Canned Dragons

Last Christmas, my sister had one prohibition on her wishlist for her Secret Santa: Nothing should be purchased for her on Amazon.com. Other than that, there were some helpful suggestions about things she wanted. I never asked her directly why the caveat about where items were purchased. I didn’t do so because it seemed obvious that there were a number of reasons a person would not want to support Amazon.

In his book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis fleshes out those reasons in a figurative sense as he chronicles real people caught in the cogs of the Amazon machine. The Atlantic has a comprehensive piece on the book. Before you get to the individual level, though, there are some startling statistics that the article provides.

• Amazon reaps fully half of what people in this country spend online.
• It is the second largest private employer in the US, behind Walmart.
• Amazon, along with Walmart, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of an arrangement that allows food stamps to be used for online groceries, bringing in large amounts of government money.

There are more stats to be had (in the piece and elsewhere), but I don’t want to push the boundaries of fair use. These three points give you plenty upon which to ruminate, though.

From a human interest perspective, MacGillis tells the stories of Amazon warehouse workers who face working conditions most of us would consider unfair, at the least. One worker he chronicles, who used to work at a Bethlehem Steel plant in Baltimore, ended up working at an Amazon warehouse on the same site for less than half the wages, at age 69, after the steel plant closed down. If nothing else, he enjoyed the continuity of working in the same place, until his supervisor threatened to dock his already meager pay over a bathroom break and he quit (he had been peeing in the corner of the warehouse to avoid the strict bathroom time limits). Warehouse workers are not the only ones with problems getting bathroom time. It’s a particular problem with Amazon’s delivery drivers, as well. Another worker MacGillis profiles stays in his basement at home, because of the high risk of COVID infection at the Amazon warehouse, so that he doesn’t put his family at risk.

In pieces critical of Amazon, we are usually reminded that these stories are set amid the backdrop of the massive and inhuman wealth of former CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, who’s fortune is second only to that of Elon Musk. The contrasts could not be greater between the majority of the workers in the company and those at the very top.

It Used To Be Simpler

A few years ago, it was easy for me to feel like I was doing my duty as a conscientious consumer by avoiding Walmart. They were the big box bad guy putting smaller stores out of business and then hiring the employees for lower wages. They were the company employing many people part time to avoid giving them benefits. They were the ones forcing local companies to outsource labor in order to keep their products on store shelves. Local textile company Pillowtex was forced by Walmart to offshore their production and close their domestic plants. Walmart wore their thrift like a badge of honor, but the extremes to which they went to save money sucked the life out of the very areas where their customers lived. It wasn’t hard to wage a personal fight against the stingy retail giant, though, at least not in most metro areas. There were other places where the same goods could be had, even if they were to be had at a higher price.

It’s more difficult to avoid Amazon than it was Walmart. With my health conditions, I need to get supplements I have a hard time finding elsewhere. I have both a Home Depot and a Lowe’s within a few miles of my house, but I still occasionally need to find home improvement items at Amazon.

Walmart wore their thrift like a badge of honor, but the extremes to which they went to save money sucked the life out of the very areas where their customers lived.

Ebooks

There aren’t any true competitors to Amazon’s Kindle ebooks ecosystem. The closest one is Barnes and Noble’s Nook. It has been clear for quite some time that B&N isn’t really serious about their ebook readers, though. The last time I checked, you couldn’t even buy the latest version of their ereader, the GlowLight 3 on their website. When I had a Nook, there were significant software problems. For instance, sometimes turning the page caused it to skip dozens of pages and you would have to go back and find your spot. The system would crash fairly often. Besides the technical issues with the device, it was difficult for others to gift books to me. The company’s efforts in the area always felt half-baked, an afterthought adjunct to their actual business of selling paper.

There are no other e-ink ebook readers, besides the Kindle, on which you can read books checked out from the library through the app Libby. This means if you have something like a Nook, you are even more locked in to the B&N ecosystem than you are Amazon’s ecosystem when you have a Kindle. Unfortunately, this is a problem that the Nook’s liberal sideloading abilities don’t solve.

