[inglor_cz]

I wonder why huge corporations let themselves be dragged into the dark vortex of culture wars. There is nothing to gain in that blood- and vitriol soaked trenches.

Or do they hope to buy themselves lenience from progressive politicians in coming cartel investigations? Will AOC (who famously helped to kill a NY Amazon project) start to love Amazon now that books that 'frame sexual identity as mental illness' are banished from its pages?

[pydry]

GitHub renamed the master branch to main just after they got flack for not canceling their ICE contract.

One of those changes would have cost them real money.

With Amazon they probably want to score some cheap progressive points to paper over those awkward and possibly illegal union busting tactics that threaten their bottom line.

[cies]

This. Big biz does not care about humans (and their rights). Amazon/Tesla behaved illegally against unionization, sell stuff made in countries with little protection for people and nature.

But they put a rainbow logo on and now all is cool.

[xiphias2]

I can't say anything about Amazon, but if one looks at a 20 year timeline, there's no company protecting nature more than Tesla.

Regarding worker rights I think that central banks destroying money by printing ,,infinite amount of dollars'' are the ones to blame, companies are generally in a hard position, that's why they can get away with inhuman tactics :(

[tekknik]

> Regarding worker rights I think that central banks destroying money by printing ,,infinite amount of dollars'' are the ones to blame, companies are generally in a hard position, that's why they can get away with inhuman tactics :(

Please read either the link below or a book called “the history of money” to know why you’re wrong in this statement. Central banks printing money has saved these workers you speak of.

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/12/06/fiat-curre...

[cies]

Lithium mining is by no means protecting nature. And couping a country to get cheap access is something Musk openly bragged about:

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/elon-musk-confesses-to-l...

Maybe electric is an eco net positive compared to combustion. But we are yet to find out. And the Tesla solar roofs, where are they? I'm afraid the roofs were merely a way to get good eco PR on the Tesla brand. And doing Tesla with one hand while putting rockets full of fuel on the other makes Mr Musk even more contradicting.

[bob33212]

They hope the woke mob will move on to another target. They are not actually spending time censoring books submitted to them

[roenxi]

If we put on our cynical hat for a second, they aren't targeting these books because anyone cares about them. The point is to assert that the woke mob have power over Amazon, a powerful company.

Folding to their demands won't do anything useful, the nebulous 'woke' will make progressively more demands. If they can choose what Amazon does and doesn't sell, why stop at books nobody cares about? Keep going until actual resistance is met!

[waterhouse]

Was this particular instance in response to a woke mob? The article doesn't mention it. I see it as just as likely to have been initiated by a woke Amazon employee. Although the woke are probably a minority of Amazon employees, they are likely a vocal and organized minority, enough to make the rest scared to try to make a policy that would stop this kind of action.

[inglor_cz]

That is a possible explanation, a tax to be left alone. A protection racket of sorts.

The thing is, classical mob that collects "pizzo" money is vertically structured and can actually promise the payer real safety in exchange for money paid. That is not the case of the Twitter mob, anyone can start a shitstorm against anyone else.

[VBprogrammer]

I'm not sure why you believe that this is something which is done upon them. A company the size of Amazon most likely has a significant LGBT community and the liberal leanings of the majority of people who have a higher level of education (presumably the majority of people in decision making positions) takes care of the rest.

[inglor_cz]

I do not really see the connection between having a lot of LGBT employees and this decision. Not every gay person is obliged to have the same opinion on teenage gender dysphoria, whether it is wise to transition someone who is not old enough to drive a car responsibly and whether it is wise to banish books from a bookstore, let alone how the ideal blacklist should look like.

This kind of topics tends to be discussed by tiny, though passionate minorities. I would expect Amazon to have some TERFs, too.

[tesseractive]

Amazon is in Seattle. We are arguably the most trans-accepting city in the US (source: being a trans person living in Seattle). Trans people are mostly just an accepted part of the community here. And people here are generally not super impressed by the "think of the children!" wedge issue any more than they were impressed with the "OMG trans women in bathrooms!" wedge issue. I'm sure TERFs exist here, but they keep it to themselves, because it's not something to admit to in polite company.

[corobo]

You know gay is only one of the letters you used?

[inglor_cz]

They are not perfect quarters of the pie, though.

There will almost certainly be more gays and lesbians than transsexuals in a random set of thousands of people.

Or do you want to say that the rest of the three letters are expected to have uniform opinions on said matters?

[inglor_cz]

My point is that the community sort-of isn't representative of the general gay population. It often consists of a specific subtype of activists that share a lot of political opinions and will gatekeep nonconforming individuals out.

[corobo]

Mate if we're misinterpreting things on purpose are you saying that people only have valid opinions if they're the majority?

No I'm not saying that, don't be daft.

[vertex-four]

Indeed, gay people often hate trans people (who, as another comment says, mostly want to get on with our fucking lives) as much as anyone else. What’s your point here? Hatred is cool and normal and Amazon should be promoting it?

[VBprogrammer]

You are punching at a straw man. No one is saying every gay person has the same opinion on this or any other matter. However, as a community (which is the word I used), they do tend to stand together.

