Amazon and me

As mentioned in the introductory post[1], I want to examine my

relationship with Amazon. They stand out as kind of an exceptional

case for me amongst Sterling's "Big Five". I don't think I've ever

given Apple a single cent, nothing they do interests me in the least.

I'm not sure how people feel comfortable buying things from them when

every design decision they make underscores how they view their

customers as nothing more than gullible piles of cash to be harvested.

Laptops covered in exotic ports so you have to buy a fistfull of white

plastic dongles to connect to even the most overpoweringly bog-basic

universal standard connectors; phones with non-removable batteries;

hell, phones now without 3.5mm headphone jacks so you have to buy

Bluetooth phones. Blech. And, to be honest, I'm not sure why

Microsoft were included in the list. Perhaps Sterling was feeling

generous, perhaps I'm missing something (I know Windows phones exist,

but I've never seen an actual human owner and user of one), but MS

seem to me to be on the verge of irrelevance. There are plenty of

people who give no thought to technology ethics who doesn't use MS

products anymore. And Facebook and Google are the obvious problematic

giants. I know I don't like them and I know why and I have been

actively taking steps for a long time to involve them in less and less

of my online life. But Amazon? I don't really put them in the same

mental basket as the others, and far from trying to cut them out of my

life, heck, I actually kind of like them (more on this later).

While preparing this post it occurred to me that I kind of

misconstrued the Big Five list. It's not intended as a list of evil

internet companies that people who want to "keep their hands clean"

should avoid. But because 4 of the 5 companies on it are companies

I think of as exactly that, the whole purpose of the list kind of

twisted in my mind. The Big Five are companies who have used

internet technology to obtain very powerful monopolies by providing

some kind of "infrastructure as a service", and since Sterling sees

the IoT as primarily an attempt by other big companies to try to

achieve this same kind of dominance "in the real world", they are

kind of intended as case studies.

And just like Google and Facebook aren't on the list because of their

public facing fronts (search, social media) but instead because of

their actual business (surveillence), Amazon aren't on there because

of the kinds of thing that I think of them as providing (again,

more on this later), but rather because of some gargantuan

behind-the-scenes thing, which in this case is logistics. And I

freely admit that I know nothing and, to be honest, don't care an

awful lot about logistics. And I really had no idea that Amazon was

a big player in that field. When I lived in the US and thus used

Amazon regularly (I had a Prime account, which entitled me to free

two-day shipping on anything and everything), I recall the vast

majority of my packages coming via very traditional means like UPS

or something like that. However, with some quick web seraches it is

pretty apparent that Amazon is, in fact, successfully "disrupting"

logistics (see https://logistics.amazon.com/). Actually, perhaps

this should have been obvious, I did hear all the stuff about

Amazon drone deliveries a little while back. And since this is

arguably the most "real world" activity that the Big Five engage in,

this is probably an especially important case study for IoT

purposes. But it's well outside the realm of my expertese or,

really, the scope of this phlog.

So, the rest of this post is going to be a bunch of stuff I wrote

• before* I properly grasped all of this and was thinking naively

about my interactions with the public face of Amazon. Which is not

worthless, afterall, I would like to optimise all my interactions

with big companies for ethicality, not just my computing-related

ones. I have no idea how interesting what follows is to anybody

else, but since I made a post promising to talk about this I feel

obliged to upload something.

I said earlier that whereas I actively dislike and happily try to

avoid the rest of the Big Five, I actually kind of like Amazon, and

it's true. It pains me a bit to say that, since I'm so interested

in a minimal, simplistic, sustainable, frugal lifestyle. How can I

like a massive online store that sells huge piles of crap nobody

really needs? Well, it's not because I like shopping for the sake

of shopping. It's because I have lots of unusual hobbies and

interests, many of which I enjoy at least in part because they

are opposed to materialistic consumption, in that they involve

repairing or restoring and using old things that many would consider

obsolete and throw out. And because of these interests, I often

need to buy really quite obscure odds and ends; unusual cables or

adaptors, special lubricants or cleaning agents, oddly sized

batteries, weird tools. And the simple true is, that Amazon has

• all* this shit, no matter what, and it all comes with a huge number

of reviews, so you can research your choice carefully. Amazon makes

what little shopping I do engage in as painless and efficient as

possible.

Let me assure you that having niche hobbies without access to Amazon

• sucks*. An era ended recently when early this year (or maybe very

late laste?), amazon.com.au appeared. Yes, we finally got Amazon,

maybe two years after we finally got Netflix. Before this, there was

effectively no Amazon in Australia or New Zealand. You could order

from the American or UK Amazons, but they were very selective about

what they would ship, and shipping was invariably very expensive and

took weeks, making the whole thing so unappealing that almost nobody

bothers. And because of this, when you need something unusual you

have to waste hours of your life searching through a long series of

small speciality stores to find the things you need. The range is

a tiny fraction of what you would find at Amazon, the prices are

higher because small speciality stores need higher profit margins to

survive, and there are very few or often no reviews of anything so

you never know if you're about to waste time and money on crap.

