[sergefaguet]

Unfortunately the majority of people who will read this thoughtful and inspiring letter will only see trivial stories about evil corporations. Stories they have been fed by the media and have accepted without thinking.

Tech companies are the only inspiring institutions that remain in America today. Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.

And amidst that sole set of institutions that inspire, thrive and lead us into the future, Amazon is one of the most inspiring.

Jeff, thank you for helping prove that humans can create great things.

[agentdrtran]

> Tech companies are the only inspiring institutions that remain in America today. Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.

you will only find this level of slavish devotion to tech on HN and in the valley. Normal people do not think like this!

[systemvoltage]

Speak for yourself. Pretty much everyone I know in my non-tech friends and family circles - everyone loves Amazon. Especially the customer service. Love has faded a tiny bit because of influx of Chinese cheap gadgets.

I'd say only tech people on HN are gung ho about Amazon's practices and in some sort of an eternal crusade against big corps. We can still criticize big corps for its workers rights and what not, but at the same time praise their technological prowess and incredible work from many thousands of people. They're orthogonal, but HN public does not know how to separate the two. Media fed and bloated minds sometimes.

Honestly, I come to HN for inspiration and motivation. Not activism. There are plenty of places to engage in productive activism on the internet if you wish, but better in person. HN is particularly not suited for it because of downvotes - activism requires people in person debating peacefully to progress and not regress into echo chambers. Activism is a joint affair, not an idealogical war. HN coalesces the worst of both - hive mind idealogical stance + echo chambering through black and grey text colors.

[lotsofpulp]

> Love has faded a tiny bit because of influx of Chinese cheap gadgets.

Love faded because Amazon removed the ability to filter search results for items shipped and sold only by Amazon.com, and they commingled inventory, so there is no guarantee of supply chain.

They made the decision to reduce their costs as a retailer, and subject their customers to supply chain risk, in order to increase their margins and sit back and earn commission as a platform.

At this point in time, I don’t see anything remarkable about Amazon’s retail operations. If anything, I would say Home Depot is more impressive, with a nice website showing me where the item is in their store, plus offering me various locations to pick it up or ship it to me. In fact, most retailers do this now (but I like Home Depot’s website the most).

Unlike Amazon, however, I don’t have to worry about resellers garbage on other websites (although Walmart is similar but I can still filter results there and I don’t think they commingle).

[systemvoltage]

Yea, I agree with you. Amazon’s retail isn’t the same as it was before.

I think this is consensus amongst the tech elite crowd on HN including myself.

I’ve spoken to my dad who buys all kinds of stuff from Amazon in his retirement in rural area. He loves it. He is still amazed by the fact that someone delivers whatever you want by the press of a button. People of HN are myopic about their position, education and knowledge of technology and try to project that the rest of the world must be the same. I am guilty of that too.

HN is such a monumentally tiny bubble.

[lotsofpulp]

I was only pointing out that the claim of love fading due to cheap Chinese gadgets is wrong. They could have had all the cheap Chinese gadgets they want, and if they kept the filter for showing only Amazon sourced products and did not commingle inventory, then there would not have been any love faded.

That the lay population does not care or is not as informed about the above issue is probably true.

Although, the lay population is very price sensitive, and Amazon’s prices are much higher than comparable in store prices at Walmart/Costco/Target/Home Depot/etc. Especially if the item is a heavy and/or liquid.

[helen___keller]

> Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.

This seems like a stretch. Media certainly fits both of these, but it's hard to claim academia is in decay by most measures, and I have no idea how you could possibly claim American government or military are illegitimate OR in decay without resorting to completely subjective measures, such as how partisan the republic is or how few things get done (of the things you care about, no doubt).

(Note: one could construct a plausible claim that military is in decay based on what percentage of spending goes to operations instead of R&D and acquisition[0], but I'd argue this doesn't mean our military is in decay so much as entering a period of restructuring as a result of a series of unfortunate long-term planning misses)

[0] as seen on HN, https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2021/04/welcome-to-decad...

[sergefaguet]

On academia, I work closely with a lot of professors at Oxford, MIT, Caltech and the like and they uniformly believe academia is in decline and with horrible institutional incentives accelerating that decay.

