#64: The Canonical Snow Shovel
I wrote an essay for Real Life earlier this week about Amazon's "customer obsession" and the company's efforts to turn the world itself into an immersive customer environment. Just a few days later, Jeff Bezos announced his plan to open a network of preschools in which "the child will be the customer." I wish I'd had that example available when I wrote the piece, as it perfectly exemplifies the consumerization of life that's happening with and without Amazon (but increasingly with it). One idea I addressed at various points in the essay is that Amazon, unlike the other major digital platforms, particularly Google and Facebook, traffics heavily in physical *stuff* and must grapple with the offline world in a way the others don't (Facebook just wants us to spend more time online). A corollary to that, which could be an essay of its own, is that Amazon benefits operationally from making the world itself more like a digital platform. And Amazon, of course, is big enough to do that. The more efficient the company's supply chain gets, the more its shipping will approach the high speed and low cost that characterizes digital packets.
One quality of the internet that Amazon embodies is variety—the so-called long tail in merchandise as well as information. Global connectivity creates a massive marketplace where tiny niches can form and flourish. At the same time, the ease of copying digital information means that instead of creating something new we can simply reproduce a satisfactory version of something that already exists. It's tempting to proclaim a binary tradeoff between long-tail variety and viral sameness, but something more complex has actually happened: Information combines and then splinters apart with ultrarapid promiscuity, undermining the ability to believe in a standard or canonical version of anything despite spreading a feeling that global variation has narrowed. The best example of this phenomenon is of course memes like Distracted Boyfriend, which now mutate and evolve with such unimaginable speed that everyone knows the meme's form even though few actually encounter the same instance. In the pre-literate past, this also happened, but more slowly: Oral narratives and music were widely copied and never quite the same. The idea of an official recorded version of a song is a bizarre 20th-century notion that we might soon leave behind (a notion that the Grateful Dead bypassed altogether thanks to their fans' bootleg culture, which prizes live recordings at least as much as the studio tracks).
Physical goods are also becoming more like memes: cheaper, easier to copy, and faster moving. Projecting Amazon's vision for the world into the future is an interesting, if not exactly fun, thought experiment, but I alluded to one possibility in the customer essay by describing an already-arriving future in which Amazon further automates the process of ordering things and eventually frees us from consciously picking them out on a website. Why browse among fifty different snow shovels if Amazon can combine user ratings, price, and your personal data to pick the best one for you? And in the long run, then, why show you the other choices at all? (I wouldn't even mind this.) For snow shovels, unlike music or memes or culture in general, there is no real joy in variety, yet certain products might flourish as virally and automatically as memes do. In this future, certain objects, like the snow shovel, might be represented by their own canonical version—the only one Amazon actually ever shows you. Everyone will see their own best choice, though, so it will be canonical just to you.
Reads:
"The Hot New Millennial Housing Trend Is a Repeat of the Middle Ages"
The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics by Toby Shorin: "Somewhere right now, someone is discovering vaporwave for the first time, and can contribute to its longevity by participating in a lively subreddit. This is why at any given time someone is willing to tell you that the 70s are coming back."
Someone trained an AI to simulate the most interesting Tour de France possible by having it watch over 100 races and factoring in viewer numbers. It came up with this.