I. Because I don’t want to be an accomplice to symbolic expropriation.
For fifty-five years that building in Barcelona, one of city’s few examples of modern industrial architecture, was the head office of the publishers Guastavo Gili. Now, after a refurbishment costing several million euros, it has become Amazon’s local centre of operations. Thanks to the technology of efficiency and immediacy it houses, Barcelona is now one of the 45 cities in the world where the company guarantees delivery of products in an hour. The Canuda bookshop that shut in 2013 after over eighty years’ of existence is now a gigantic Mango clothes store. The Catalònia bookshop, after over a hundred, is now a McDonald’s with a kitsch modernist décor. Expropriation is literal and physical, but also symbolic.
If you enter “Amazon bookshop” on Google, dozens of links appear to Amazon pages that sell bookshelves. As I will never tire of repeating: Amazon is not a bookshop, it is a hypermarket. Its warehouses store books next to toasters, toys or skateboards. In its new physical bookshops books are placed face up, because they only display the 5000 bestselling books most sought after by their customers, a lot less than the number on the shelves of genuine bookshops that are prepared to take risks. Amazon is now considering whether to repeat the same operation with a chain of small supermarkets. As far as it is concerned there is no difference between a cultural institution and an establishment that sells food and other goods. […]
II. Because we are all cyborgs, but not robots.
We all carry implants.
We all depend on that prosthetic: our mobile phone.
We are all cyborgs: mainly human, slightly mechanical.
But we don’t want to be robots.
The work Amazon employees have to do is robotic. It was ever thus: in 1994, when five people were working in the garage of Jeff Bezos’s house in Seattle, they were already obsessed about being quick. It has been like that for twenty years, with stories galore of stress, harassment and inhuman conditions at work to achieve a horrendous efficiency that is only possible if you are a machine. […]
III. Because I reject hypocrisy.
The great shame of Barcelona, a city with many, excellent bookshops, was the existence for 24 years of the Europa Bookshop, run by the neo-Nazi Pedro Varela, an important centre for the diffusion of anti-Semitic ideology. Fortunately, it closed down last September. Amazon sells a huge number of editions of Mein Kampf, many of them with highly dubious prologues and notes. In fact, the World Jewish Congress alerted the company to dozens of negationist books it makes available with no obstacle to purchase. In other words, the Europa Bookshop was closed down for inciting hatred, amongst other crimes, but Amazon isn’t. Even though it is a crime to deny the Holocaust in many of the countries where it operates. […]
IV. Because I don’t want to be accomplice to a new empire.
[…] For Jeff Bezos—as for Google or Facebook—pixel and link can have a material correlative: the world of things can work like the world of bytes. The three companies share the imperialist wish to conquer the planet, by defending unlimited access to information, communication and consumer goods, at the same time as they force their employees and publishing partners to sign contracts with confidentiality clauses, hatch complex strategies to avoid paying taxes in the countries where they are based and construct a parallel, transversal, global state, with its own rules and laws, its own bureaucracy and hierarchy and its own police. […] Amazon’s parallel project [to Google [x]] is Amazon Prime Air, its drone-based distribution network, drones that are currently 25 kilo hybrid devices, half-aeroplane, half-helicopter. Last August the regulations of the Federal Aviation Administration of the United States were charged to facilitate the flight of drones for commercial purposes and to make it easy to qualify for a drone-pilot certificate. Long live lobbying! Let our skies be filled with robotic distributors of Oreo biscuits, cuddly toy-dogs, skateboards, toasters, rubber ducks, and … books. […]
V. Because I don’t want them to spy on me while I am reading.
[…] On the last World Book Day, Amazon revealed the most frequently underlined sentences over the last five years of the Kindle platform. If you read on your device, they find out everything about your reading habits. On which page you give up. Which page you finish. How fast you read. What you underline. The great advantage of a print book is not its portability, durability, autonomy or close relationship with our process of memorising and learning, but the fact that it is permanently disconnected.
When you read a print book, the energy and data you release through your eyes and fingers belong only to you. Big Brother can’t spy on you. Nobody can take that experience away or analyse and interpret it: it is yours alone. […]
VI. Because I defend being slow yet quick, and only relative familiarity.
[…] Desire should last. I must go to the bookshop; look for the book; find it; leaf through it; decide if the desire was warranted; perhaps abandon the book and cherish the desire for another; until I find it; or not; it wasn’t there; I order it; it will come in 24 hours; or in 72; I’ll be able to give it a glance; I’ll finally buy it; perhaps I’ll read it, perhaps I won’t; perhaps I’ll let my desire go cold for a few days, weeks, months or years; it will be there in the right place on the right shelf; and I will always remember in which bookshop I bought it and why. […]
VII. Because I’m not ingenuous.
No: I’m not.
I’m not ingenuous. I watch Amazon series. I buy books I can’t get in any other way on iberlibro.com that belongs to Abebooks.com that Amazon bought in 2008. I constantly look for information on Google. And I am constantly giving out my data, spruced up in one way or another, to Facebook as well.
I know they are the three tenors of globalization.
I know theirs is the music of the world.
But I believe in necessary, minimal resistance. In the preservation of certain rituals. In conversation, that is the art of time; in desire that is time turned into art. In whistling, when I walk from my house to a bookshop, melodies that only I hear, that belong to nobody else.
I always buy books that aren’t out-of-print in independent, physical bookshops, ones that I reel a bond with. […]
*Excerpted from Against Amazon: Seven Arguments / One Manifesto
by Jorge Carrión, translated by Peter Bush (Ontario: Biblioasis, 2017); number 26 of second edition of 1000. To be reprinted in September 2020 in Against Amazon: and Other Essays.
