#78: Barbarism Begins at Home
After Amazon bought wifi networking startup Eero a few days ago, Benedict Evans wrote that "Amazon wants to plumb your home for Prime—to own the last ten yards of physical distribution." Ben Thompson, similarly, described the acquisition as more evidence of Amazon's mission to "own the home." Keep in mind, these guys are relatively optimistic about what Amazon is doing, and even they can't describe it without Orwellian undertones. We're well past the point at which everything will be connected to both the internet and the neoliberal aether unless there's a really good reason not to do so, and those remaining reasons are being convincingly rebutted (if not refuted), one by one. On the same topic, also this week, Chenoe Hart published a great essay about how increasingly streamlined, robot-enabled logistics will make ordering and returning merchandise so fluid that we will essentially begin "streaming" physical goods rather than owning them, the same way we stream digital media. Increasingly, this will allow "mass consumption to be replaced with mass distribution."
When I think about the world Amazon wants to create, the word I keep returning to is "friction." Amazon's entire existence has amounted to a war on friction—both the operational kind that increases costs and slows deliveries, and the user-experiential kind that prevents a purchase, distracting you and making you look up from the screen and accidentally remember to resume living your life. This war on friction has two fronts: the ever-shortening logistical last mile, now down to ten yards or less, and the individual's immediate personal space, which is the space most likely to be under that individual's control and thus full of obstacles to Amazon's (or any other company's) purposes. The former front is where supply terminates; the latter is where demand begins. The home is so important because it's where those two spaces overlap. Hart's essay argues that the home is becoming another logistical node, a little warehouse that compresses the last mile down to millimeters. If the house can simultaneously become a bigger smartphone, an ambient field that translates your words and behaviors directly into Prime orders, that might erase all the remaining friction that separates individual customers from Amazon.
Meanwhile, there's the awkward possibility that Amazon's all-encompassing consumer paradise, though impossible to refuse, isn't really something we get to choose ourselves. I've argued elsewhere that the "consumer" identity crowds out other valuable roles we all might assume. For many, the privacy of the home is one of the last strongholds of such non-consumer roles. Maybe Amazon recognizes this threat. Alex Pareene recently articulated a bleaker view of the future described above, which has already arrived for many: "Underemployment, mitigated by the escapist pleasure of eating pizza in front a $150, forty-inch TV." In this dystopia there are fewer reasons than ever to leave the house that Amazon "owns"—a cornucopia of inexpensive delivery goods and digital entertainment keeps us glued to the couch, with everything outside more expensive and less stimulating. That inertia is a third kind of friction, but a kind Amazon doesn't want to solve.
Reads:
The utopia that Sidewalk Labs hopes to build: "Instead of a Toronto beset by a housing crisis, a revenue crisis, a representation crisis, and attacks from the province, we could have a Good Place, a generic No Place on the lake, whose purpose is clear, and it could all be as pretty as a picture."
The rise of algorithmic real estate investment as "a more systemic, calculable and accelerated model concerning the extraction of value from physical space."
A disembodied Windows 98 error message hovering in the Ukrainian sky.