What will the world look like after Amazon?
We asked the corporation's workers.
With over 1.6-million employees, Amazon is one of the largest corporate empires to have ever existed.
But while the company tells a utopian story about its gifts to the world, its workers pay the price, toiling in dystopian conditions of overwork, insecurity, and relentless surveillance.
As workers' movements and community groups around the world rise to challenge Amazon's power, the nine stories in this book, written by rank-and-file Amazon workers, speculate on what the future holds for people and the planet.
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Since it was founded in 1994 as an online bookshop, Amazon has aggressively transformed not only the way we read but also fields as diverse as logistics, film and television, artificial intelligence, groceries and web services. In addition to the 1.6 million drivers, sorters, coders, and others who are on its payroll, millions more rely on the company as independent contractors, trapped in Amazon's gamified platforms.
Since its earliest origins, Amazon's founder and current Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos has infused the firm with the spirit of science fiction. The genre has inspired the iconic billionaire to invest his fortune in a private space company that promises to take humanity to the stars. But here on earth, the corporation's workers are compelled to build a future that will exclude them.
What happens when workers reclaim the power to tell their own stories and reclaim their right to author their own futures? The Worker as Futurist Project supports current and former workers at Amazon to write short, speculative fiction as an act of resistance. This book is the result of a series of workshops held in 2023.
"Milton Friedman knew the future was up for grabs, and that in crisis, 'ideas lying around' moved from the periphery to center in an eyeblink. Two can play that game: imagining a better future is a way to seize that future, and sadly, we are in for innumerable crises where our 'ideas lying around' can come to the fore." - Cory Doctorow
"These wonderfully various and surprising stories prove that, if we don't manage to find our way beyond Amazon, it won't be for lack of political imagination. In this volume, the labor conditions of the present give us a unique vantage point on possible futures." Mark McGurl