This. I think there's much value to be had in using a thing like Amazon for what it's good at: an efficient distribution network, and to some extent a captive market that controls its own terms, inputs and outputs and optimizes for that efficiency.
Apart from labor abuses (and some are entered into willingly: see higher level Amazon true believers putting in 90 hours a week to provide half a cent cheaper toilet paper), what Amazon is, is not the problem.
The problem is the idea that all such toilet paper consumers must work to get paid the money to buy that toilet paper, in an Amazon-ified world. And that all the providers of goods feeding the Amazon supply chain must earn their own profits to survive so that they can keep feeding Amazon, on Amazon's terms.
And most of all the problem is that the penalty for failing to earn these wages/supplier profits is death, because there's no alternate system pumping capital down to where consumers do their choosing. Amazon is TOO efficient and a world based on that ethos can't maintain a consumer class at all. The solution isn't necessarily to make Amazon inefficient so it can provide 'jobs', the solution is to decouple job wages from continued existence as a human.
Apart from labor abuses (and some are entered into willingly: see higher level Amazon true believers putting in 90 hours a week to provide half a cent cheaper toilet paper), what Amazon is, is not the problem.
The problem is the idea that all such toilet paper consumers must work to get paid the money to buy that toilet paper, in an Amazon-ified world. And that all the providers of goods feeding the Amazon supply chain must earn their own profits to survive so that they can keep feeding Amazon, on Amazon's terms.
And most of all the problem is that the penalty for failing to earn these wages/supplier profits is death, because there's no alternate system pumping capital down to where consumers do their choosing. Amazon is TOO efficient and a world based on that ethos can't maintain a consumer class at all. The solution isn't necessarily to make Amazon inefficient so it can provide 'jobs', the solution is to decouple job wages from continued existence as a human.