When Amazon Web Services decided to stop hosting the alt-right social network Parler last week following the insurrection at the Capitol, it looked like the site was doomed to go offline.
Migrating an app successfully between cloud providers, and ensuring it works on the other side as expected, is hard enough. But moving the vast amounts of data associated with a social network (likely hundreds of terabytes of information) would be agonizingly slow, taking far longer than the 24-hour warning Amazon gave Parler.
Unfortunately for Parler, virtually every other vendor was ditching them as well. With cloud providers rejecting them…
’Guaranteed not a hack’
Before Parler went offline Monday morning, a hacker reportedly downloaded all the data that users had shared to the platform, including images, video, and deleted posts mentioning the assault on the Capitol last week, Motherboard reported.
Now, some Trump supporters who have fled to MeWe and Telegram are insisting the hack is “fake news,” and are baselessly claiming it was coordinated by Twitter and Amazon Web Services to dissuade people from using Parler, in the event that it returns. …
As small businesses closed and layoffs hit, Amazon expanded its power — despite a string of crises and worker uprisings
When the Covid crisis went into full swing in March, two trend lines emerged almost immediately: Small businesses were forced to close down, and Amazon started hiring. At the time, I worried that as the pandemic raged we would see an accelerated consolidation of power among the tech companies that rely on part-time gig labor and e-commerce to gain advantage while everyone else hemorrhaged jobs. That decent jobs at vital local institutions would be traded for precarious jobs at a handful of online markets and platforms. I worried that 2020 would be the year of Amazonification.
With independent businesses shuttering…
Earlier this year, OneZero senior editor Sarah Kessler talked to independent sellers about how they operate on Amazon’s “artisanal” Handmade platform. They revealed that it’s a major challenge: Amazon does little to support them, and their bespoke offerings are forced to compete against mass-produced items sold by large manufacturers.
All of this came to mind on the occasion of Amazon’s Prime Day event, which actually stretches across two days this year. The Raven Book Store, a shop in Lawrence, Kansas, and the publisher of How to Resist Amazon and Why, took aim at the company’s promotional material — which touts…