The decay of the US government is visible in the crumbling infrastructure, the homeless people on the streets and in tent cities, the trash, the shitty COVID response, the partisan bickering. It has no claim to leadership, it is not inspiring to anyone whether in the US or around the world. It is in crisis and it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix.

[helen___keller]

> The decay of the US government is visible in the crumbling infrastructure, the homeless people on the streets and in tent cities, the trash, the shitty COVID response, the partisan bickering. It has no claim to leadership, it is not inspiring to anyone whether in the US or around the world. It is in crisis and it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix.

You're throwing a lot of things out here, but they generally fall under being either (a) subjective, (b) deliberate policy choices by a democratically elected government, or (c) emergent properties of deliberate policy choices by a democratically elected government

Ultimately, if the people of this country don't want government spending on the sick and homeless, then it's not a decaying and illegitimate government, it is a well functioning and legitimate government as decided by a cruel populace.

Not to say the the government is perfectly legitimate, I could write an essay on issues with the way our government is structured and how certain design choices diminish citizen's representation in the government (for example: gerrymandering, first past the post electoral college allocation, and the near-permanence of effectively arbitrary state lines). But even the sum of these do not make our government illegitimate.

> it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix

I can agree on that much atleast.

[sergefaguet]

Legitimacy is generally not an objective thing. So there’s not much of a point in arguing here further.

[ActorNightly]

I think he is talking more about where the opportunities are for the talent.

In the past, if you wanted to work on cool shit, government/military had plenty of projects, and research was being done in academia.

Nowdays, if you want to work on cool shit, you go to tech companies.

[nslice]

Yes Amazon is one of those institutions that you only see once in a lifetime. While they have had faults, they've always 'relentlessly' worked to improve. There is no doubt that Amazon may succumb to the same late-stage effects that have decayed those mentioned organizations.

[y-c-o-m-b]

> trivial stories about evil corporations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon

These are not "trivial stories about evil corporations". They are very real criticisms about the company and its leadership and the lives they have ruined are very real too. To wave your hand and excuse the vast amounts of ethically and morally horrendous things Amazon has done as "trivial stories" is quite frankly one of the most willfully ignorant and disgusting things I've seen posted here - let alone up-voted - in quite some time.

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale

A company that benefits from forced labor camps for fucks sake... that is inspiring to you? Jesus Christ.

[shawnz]

If benefiting from forced labour makes something uninspiring to you, then how is it possible to find anything created in the western world inspiring? Are you sure the clothes you are wearing now, which you are certainly benefiting from, weren't made with forced labour?

[y-c-o-m-b]

Whataboutism is not a valid excuse. I'm not walking around telling people the company making my shirts are inspiring and they should ignore the media. If I find out they are using forced labor, then the reasonable next step is to avoid using the brand and/or try to implement a change by being vocal about the injustice. Which is specifically why these "trivial stories" are so important; they are not just people complaining about minor issues, they are a means to implement a positive change.

[shawnz]

I don't mean to say that it's OK for Amazon or anyone else to use forced labour just because it's hard to avoid. I am only saying that it doesn't invalidate the good which they have done either. Just like how perhaps you and I wear clothes made with forced labour, because it is hard to avoid, and it doesn't necessarily invalidate the good we have done. I agree it is important to hold businesses accountable for the practices they use.

[ActorNightly]

I legitimately can't believe you don't even read the links you post. The wiki link states that Amazon has addressed most of its criticisms.

As for China, to sit from the comfort of your own home and demand that a company act benevolent at a cost to itself is simply ridiculous.

[danielbln]

Is this satire? I honestly can't tell.

[ActorNightly]

If you live perpetually on the internet instead of reality, you will think its satire.

Go around your neighborhood and ask what do people think of Amazons products like Prime with all the shipping advantages and media that comes with it, of amazons return policy, of things like $15 an hour minimum wage, $30/hour of overtime + benefits, and you will find a different story.