Censorship

Much has been made recently about Amazon’s abrupt removal of the book When Harry Became Sally by Ryan T. Anderson. I haven’t read a sentence of this book (and since I mainly get books on my Kindle, it’s doubtful I will), but it was concerning that Amazon didn’t even follow their own policies when deciding to take the book off of their site. As Rob Vischer points out on the Mirror of Justice blog , this move, and others commonly attributed to “cancel culture,” wouldn’t be so concerning without the enormous clout that the big tech companies wield.

But what if Amazon decides to stop selling a controversial book? Amazon – like other Big Tech companies – doesn’t just participate in the market; in a real sense, they function as gatekeepers to the market. When those gatekeepers act to remove certain people or ideas from circulation, we should be concerned. (That doesn’t mean it should never happen – e.g., I don’t think Amazon should sell a do-it-yourself kit for building a dirty bomb at home.) In my view, the power of Big Tech is what makes today’s “cancel culture” debates relevant.

Amazon as a business can decide what it does and does not want to sell. Vischer is right, though, that it is in the context of their market dominance that moves like this become concerning.

The spectacle of Bezos burning money for rocket fuel while people go without basics in this country is abhorrent, especially during a pandemic.

Space Billionaires

To come back briefly to the gap between worker and CEO pay, no company does a better job showcasing this than Amazon. Bezos may no longer be CEO, but he’s still the face of the franchise and his space voyages made on the backs of the overworked and underpaid do not go unnoticed. Bezos may have thanked Amazon workers, but his wave looked like it had a middle finger extended. The spectacle of Bezos burning money for rocket fuel while people go without basics in this country is abhorrent, especially during a pandemic.

The Challenge

I'm constantly asking myself: What is a conscientious consumer to do? Those who have disentangled themselves from the great ecommerce beast, please let me know the process you went through. I'm open to even ways to partially extricate myself and feel good about contributing to a healthier retail, publishing and working environment.

When I lived out my teen years, in the early nineties, the musical landscape was much different than it is today. I don’t mean in terms of genres or styles (although that is certainly true, as well). I’m now going through the experience of my teenage son exploring the music that was popular back then. It’s the same music, but encountered in a much different way. The easy access that he enjoys to jump to anything in the sonic universe enables him to quickly make musical connections that it took me years to understand. The glut of information available in the internet can, in a short matter of time, fill a brain with enough musical trivia to shame the most learned and cynical 90’s hipster record store clerks.

In the the space of a few days, my son went through Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. I thought, “it’s only a matter of time before he makes it to Dinosaur Jr.” Passing by his room a couple of days later, I heard the unmistakable bridge from the Dino Jr. song “Raisans.” The gruesome sample of a mentally ill man complaining that his bathing attendants were killing him is haunting every time I hear it. The sound of the guitar leads, erupting before you can even anticipate them, like lava from a long-dormant volcano, made their way into the hallway.

Where he will leap to next I can't anticipate, although he has mentioned needing to hear Mudhoney as he takes in a grunge history lesson. With the wide availability of almost all recorded music a few taps on the keyboard away, he loses something that made crate digging and memorizing liner notes and record guides made special. In my teens, to a certain species of nerd, musical knowledge was power. When you were listening to Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day and others a full two years before they broke into the mainstream and the jock with his locker next to yours suddenly became a fan, it gave you a sense that you were onto something.

If you were not careful (not many teenagers are too careful), you could build up a sense of superiority over knowing what others would only come to find out later. It was easy to look down upon the johnny-come-lately crowd as mere posers. I shamefully remember the feeling of disdain. Once, in the twelfth grade, I had a fairly heated argument with one of my classmates in the library about what music was cool. A year later, she had died, a victim of a vicious asthma attack, and I laid in a hospital bed awaiting my first round of chemotherapy. After that point, I no longer had the will to make music a thing by which I judged others. It all seemed so pointless.

I'm doing my penance now for my snobbery in high school, though. I couldn't stand Pearl Jam back then and now my teenage son listens to them more than any other band. He sings songs like "Jeremy" at the top of his lungs, so I hear them all of the time. It serves me right.

Jack Nicas reports for the New York Times.