[caslon]

Corporations are made of employees. Even their executives are just employees! Employees, as you might know, are people! They have opinions and preferences of all sorts!

The high-value workers and executives for Amazon are located exclusively in progressive areas. They probably raised a fuss and Amazon didn't want another Tim Bray situation. Given that the corporation loses nothing and gains a degree of loyalty from its employees, it wins.

[inglor_cz]

"the corporation loses nothing"

Do you believe that? I would say such decisions are far from riskless, they can even jumpstart potential competitors and drag Amazon et al into future antitrust litigations. This kind of power being exercised wantonly tends to attract hostile attention.

"Corporations are made of employees... They have opinions and preferences of all sorts!"

They are, but we do not really know how many employees would prefer X or Y. There wasn't any internal ballot on this topic, AFAIK. It may well be the case of a tail wagging the dog.

[inglor_cz]

Microsoft is here in 2021 as well. IBM, too. But they aren't the powers that they used to be.

Book selling is highly symbolic for Amazon, because they grew out of this niche. Also, banning books has a specific bad taste associated, because that is what authoritarians over the ages have done and liberal people resented such bans.

[inglor_cz]

Bans are mostly local affairs. For a shop, if they refuse to carry a certain book, they have effectively banned it from their domain of power, which is what matters.

I know that they once removed 1984 from Kindles due to a copyright issue. Some people noticed even then. But a momentum of interest takes some time to build up. If Amazon starts expanding their blacklists frequently, it will attract more and more attention.

[caslon]

They've been doing it for quite a while; RMS pointed out that they retroactively removed 1984 from people's libraries nearly a decade ago. No regulator cared then, no regulator will care now.

Banning books isn't a particularly controversial thing; this isn't even banning them, it's just...not selling them.

[caslon]

> Do you believe that? I would say such decisions are far from riskless, they can even jumpstart potential competitors and drag Amazon et al into future antitrust litigations. This kind of power being exercised wantonly tends to attract hostile attention.

I guarantee you that Amazon is still going to be here in ten years. At most for antitrust, it would have AWS and the core shopping business split up. But that would happen anyway. It's not really wantonly to take an ethical stand, even if the ethical stand is mostly for show, or even if it's outright wrong. Especially not in a field like bookselling, that Amazon has nowhere close to a monopoly in.

> They are, but we do not really know how many employees would prefer X or Y. There wasn't any internal ballot on this topic, AFAIK. It may well be the case of a tail wagging the dog.

We pretty much know for Amazon, though. Its valuable employees are rich people on the coasts. Overwhelmingly, this demographic is pro-LGBT and against getting put in a higher tax bracket. They aren't going to vote against liberalism.

[throwaway53453]

The corporation doesn't get loyalty, they get employees who will keep doing this in the future.

[caslon]

That's loyalty, because it implies the employees are more likely to stick around. Employees that feel their input is valued more often than not do.

[inglor_cz]

Maybe some employees will be less likely to stick around, too.

It is unlikely that every employee gets their input valued. The game of favoritism is older than Amazon, even older than the written word. Usually, a small clique gets to the top and gets their input valued quite a lot - at the expense of everybody else. Some people are more talented in office politics than others.

For the "everybody else", it means either curry favour with the clique or get out.

[caslon]

The minority of conservatives in progressive cities on the West Coast are cheaper to replace than the majority of liberals, though. It's how the market works.

[throwaway53453]

lol you have a twisted view of capitalism if you think it's about abusing workers

[throwaway53453]

That's if you assume the majority of employees agree. Most either don't care or are scared to speak out.

[unix_fan]

Pandering in big tech is nothing new. Apple likes to support minorities, but they completely forget about their slave labor in Asia. As a minority myself, these actions will make sure I keep some distance between me and these companies.

[lm28469]

> I wonder why huge corporations let themselves be dragged into the dark vortex of culture wars. There is nothing to gain in that blood- and vitriol soaked trenches

There is plenty of money to make and we all know this is the only thing that matter for corporations.

[inglor_cz]

> There is plenty of money to make

How exactly?

[lm28469]

"Oh wow look at our new car it's so LGBT friendly, inclusive and __empowering__"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPLnthpzR1U

[inglor_cz]

I do not doubt that they try, but is there any evidence that this kind of P.R. operations actually helps with sales?

This is where I am skeptical.

[wlaggert]

In terms of stock price nothing is gained, except when pandering to potential ad clickers like Google (apparently conservatives do not click on ads ...).

But the thousands of middle managers with non-technical degrees need to justify their existence. They always need to check some bullet points in their performance evaluations.

This is why you see HR moving to a "new" online HR platform every year and inventing nonsense like 360 degree reviews.

They can claim that they have "done" something!

Same here: This ban will have been discussed for at least a week, so another week is secure for their performance evaluations.

Another benefit of the culture wars is that they can be used to suppress the productive parts of the population. Especially technical people are intimidated easily (not in online comments but in real life), so if the parasites establish a sufficient number of taboos and enforce them, they control the actual workers.

Taboos have been a ruling class tool since the dawn of time.