Amazon: At the Intersection of Culture and Capital

by Paul Smith (Editor), Alexander Monea (Editor), Maillim Santiago (Editor)

Overview

Amazon is everywhere. In our mailboxes, in delivery vans clogging our streets, in an increasing portion of our air traffic, in our grocery stores, on our televisions, in our smart home devices, and in the infrastructure powering many of the websites we visit. Amazon’s tendrils touch the majority of online retail transactions in the United States and in many other countries.

As Amazon changes the face of capitalist business, it is also changing global culture in multiple ways. This book brings together some of the most important analyses of Amazon’s pioneering business practices and how they intersect with and affect the components of everyday culture. Its contributors examine the political economy of Amazon’s platform, making the argument that it operates as an unregulated monopoly that is disruptive to the global economy and that its infrastructure and logistical operations increasingly alienate its workers and wreak many other social harms.

Our contributors outline the practices of resistance that have been employed by organizers ranging from Amazon employees to artists to digital piecemeal laborers working on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. They examine the broader cultural impact that Amazon has had, looking at things like Amazon Prime and the creation of unending consumption, the absorption of Whole Foods and its brand of ‘conscious capitalism,’ and the impact of Amazon Studios and Prime Video on everyday film and television viewing practices.

This book examines the broader environmental impacts that Amazon is having on the world, looking at the slow violence it incurs, its underwhelming Climate Pledge, and the regional impacts that its business practices have. Lastly, this book gathers together some important artistic responses to Amazon for the first time in an appendix that offers readers insight into other ways in which critics of the company are making their voices heard and attempting to move broader audiences into solidarity against Amazon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538165232
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	11/28/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Paul Smith is Professor of Cultural Studies and Global Affairs at George Mason University. Most of his working life has been spent in the US, including posts at Miami University OH, and Carnegie Mellon before his appointment at George Mason University in 1996. Between 1999 and 2002 he was chaired Professor and department head of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. At George Mason he has been director of the Center for the Study of the Americas and currently teaches mostly in the Cultural Studies PhD program, but also for Global Affairs. He was elected President of the national Cultural Studies Association (2016-18). He is the author of Pound Revised, Discerning the Subject, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production, Millennial Dreams: Culture and Capital in the North, and Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy. He has edited Men in Feminism (with Alice Jardine), Madonnarama (with Lisa Frank), and Boys, and has published a book of translations from Jean Louis Schefer, The Enigmatic Body. His essays and articles have appeared in scores of journals and collections in the US and overseas. His most recent edited volume is The Renewal of Cultural Studies and he is currently completing a book on Covid vaccines.

Alexander Monea is an Assistant Professor in the English Department and Cultural Studies Program at George Mason University. He researches the history and cultural impacts of computers and digital media. He is the author of The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight and co-author of The Prisonhouse of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital. He is also an editor for the journal Data & Policy focusing on the area of Ethics, Equity, and Trust.

Maillim Santiago is a media and culture scholar pursuing a Cultural Studies doctoral track at George Mason University. She has contributed work to MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture and Final Girls Film Festival. Her work has screened across the country, including the Brooklyn Women’s Film Festival, Tampa Bay Comic Con, Florida’s Undergraduate Research Conference, Orlando Film Festival, Final Girls Film Festival, and more.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. The Political Economy of Amazon

1. Lina Khan, “Amazon's Anti-Trust Paradox” [Reprint]
2. Ulysses Pascal, “Amazon 1-Click and the Value of Broken Infrastructure”
3. Nikolaus Poechhacker and Eva-Maria Nyckel, “The Logistics of Probability: Anticipatory Shipping and the Production of Markets” [Reprint]
4. Alessandro Delfanti, “Amazonian Fulfillment: Machinic Dispossession and Augmented Despotism”

1. Practices of Resistance

1. Jamie Woodcock and Callum Cant, “Platforms, Resistance, Organizing”
2. xtine burrough, “Disrupting Work with Play on Mturk.com: A Visual Essay”
3. Lilly Irani, “Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk” [Reprint]

1. Amazon and Culture

1. David Arditi, “Unending Consumption: A Prime Example”
2. Lisa Daily, “Amazon Eats Whole Foods”
3. Maillim Santiago, “Virtuous Viewing and Amazon Studios”

1. Environmental Impact

1. Brett Hutchins, Libby Lester, Richard Maxwell, Toby Miller, and Whitney Monaghan, “Quick and Slow Violence: The Age of Billionaire Biodiversity.”
2. Emily West, “Decoding Amazon’s Climate Pledge: Public Relations and the Platformization of Governance”
3. Patrick Brodie and Paul O’Neill, “Confronting the Regionalism of Amazon Web Services”

1. Appendix

1. Hiba Ali and Nina Sarnelle, “Art and Action”

List of Contributors

Index

About the Editors

Editorial Reviews

In recent years, no single institution has become more ubiquitous, more central to the material culture and everyday commercial life of people across much of the globe, than Amazon. Nobody studying contemporary economics, culture, society, or politics can avoid the need to say something about it. The diverse and rigorous contributions to this indispensable volume do exactly that, from a wide range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. As such, this book offers a tremendously impressive set of insights into the nature of contemporary capitalism and power.

Jeremy Gilbert

Amazon: At the Intersection of Culture and Capital offers a set of investigations ingeniously put together to depict Amazon’s multifaceted history, from its (intellectual) monopolistic behaviors, its performative effects on consumption and how it deepens ecological crises to its workers’ struggles and social and artistic activism to raise awareness and fightback. This is a must-read book for those willing to know more about how digital technologies and big data underlie every single corner of Amazon’s business, from its e-commerce marketplace to its black-box digital services on the cloud to its digital technologies that organize logistics and control its workers.

Dr. Cecilia Rikap

Technology-driven web development led to the creation of e-commerce and platform-based businesses, which occupy these new spaces and serve largely virtual markets. Amazon specifically developed multiple products, services, and technologies for a wide array of consumers, and the Amazon family of products evolved into its own culture. Fueled by social media and the pandemic, Amazon's culture now links its various product platforms, giving rise to new business opportunities in the spaces between platforms. This integrated culture has rewritten many of the rules for a "traditional" business. The editors of this volume assembled a series of related essays spotlighting various aspects of this culture and outlining exactly what Amazon has built, acquired, and accumulated. The authors examine Amazon's functionality as an "unregulated monopoly," its labor and safety practices, and its social good and harm. This volume is one of the few places where readers can view Amazon both as a whole and through its parts. It will facilitate fact-based discussion of Amazon's benefits and liabilities and new mechanisms and regulations to deal with the various impacts of this multifaceted, global company. Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty and professionals

Choice Reviews

Amazon: At the Intersection of Culture and Capital is a highly readable, provocative, and insightful collection of perspectives on Amazon's digital dominance. Featuring work ranging from antitrust analysis to artistic interventions, the book is impressively well-curated, critiquing undue concentration of platform power while sketching paths toward more equitable and democratic commerce.

Frank Pasquale