In 2004, Apple decided to expand in China with a factory making the iPod, which was becoming a hit product. On a trip to scope out the location for the factory, the head of Apple’s manufacturing partner pointed to a small mountain and told two Apple executives present that the factory would be built there, according to one of the executives. The executives were confused; the factory needed to be up and running in about six months.

Less than a year later, the executives returned to China. The mountain was gone and the factory was operating, the executive said. The Chinese government had moved the mountain for Apple.

This has been a concern of mine in the last few years. As tech companies become increasingly politically active in the United States, they also increasingly cave to the Chinese government. It seems no other US tech company is as beholden to China as Apple. China moved mountains for Apple. Now they expect the tech giant to pay them back in the form of compliance to laws that go against the principles for which the company stands. It was a Faustian bargain that was forged between the two parties.

He Warned Apple About the Risks in China. Then They Became Reality.

Doug Guthrie, once one of America’s leading China bulls, rang the alarm on doing business there. He spoke about his time at Apple.

NYTimesBy

When Medium decided to stop funding many of the publications on their platform, most editors of those publications wrote nice notes thanking Medium for their patronage. A few detailed new plans for publishing their content elsewhere. Sarah Cords, from P.S. I Love You, however, would not go gently into that good night. She is angry about the defunding of the publication she had put her heart into, and wants others to know it.

Cords is tired of the churn in journalism and the constant desire of technology companies to be "disruptive."

But you know what? I’m a member of Gen X and I’m tired. I’m deeply tired. I’m fighting to stay employed so we can keep our health insurance, and I’m trying to look after my elderly mother, and I’m trying to take care of my husband who has health problems, and I’m trying to keep up with my kids who need a lot of help and reassurance after a year of pandemic.

P.S. I Love You, which was a publication about relationships, had almost 300K subscribers and I was one of those. I didn't read every article they published, but found a lot of the work there to be compelling.

I don't want to ascribe callousness to a guy I don't even know, but I wonder how much Ev Williams thinks about the people that get tossed aside every time he has a whim to change the business model.

Have you ever thought about how hypnosis so closely resembles guided meditation? Especially the beginning of hypnosis, called induction, which is designed to put you into a state of relaxation in which you are more susceptible to suggestion. The watching of the breath, the attention on sensations in the body that focus and settle your mind are integral to both beginning hypnosis and to mindfulness meditation.

When Cassandra Jenkins begins the song “Hard Drive” with spoken word, it feels like a hypnotic induction. With the saxophones playfully decorating the background, the accompanying instruments sound a bit like something off the Blue Nile’s Hats LP. Jenkins transitions to a singing voice as the chorus starts and it sounds all the more beautiful for the contrast with the spoken narrative. The song is masterfully constructed. As Jenkins speaks towards the end of the track, she narrates a friend assuring her of a better future, then slowly counting to three while directing deep breathing, which mimics the part of cuing someone out of hypnosis.

Jenkins talks about therapy in the song. In 2019, she was set to go on tour with Purple Mountains when, a few days from the start, Dave Berman from Purple Mountains passed away. One has to assume that therapy has played an important part in her life.

Over at Opuszine, Jason Morehead has a detailed examination of what the WandaVision experiment put the citizens of Westview through and what they are owed in the narrative. He believes that an extra episode that deals with their trauma would be appropriate. In the piece, he discusses the unreliability of Wanda as a narrator with regards to whether she knows what her spell is inflicting upon the citizens of Westview.

Some may point to those scenes where Wanda tells Vision that she has no idea what’s happening, or how it’s happening, as a way to let her off the hook. However, WandaVision sets up Wanda as something of an unreliable narrator, especially when we see her increasingly desperate attempts maintain the illusion and prevent others, including her own husband, from uncovering it. Still others may point out that when Wanda discovers the effects of her illusion, she does lift it so that Westview’s citizens can escape — only to put it back in place the minute she sees that Vision and their two sons are being adversely effected.

