Amazon.Heartbreak

Ex-Amazon.com wage slave Mike Daisey asks in one fantasy e-mail to his then-boss Jeff Bezos: "Would it have been so hard to build a cool and quirky bookstore instead of a soulless virtual megamall? You were afraid: afraid to define the company, afraid the stock would drop, afraid not to feed the monster. What you sacrifice reveals what you value, and you're a fool if you think the world will forgive you in the end." Prescient stuff. 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com , Daisey's hilarious, heartbreaking and surprisingly powerful recounting of life inside what may be the world's strangest, most ephemeral company -- a symbol of all that was exciting, misguided, and ultimately misunderstood about business online during the mad years. It's also one of the best books ever written about the Net, an unsparing, even brutal indictment not only of hubris, but of media and, of course, the corporate-spawned hype that shapes so much of American life.

Mike Daisey's Amazon wasn't really a good place to work in. He had doubts when the interviewer asked him for his college board scores and GPA (the company made a big point of seeking out highly-educated freaks and geeks), and when he noticed all the desks were fashioned out of used doors.

The company, he soon found out, was a bizarre corporate/yuppie/geek shell-game, equal parts myth, BS, and Yes, some idealism and innovation. Remember those lonely pundits, analysts and prophets wandering the talk shows, wondering aloud whether it was really okay for a company that hadn't ever turned a dime's profit to be valued so highly by stockholders and so loved by media? They were quickly shouted down or ignored by the geek digerati and bewildered journalists and analysts, dismissed as clueless old farts and reactionaries. We wanted so much to believe that people like Bezos and companies like Amazon were re-shaping the world (I sure thought the Net would revolutionize politics and business, though I never could see how Amazon would make money with those discounts and shipping costs.) We have yet to fully acknowledge that if it survives at all, Amazon will make it as any other company has, not as part of any revolution.

Daisey, who writes in an original, bitingly funny voice, nearly went mad at Amazon and long ago fled Starbucks-land for Brooklyn (the surprising new universal destination point for hip and creative seekers of fortune), where he has prospered, adapting his book into a successful off-Broadway play. On one level, his story is a pure riot, especially his accounts of life as a customer service phone rep and of the hero-worship of "Jeff" throughout the company. Daisey escaped from customer service to become a toy evaluator (the description of an Amazon employee storming his Seattle apartment to try to get back the toys he was late reviewing for the site is a classic) and then into corporate HQ, the gothic mansion housing avocado sandwiches, slaves to fetch laundry, Jeff and Business Development. His anecdotal profiles of geeks who were not nearly as smart as they thought they were, and of Seattle, for a couple of years the smug, red-hot center of the new-kind-of-company-that-was-reshaping the world are also piercing and well written. He describes Amazon's headquarters as "Lex Luthor's Freak House on the Hill ... it squats like an art deco toad over the city of Seattle, its insides all scooped out and replaced with IKEA and geek central -- a trifecta of Batcave, Fortress of Solitude, and supervillain lair."

But Amazon, Daisey suggests, was mostly a weird idea hovering in the brains of Bezos and his many camp followers in media and business. Well, it was more than an idea.

But however bad you thought companies like Amazon might be, it was worse. Banks of bored, gerbil-like customer service phone reps alternately took orders (at the time, nobody trusted sending their credit card numbers over the Net, although they rarely hesitated to turn them over to teenaged cashiers in restaurants) and soothed legions of enraged customers. They pretended to be managers when customers demanded to talk to one, pretended to be sorry for their troubles, pretended to get their problems sorted out right away.

The American consumer, Daisey perceptively points out, is a creature of entitlement, expecting instant satisfaction from somebody whenever something goes wrong, even though (in the tech world at least) they rarely get any. CS and tech support reps are the sacrificial lambs placed between furious buyers, bad service, poor products and craven corporate execs. At Amazon, software-wielding managers counted the time the reps spent on the phone, the length of calls (there was great pressure to resolve problems in seconds, not minutes), the number of customers they were "handling," the number of problems "resolved."

For all the monitoring, though, reps like Daisey were curiously unaccountable. They hated their work, and were numbed by it. Customers took their chances.

Daisey and other CS reps, pretending to be courteous to hordes, faked efficiency by dialing themselves and then hanging up, raising their efficiency numbers to the point where many got promoted. During Amazon's frequent early server crashes, Daisey and his fellow workers would take credit card orders and numbers down by hand, with many of the slips then lying around in piles for days or inadvertently brought home. All Amazon employees dreaded Christmas, when the overextended company struggled to deal with demand it simply wasn't equipped to meet. (It was during Christmas shopping periods that the cracks in Bezos's public relations blitz began to show.)