It's frustrating and it's limiting. Ironically, I have found that

having access to a mega-store like Amazon actually facilitates weird

and wonderful mind-expanding hobbies as an alternative to mindless

consumerism.

That said, I am aware that there is plenty of controversy around

Amazon, relating to tax issues, treatment of their warehouse

workers, etc. I won't pretend that I'm okay with this, I suppose I

just put it in a different mental basket, as a case of "big greedy

companies being big greedy companies". It's nothing new and it's

nothing specific to the internet. I probably should make more of

an effort to disengage myself from this kind of thing, but let's be

frank, if I'm going to avoid doing business with companies that

treat their workers poorly and who try to avoid paying as much tax

as they're supposed to, I would probably have bigger and more

pressing concerns than Amazon. Besides, I am not using them as

much these days as I used to. There is no amazon.fi, but I can and

have used amazon.de and amazon.co.uk a few times since moving here.

It's more convenient than it is from AU/NZ, but not as convenient

as it was in the US. I don't have a Prime account, and now that

my hobby bench is more or less fully kitted out, I think future

purchases will be relatively rate.

All of the above applies to Amazon in their capacity as an online

store, which is my default mental model of them, but there is more

to consider.

There is Amazon as the provider and ruler of the Kindle ecosystem.

As mentioned, I own and use a Kindle. I will admit to being

conflicted about this. I bought the thing because I move overseas

quite often for work reasons, and this lifestyle is totally

incompatible with accumulating physical books, which is something

that I used to do a lot of. I guess that's a bit of a cop out, in

that I could have compensated by buying cheap used books and

reselling them after reading, or relying more heavily on libraries

(although now that I'm in a non-English speaking country the range

of English books at the library is diminished, although still

better than you might expect). And I know that Amazon no doubt

mine the data about the books I read - I convinced myself that

this was not a big problem because prior to buying the Kindle I had

bought a heavy percentage of my physical books from them anyway,

so they weren't learning anything new. And yeah, the books are

DRMed, and that's nasty. Despite the fact that I kind of feel

bad about owning the thing, at the end of the day, I do own it

now, and the thing cannot be unmade, so I feel an intense personal

responsibility to ensure that it is used for as long as possible

and then properly disposed of, to reap maximum benefit from the

extensive environmental damage already done to manufacture it and

to make sure that as little further damage is done as possibl.e

And the best way to achieve this is maintain to-the-grave control

of it myself. Of course, I could probably jailbreak or root (or

whatever the Kindle-appropriate term is) the thing and use it to do

non-DRMey things with FOSS software. But I do find using it for

it's intended purpose so convenient that I worry about doing

anything that might endanger that use (and I don't imagine that

Amazon would have any qualms whatsoever about making sure that

devices not running the stock firmware cannot access the Amazon

store). So, yeah, I guess no way around it, I'm sacrificing some

principles for convenience here. I do think the damage done by

participating in this kind of ecosystem is far less than that done

by participating in those of Facebook and Google, for what little

it's worth.

There is also Amazon as a provider of cloud services, in the guise

of AWS, and I'm a user of this too. Specifically, I use their

"Route 53" DNS service. When I first began hosting my own stuff

online, I got free DNS hosting from an old friend's internet

business. This was back in the days when I used a physical server

in my own home and was hosting from behind an ordinary old DSL

connection. Once I moved to using VPSes, I suddenly had IPv6

addresses that I wanted to use. For whatever reason, my friend

was not set up to handle AAAA records, so I went to Amazon have

used them ever since. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I have no

idea at all what is involved in providing my own nameservers, but

maybe I should look into it. As I've added more and more domains

from various hobby projects (including, of course,

circumlunar.space), I have noticed my monthly AWS bills getting

larger and larger. They are still trivial, about US$2 a month,

but then, that's US$24 a year, which is more than what the actual

circumlunar.space VPS costs me, so probably I could actually save

some money by doing my own namehosting. I couldn't hope to match

the uptime or geographic distributedness of Amazon, to be fair,

but then it's not clear that I really need to. Maybe this is the

most fruitful place for me to try to disengage from Amazon, in

that I might simultaneously save money, learn some new networking

stuff, and increase my online self-reliance.

If anybody has any experience with running their own nameservers,

feel free to drop me a line.

[1] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/the-epic-stru

ggle-of-the-iot.txt