It’s really not clear, at different points in the show, what Wanda knows about the pain that the citizens of the town are going through (or whether she wants to know). It also isn’t clear how interested the story is in putting a focus on that. To use the military term, the town residents are almost treated as collateral damage. Even after understanding the difficulty that the citizens have gone through, one of the protagonists, Monica Rambeau, admits that she would have done the same thing, under the spell of grief.

Morehead brings up Age of Ultron as a counter-example of this in the MCU. My wife and I watched that movie a couple of weeks ago so she could see the back story on the twins and had the exact opposite reaction. There’s so much widescreen destruction and ‘splosions everywhere, that you can easily get distracted from the people caught in the middle of the firefights. The mechanisms of telling these stories about superheroes handle most of the ordinary humans with the same capriciousness that the Greek gods were said to have handled mortals in their tales. Certain people are depicted as being saved like precious jewels while others are fodder for the Ultron stormtrooper armies.

I don’t know how to resolve this issue. In these smash ‘em ups, the buildings, the cars (oh my gosh, the cars) and the people ancillary to the story all serve as props for spectacle. A huge boss fight in a city doesn’t work without the stage setup (which includes the unfortunate denizens of the area under siege). I think the difference between WandaVision and the other MCU vehicles was that we did get to understand more about the people on the sidelines and that brought more attention to their plight. This makes us feel like they are deserving of additional care.

The mechanisms of telling these stories about superheroes handle most of the ordinary humans with the same capriciousness that the Greek gods were said to have handled mortals in their tales.

In a certain way, the model that WandaVision brings with it, where the audience is given a chance to emote with the people on the periphery of the main action, is a step in the right direction for the MCU. It’s something I haven’t seen as much of, to this point (I don’t claim to have seen every Marvel film or tv show). I think it could be considered another way that the show breaks barriers within the genre.

By most accounts, evangelical Christians are concerned about the path this country is taking and encroaching restrictions on religious liberty. This is usually cited as their main reason for supporting the former president, despite the fact that he possessed almost every character trait they had vocally opposed in past leaders. Beyond supporting the president, they have appeared, at times, to almost want to make him their king.

Attitudes among evangelicals are shifting on a number of topics. NPR reporter Tom Gjelton from “Morning Edition” cites a disturbing new survey that shows a number of Americans consider violence a legitimate political tool to achieve their desired outcomes.

The survey found that nearly three in 10 Americans, including 39% of Republicans, agreed that, "If elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions."

What should be most shocking about the appetite for violent action is that much of it is coming from those who consider themselves Christians.

The AEI survey found that partisan divisions were also evident along religious lines. About three in five white evangelicals told the pollsters that Biden was not legitimately elected, that it was not accurate to say former President Donald Trump encouraged the attack on the Capitol, and that a Biden presidency now has them feeling disappointed, angry or frightened.

It’s important to remember that the term evangelical means to evangelize, or seek to convert someone to Christianity. Who is going to be convinced that a Christian holds the key to ultimate truth when they can’t even accept the obvious truths in front of them?¹ If someone feeding them a narrative that is counter to the facts so easily sways them, what does that say of their witness?

I don’t want to be dismissive of fears of anti-Christian bias, though I have yet to see evidence of a systemic problem in the US. I do think that some US Christians have developed a sense of persecution beyond what is warranted, particularly when drawn in comparison to the persecutions in other countries and those that are set in the cement of history. The fact that a practicing Catholic in the White House has them so distressed is evidence of their relative safety and outsized concern with regard to religious issues. Do people really believe that Joe from Scranton is going to mark the end of Christianity in America?

As a thought exercise, let’s imagine that Christians are facing a difficult climate in the US, with secularism dominating the systems of power. How does scripture command us to respond? I think this piece from Alan Jacobs, which touches on themes he has written about before, adds some clarity here (emphasis mine).

Do people twist the truth or simply lie about us? Are we treated with subtle and not-so-subtle bigotry? Are we mocked and belittled? Might we, soon enough, be facing actual persecution? If so, then we have our instructions:

We are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

If people take our coats we should give them our cloaks as well.

We should never return evil for evil, but should strive to live at peace with everyone.