And on top of all of their humiliations and degradations, Daisey and many of his colleagues showed up at work one day to learn that many of the CS jobs had vanished from Seattle, farmed out to India where phone workers earning $1 an hour assured frustrated customers their books were on the way.

In between the descriptions of insanity inside Amazon, Daisey portrays a picture of a company whose ambition from the first outstripped its resources. Wall Street was traumatized by the prospect of e-commerce, and Bezos seemed to them to grasp what the new world order would be like. So Bezos, like Gates, became one of the Net's mini-Gods. As soon as it became common knowledge that Amazon had whipped bn.com, the next logical step was that Amazon would have to take on the mothership -- Barnes & Noble itself. "If Amazon was going to justify a market cap larger than most third world countries," writes Daisey,"it was going to have to trounce Barnes & Noble and all the other physical booksellers," since books, after all, were Amazon's core product.

That, of course, never happened. Instead, Bezos panicked and swerved. "Reporters would ask about the rivalry, the dueling press releases and other PR efforts of the past, and Jeff would shrug and smile his smile. He talked about entering new markets, how Amazon was so much more than a bookseller that it seemed book sales hardly mattered. It was as though he could hold up a hand puppet and tell the press, 'Look at the puppet ... don't look over there, look at this shiny puppet,' and the press watched the puppet, wondering how on earth he made that little guy talk. You wouldn't even know that Amazon sold books anymore from some of the stories coming out, much less that they were the vast majority of its sales."

Bezos, Daisey theorizes, knew Amazon would never be able to compete with Barnes & Noble in the non-virtual realm, and the company soon lost identity, focus, even the confidence of gullible journalists and analysts. Employees knew all along what those crank analysts had been saying -- because of shipping costs, the company had to discount its products too heavily to be competitive. This was a dilemma the new economy thinkers and gurus at Amazon have never solved.

In the meantime, Daisey had hilarious confrontations with geek, yuppie and hippie bosses, all of whom he outmaneuvered or outsmarted; helped himself to a generous supply of Post-its and company pens; and referred to his fellow employees and friends by their Amazon e-mail names -- "bsmith," "hjones" and so on-- as was Amazon tradition.

But he never really knew what any of his jobs required of him, nor did he ever witness anything at Amazon working rationally or well. Employees were obsessed with their stock holdings and with Amazon's almost desperate efforts to expand into new realms to justify the fanatic faith of early Net-believers.

Daisey's book underscores something that ought to have been apparent for some time: Net companies are often corporate cults -- Gates, Jobs, Yang, Bezos -- revolving around eccentric, self-styled geeky gurus who profess to be changing the world and who have a genius for convincing the always-gullible media that they are. For all their arrogance and savvy, geeks and nerds seem to crave leaders to follow. At least Gates rewarded his with lots of successful stock.

At Amazon, employees sat around their desks e-mailing one another about Jeff:

• He was worth billions but rented an apartment and drove a Toyota hatchback (true.)
• He worked in investment banking before starting Amazon.com (true).
• He slept only three hours a night (false).
• He still responded to e-mail at his public address, jeff@amazon.com (true.)

The problem with cults, of course, is that they foster disconnection with the real world. Amazon lost touch with the rest of the planet as its hapless employees, many doomed to be laid off, obsessed over their stock value and counting the days to becoming millionaires. When the followers discover their gurus are all too human, bitterness and disenchantment seem inevitable.

What makes this an especially significant book is that Daisey has written a story about a generation and its values; as well as a riveting business yarn. The kids working 90 hours a week at Amazon, and the execs and white-collar workers sleeping on motel-room floors and hauling boxes in warehouses during the holidays, (Amazon built giant warehouses in remote places where there were no available workers to hire) thought they were re-inventing the world. Instead, they were simply pawns in one man's high-stakes gamble. Suspicious of authority and corporate values, they succumbed anyway -- mostly because of the aura of hipness and the promise of wealth -- to both, though in new guises. Geeks, it turns out, are as greedy as anybody. Daisey discovered, as so many of his generation were about to -- that Bezos and the other cult leaders had simply dressed up the hog.

Yet Daisey, along with his increasingly bewildered co-workers, really wanted to believe. At first, he felt he had finally kind a new kind of work culture, one he could spend the rest of his life working in and for. In a way, he was heartbroken when the truth finally dawned, and his account is touching as well as comic. Anybody who experienced the Net in its early days, or is struggling to deal with new notions of truth, economics and work in the digital age, will understand.

