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THE_PAX_VOBISCUM_BITE
October 17-20, 2014
This is a version of some material
posted to the dailykos:
http://dailykos.com/user/doomvox
Krugman takes on Amazon.
Can we boycott Amazon now, please?
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I've been doing an anti-Amazon rant for so long,
I'm afraid it's not very fiery these days, but the
spectacle of the Krugthulhu attacking Amazon's http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amazons-monopsony-is-not-ok.html?_r=0
latest nasty manuevering inspires me to go on...
If you haven't been following the story, Amazon is
in a fight with a large publisher, Hachette trying http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/10/technology/writers-feel-an-amazon-hachette-spat.html?_r=1
to squeeze a better deal out of them by making it a
little harder to buy their stuff via Amazon. Some
years back, Amazon was in a similar fight with http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/technology/30amazon.html
Macmillian, and got them to cave-in.
The fact that people are still surprised when Amazon
does something sleazy is actually pretty amazing.
And the fact that Amazon has defenders is astounding.
Some low-lights of the history of Amazon:
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o Amazon donated money to the Republican party, helping
to support the rise of the Bush Junior regime. (The
first place I heard of Amazon was a story front and
center in the Wall Street Journal-- what kind of
connections does that take?).
o Amazon was the first company to aggressively use a
software patent against it's competition, Barnes
and Noble. Nearly every programmer is against
software patents in principle (both the left-wing
Richard Stallman and the right-wing John McCarthy
spoke out against them-- not that this mattered to
our lords and masters), and on top of that, nearly
every programmer regards this patent as an obvious
"fail" for the non-obviousness critereon.
o If you talk to people who've worked for Amazon on
the white-collar side, their business culture does
not make it sound like the kind of place you'd like
to stay for very long... it's always offended me
that places like this can be successful in the US,
where every free marketeer will tell you that market
forces are supposed to constrain them to play nice
to compete for employees.
o And in recent years we suddenly started hearing
about really bad working conditions in their
warehouses... what a surprise that was, eh?
Krugman's column, "Amazon's Monopsony Is Not O.K.",
brings up some interesting evidence of a possible http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amazons-monopsony-is-not-ok.html?_r=0
political bias in Amazon's recent moves:
"Specifically, the penalty Amazon is imposing on
Hachette books is bad in itself, but there's also a
curious selectivity in the way that penalty has been
applied. Last month the Times's Bits blog documented
the case of two Hachette books receiving very
different treatment. One is Daniel Schulman's “Sons
of Wichita,' a profile of the Koch brothers; the
other is 'The Way Forward,' by Paul Ryan, who was
Mitt Romney's running mate and is chairman of the
House Budget Committee. Both are listed as eligible
for Amazon Prime, and for Mr. Ryan's book Amazon
offers the usual free two-day delivery. What about
'Sons of Wichita'? As of Sunday, it 'usually ships
in 2 to 3 weeks.' Uh-huh."
Krugman also remarks on a phenomena I've noticed
lately: "Meanwhile, Amazon's defenders often
digress into paeans to online bookselling, which (By the way, you do realize
has indeed been a good thing for many Americans". that the Times has policies
By way of an example, Krugman links to a Joe against writers calling each
Nocera article at the NYT. other out by name, right?
But Krugman did it by *link*,
so that's okay. Heh).
Myself, lately I've been
puzzling over a piece by Clay (It often seems to me that verbal
Shirky, who I am told is a facility can be an intellectual trap:
very intelligent fellow. someone who can write well can
generate any amount plausible,
Shirkey repeatedly talks as though reasonable sounding prose supporting
without Amazon, the book-reading any position. The professional
public will be plunged back into propagandist does this on purpose,
the middle ages (no one else does but the professional academic often
online sales?). And he seems to seems to be deluding themselves by
feel that the opposition to Amazon accident...)
is just a matter of snobbery (those
big city intellectuals don't https://medium.com/@cshirky/publishing-and-reading-6a80139d13cc
understand the plight of people
living in podunkistan)-- but the
central issue here is the fear of
abuse of a single point of control
(and in the case of Amazon, it's an
already substantiated fear).
At one point Shirky comments dismissively
about someone who dared to question the
sacred principle of supply-and-demand:
"Set aside that fact that such a statement
would contradict everything we know about
the effect of price on human behavior...".
It seems to me that there's another
thing that we all know about human
behavior: monopolies abuse monopoly power.
Centralized points of control become
centralized points of failure.
Shirky repeatedly sneers at big publishers
like Hachette as a cartel with no interest It occurs to me that even a cartel
in supporting small, independent works of might be preferable to an outright
which Amazon is supposedly the champion. monopoly... nevertheless, this
particular cartel has already had
it's behavior restrained by the
Strangely enough, V. Vale of RE/Search legal system. What possible
fame-- a man who knows something about argument could there be that
independent bookselling-- violently Amazon's behavior does not need
disagrees with this line of thought. restraint?
And I must say V. Vale's own anti-Amazon
rant makes my efforts seem dull and
weak:
http://www.researchpubs.com/2014/08/v-vales-research-newsletter-129-august-2014-amazon-kills-capitalism/
"Then, less than 20 years ago, a gigantic white Lovecraftian
worm parasite calling itself 'Amazon' climbed aboard something
called the 'Internet.' This parasite made nothing, created
nothing, but conned every publisher in America to sell to
Amazon on Amazon's terms. Discounting, plus loss-leading 'free
shipping' systematically began killing bookstores, small book
distributors, small publishers-- as well as larger
entities. Yes, in the past twenty years a large number of
physical bookstores and publishers who print on paper, have
perished."
"Do you shop at Amazon? Well, you are destroying book
publishing, culture itself, as well as countless other small
enterprises. Every 'merchant' who gets used by Amazon knows
that the world was a better place before Amazon came along..."
Krugman essentially suggests that we should be using anti-trust
law against Amazon-- he invokes the example of Standard Oil.
If you're not interested in waiting for hell to freeze over and
Elizabeth Warren to be appointed the Czar of all Czars, I have
an alternate suggestion: let us boycott Amazon.
What will we do for books? Myself, I use local independent
bookstores when I can, and when I can't I often use Barnes
and Nobles (bn.com). Whereas Amazon went Republican (and
did it back when that really mattered), Barnes and Nobles
has always contributed to the Democratic party.
I like the idea of ordering directly from small publishers,
but there's a regrettable trend in that world to use Amazon
for "fufillment", which strangely always seems to leave me
unfufilled.
Even just as a practical matter: bn.com let's me check a
little box saying "use the US postal service for this
address". Amazon likes to force you to use UPS, but if you
don't live in Mayberry RFD and/or have your own shipping
department to take deliveries, UPS is actually ridiculously
inconvenient. If you miss a postal service delivery, you
just go get it at the post office when you can. You too
can join the communist anti-capitalist revolution: support
your local post office.
By the way, I know I've been calling Amazon a "monopoly"
throughout here, and I realize that technically they're more
like a "monopsony"... but give 'em time. Krugman himself
expresses skepticism that Amazon will conquer the entire
universe of online retail, but why take that chance?
Controlling around a third of online booksales is already
bad enough.
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