If these seem like difficult objectives, it might be helpful to study the history of the ancient Christians and the evidence of their fidelity to these teachings. The book Destroyer of the Gods by Larry W. Hurtado proves especially instructional here, as it accounts the early Christians, what made them distinctive, and what put them at odds with their neighbors.

I do think that some US Christians have developed a sense of persecution beyond what is warranted, particularly when drawn in comparison to the persecutions in other countries and those that are set in the cement of history.

Ancient Christians were put to death by the Roman Empire for their faith. They were martyred for being “obstinate,” in the translated words of the much venerated (even now) stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelias, and refusing to worship the Roman Emperor. Nevertheless, in the face of violence, they did not return in kind. They held fast to the words of Jesus (and Paul) that were cited by Professor Jacobs above.

What would it look like for American Christians to follow the words of Christ as they speak to enduring hostility with grace?

In this case, that Joe Biden was legitimately elected. ↩︎

I have to admit, I have been somewhat surprised at people arguing against tech companies being able to enforce their terms of service. Working at a software company, I have been involved with our legal representatives in crafting terms of service, and never have I heard a question come up about our ability to enforce said terms. However, with social media, this seems to be coming up fairly often these days.

It reminds me of when, a few years ago, Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips kept posting nudes on Instagram. Since this violated their terms of service, they would suspend his account and take down his photos. He would sort of complain about this, feign ignorance, then start up a new account and start posting nudes again. His fans would be incensed by Instagram’s enforcement of their terms. Their sense of indignation about Coyne being entitled to violate Instagram’s terms of service seemed to imply that he was either the owner, or partner, or at the very least a paying customer. In reality, he was none of those things. Increasingly, people who publish on big social media networks seem to feel that a space on those networks belongs to them, and they are free to use whatever editorial discretion they see fit.

If an artist, like Coyne, wanted to display his artwork in a gallery, the gallery would have to agree to that artwork being displayed in their space. Even if, hypothetically, the gallery were to have an open exhibition and allow anyone to show their art, there would likely be rules about what could be displayed. If those rules were violated, the gallery would then have the right to take down the artwork. The gallery belongs to its owner, and they manage the infrastructure, rent/mortgage, utilities, upkeep and more. In the case of Instagram (which I’ll stick to, for purposes of the analogy), they pay for the R&D, support, infrastructure, monitoring, etc.[^Although, less of the “R” part when they just steal features from other platforms.] Therefore, they have every right to determine what appears on the service for which they are then responsible.

The argument for unrestricted rights to post anything on social media seems to stem from a belief that, once a service reaches a certain critical mass, it becomes a property of the people. After all, no one is arguing that Micro.blog doesn’t have a right to their stringent community standards.[^Even people who are using the Micro.blog service who are making the argument that Twitter shouldn’t be able to enforce its standards.] The people who run the service are very open about how members of the community have to behave. Are having those community guidelines a violation of free speech? Not at all. Those who create and maintain a service have the right to decide what is permissible on that service, regardless of the size of the service and how many members it may attract.

As M.G. Siegler put it:

Twitter is a private enterprise. They can set their own rules for what they want or do not want on their service. Including whom they want or do not want on their service. Full stop.

I’ve expended a few words to get to the same point, but it’s really that simple.

Jonas Ellison writes about wanting to attend a vinyl church, and I’m here for it. What does he mean by a vinyl church? He is using vinyl as a reference for older traditions that are slower and more thought out. Vinyl church’s don’t try so hard to be accessible to the younger generation.

But the sooner we stop watering things down and trying to make church ‘hip’ or ‘relevant’, the more we can get closer to authenticity. Dust off that old turntable, dear church. Leave the skinny jeans in the drawer and put those vestments back on. Take the projectors, strobe lights, and fog machines down and bring in the thuribles and incense (the more the better). Tell your praise band to save the rock and roll for real rock and roll and bring in old hymns (maybe comb through the toxic theology), the organ, and/or a choir. Contemporary music is excusable in elevators and shopping malls, but not vinyl church.

I’m happy to be a member of what he describes as a vinyl church. We sing the old hymns, and though some of the less popular ones are pretty hard to sing, it’s nice to feel like a part of a tradition. When I see blog posts with titles like, “What We Lost When We Lost Our Hymnals,” I can’t relate.