Comments

Kickin' It Ole School

[Anonymous Coward]

Izzo (O.S.D.O.A.)
Jay-Z

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Born Sean Carter in Brooklyn, N.Y., nimble-tongued rapper Jay-Z started out as the Jaz's rhymin' partner, rapping on the hit single, "The Originators." Jay-Z went solo in '95 with the Payday/ffrr single "In My Lifetime" but didn't release a solo album. Jay-Z then touched mainstream in 1996 with the single "Dead Presidents" b/w its enormously successful b-side, "Ain't No Nigga," featuring Foxy Brown. Later that year his solo debut, Reasonable Doubt, came out; featuring cameos by SWV and Notorious B.I.G., the album soon went gold and spawned the Top 40 single "Can't Knock the Hustle," with Mary J. Blige. In 1997 Jay-Z returned with Vol. 1 In My Lifetime, featuring production work by Sean "Puffy" Combs and appearances by Babyface, Foxy Brown and Lil Kim. Jay-Z has since released the The Streets Is Watching soundtrack album and 1998's platinum-selling Vol. 2 Hard Knock Life, which catapulted Jay popward with the Annie-sampled "Hard Knock Life." The album featured cameos by DMX, Foxy, the Lox, Jermaine Dupri and Timbaland. Jay-Z's fourth full-length, Vol. 3--Life and Times of S. Carter, was released in late 1999 to favorable reviews.

Jon's stats for today.

[GodForGeeks]

Unfortunately, compiled by the Evil Empire's word processor: 1829 Words 24 Paragraphs 71 Sentences 3 Sentences/Paragraph 25.5 Words per sentence 8% Passive sentences 12 Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level

Re:The Book is $13.80 at DoubleDiscount.com

[thedanceman]

How is this "Redundant"? I am posting a link to the cheapest place to buy the book. I didn't see anyone else post a link to the cheapest site. What gives?

Wage slave????

[Anonymous Coward]

Ex-Amazon.com wage slave Mike Daisey...

Words do have meanings. This diminishes what slavery really means if you call something "slavery" that is nothing like slavery at all.

Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

This has to be Katz's dumbest article yet. I used to think he was just about being a shock jock for the nerd world.

Now it seems like he's another queer anti-establishment neohippie who mixes drugs, alchohol and his keyboard in altogether too many strange ways.

If my corporation isn't a money grabbing monster, how are they going to pay my quite above average salary (so that I can buy the latest cool shit)?

Re:Jeez

[Anonymous Coward]

this should be +5 insightful, but since slashdot is such an anti-corporation, leftist, site it feels good to say "bad big, corporation. good artsy-fartsy, little corner bookstore."

JonKatz is a Jew

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody has to say it. I might as well be the first.

Wait... No?

[DeltaSigma]

What's all this "Bezos and Gates, the Cyber-gods..." blather I'm hearing? There's only one cyber god I need, and that's John Carmack. He spoke here yesterday you know. Any of you that missed it should be ashamed...

Re:The Book is $13.80 at DoubleDiscount.com

[Anonymous Coward]

bad moderation

Re:The Book is $13.80 at DoubleDiscount.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's redundant. And redundant. Get it?

ok

[nomadic]

I typed a reply three times and three times it wouldn't allow it.

Do the slashdot editors type 3 wpm or something? Do they assume the rest of us are that oafish? Is the idea that someone might type a message in under 20 seconds THAT foreign to them?

the UTM is listening

[Anonymous Coward]

The United Troll Movement congratulates you for your FP. Anyway, this very first post is now tagged and we claim pretension.
We are friendly and want you all to join the very movement.

Re:Soundtrack question

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta admit, the Massive Attack tracks in that movie were pretty wicked too (Angel and Inertia Creeps).

Re:Fristed.

[Anonymous Coward]

First Posters Should Hug A Root

Nth hug a root post today!!!!

Thanks

Re:First Junis from Afghanistan post!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot Friends

I wish I had a commodore 64. It is powerful machine, but my Slashdot friends could only afford a vic-20. I am grateful still though.

I have started an ISP with my vic-20. Once I upgrade the 4K to 8K it will be a powerful machine.

thank you slashdot friends

I have to say

[Anonymous Coward]

nice writing JonKatz

THIS IS AN EXTREMELY OLD STORY

[Anonymous Coward]

This story has been told, and told, and told in the media.

Figures it is Katz.