This piece reminds me of something Rachel Held Evans wrote a few years ago, that I responded to in this post. I love the vinyl metaphor, though, especially in light of the recent surge in vinyl sales, which have eclipsed CD sales for the first time in decades. The metaphor brings with it a focus on the intentional. It also works well with the conversation about the imperfections in vinyl. Church’s bear those same imperfections. Someone once tried to tell John Peel that CD’s were better than vinyl because they don’t have surface noise. He responded, “Listen mate, life has surface noise.” The same can be said of the church.

When I think of new media coming to us in the form of a la carte, individual packages, I can’t help but think of the advice to “be careful what you wish for.” For years we decried the bundles that were offered to us by cable providers. “Who needs all of those channels,” we rightly asked ourselves. We wondered loudly about why we should have to pay for a bunch of networks we didn’t watch.

The cable bundle model often gets talked about in conjunction with the proliferation of online streaming platforms. A new platform seems to crop up every month, and as soon as you’ve dismissed the latest offering as an also ran, a really compelling show or movie premieres exclusively on that service. Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos once said of the company, “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” Well, HBO is picking up the pace in the race against Netflix. This Christmas, one of the year’s most anticipated movies, Wonder Woman, 1984, will debut on both the HBO Max service and in theaters. HBO is extending that model into next year (to the consternation of many movie theater chains). So, while the monthly subscription cost for Netflix keeps going up, you also have to look at what you want to watch on the other services and what they will all cost you.

The new a-la-carte way of offering subscription content seems to be most often considered in the context of streaming video, but it has become increasingly relevant with written media, as well. There has been some discussion around the defection of writers from well-known publications to their own enclaves, most notably on the Substack newsletter platform. Berny Belvedere writes about this model and what it means for the consumer’s bottom line.

Similarly, there’s a growing consternation about what the new Substack model means for our Hot Take Budgets. You get a subscription to The New York Times and it’s a flat fee for their entire lineup of reporters and opinion writers. On the Substack model, though, you pay for each individually. It’s possible that there will need to be some consolidation in order for the model to work over time. But once that happens, what? Do we now just have a publication again? Just … with fewer editors?

He raises good questions, and as he notes, others are asking about the same things. I know I am only willing to pay for one Substack subscription, though there are many writers I enjoy on the platform. Belvedere is more bullish on Medium, which has a better system of aggregating content, for a reasonable monthly (or yearly) fee. Medium knows that they are competing heavily with Substack and they are making a lot of changes to the platform to make it more attractive to writers.

As Belvedere writes, those who are successful on Substack tend to be those writers that have an existing reader base. In this piece for NPR on the phenomenon, Bobby Allyn quotes New York University Journalism Professor Meredith Broussard on that subject.

The Substack model works really well for some people who already have prestige and a following. And it doesn’t work that well for everybody else.

In the same piece, Casey Newton (formerly of the Verge), who came to Substack with a lot of followers, explains his financial rationale.

All I have to do is find a few thousand people who will pay me $10 a month or $100 a year and I’ll have one of the best jobs in journalism.

How many single writers can readers afford to pay $100 a year? Even the lowest Substack tier is $30. Following multiple writers will cost you in the hundreds of dollars. You can get subscriptions to the Atlantic or the Washington Post, with their wealth of writers, for a lot less. Also, as mentioned previously, you can get access to publications with a variety of great writers, like Arc Digital, as well as syndicated content from publications like the Atlantic, and many pieces from independent writers for $50 a year on Medium. Apple News+ also aggregates content from the some of the top publications for $9.99 a month.

If, hypothetically, Substack were to become the dominant form of paid journalism, it would create a fairly substantial financial barrier of entry into the world of news and analysis. To have many priced out of that world seems to me to be less than desirable, if we are to have an informed and educated public.¹

I really like Substack as a delivery mechanism for some of my favorite writers, but I can’t see the paid model working out for many people (readers or writers). Ultimately, this is probably for the best.

To picture what it would be like without this, imagine an exaggerated version of the last four years of United States history - if you can. ↩︎