[danielbln]

Ludicrous. Most people, myself included, use and praise Amazon's various services, while at the same time being able to criticise a mega-corp that employs various questionable business practices. In fact, you'd be surprised how critical people actually are of Amazon in my neighbourhood. OP's strange song of Amazon as a shining beacon of light and harbinger of humanity's future - that's what smells of satire.

[ActorNightly]

Nobody is saying Amazon is without fault for making mistakes, however in terms of the stuff that they do with retail, they generally seem to take care of it.

In terms of things like poor worker conditions across the board, you would have a point if you actually had any concrete proof, and no, twitter threads don't count as proof. Not to mention that there is plenty of evidence to support the contrary.

[frombody]

Try talking to your Amazon delivery drivers.

I've yet to meet a single one that has anything positive to say about the company.

[ActorNightly]

Not every job has to be enjoyable? They do the work they are hired to do and get paid accordingly, and can quit anytime.

The point is that Amazon does a shitload of good by providing useful services to a lot of customers.

[chakhs]

same thought really, can't tell if it's trolling or not, which is weird that we actually consider someone could be serious saying this

[cm2012]

Someone once described Amazon as essentially a charity since they didn't take profits for shareholders in the first 20 years of their existence even though they could have. Even now they still reinvest most profits into capex.

[quadrangle]

"non-profit" would be at least appropriate for your point, "charity" definitely not. Those two terms are not actually synonyms.

But even with non-charity non-profit, Bezos wouldn't be so wealthy. Still, that's not your point. Your point is that it operates in a way to advance its business activities rather than to distribute profits, and that's largely true.

[decebalus1]

Someone needs to read up on both the definition of charity and the definition of 'essentially'

[Aunche]

Progressives tend to idolize complainers more than creators. Labor gets more credit for the 40 our work week than the employers who popularized it like Henry Ford. Civil rights activists get more credit than judges and lawmakers who risked their careers. This isn't to diminish the accomplishments of labor unions or the Civil Rights movement as it certainly takes a lot for disenfranchised groups to gain political clout. The problem is that it feeds to the illusion that simply complaining about things as loudly as possible about every single perceived injustice will somehow make the world better.

[teachrdan]

> complaining about things as loudly as possible about every single perceived injustice

What you describe here is how the American right caricatures people who make change in the US. Civil rights activists did more than "complain"; indeed, if they had only complained, it's hard to see how they would have been able to overcome white supremacists in business, law enforcement and government.

Just look at the Montgomery Bus Boycott, or the lesser-known Freedom Riders. These were campaigns organized by a coalition of local folks in the South (mostly, but not entirely Black) as well as anti-racists in the North. These activists were successful because they were strategic (the Freedom Riders forced the Kennedy Administration to enforce existing anti-segregation laws on US highways...) and incredibly brave (...and they endured having their bus firebombed by white supremacists while the police stood by watching).[0]

Much like organized labor, Civil Rights activists created a power base among the disenfranchised in the face of state sanctioned violence, up to and including assassination.[1]

It's fair to say that some progressives caricature the accomplishments of Amazon, which, on a technical level, are tremendous yet difficult for a non-technical person to appreciate. But this comment comes close to saying that ordinary people have no right to criticize the great men of industry like Jeff Bezos and Henry Ford. This is particularly ironic because Ford published and distributed anti-semitic propaganda to the extent that he was personally honored by Adolph Hitler[2]; Ford also hired armed thugs to intimidate and attack union organizers.[3]

There's a particular tendency on HN to lionize successful (rich) founders and CEOs to the point of obscuring their exploitation of labor. This includes Elon Musk, who literally purchased the title of "Founder" for Tesla, and whose factories had, at one point, accumulated more OSHA fines than the next ten car manufacturers put together.[4]

I'm not saying we shouldn't appreciate the staggering achievements of companies like Amazon or Tesla; I personally think Tesla has the only big vision worth pursuing in all of Silicon Valley. But nor should we ignore the human cost of what they do. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are among the two richest men in the world right now, and they got that wealth in no small part through the exploitation and human misery of their most vulnerable employees.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Riders#:~:text=Freedom....

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Assassinated_American...

2. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryfo...

3. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...

4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...

[Aunche]

I emphasized in my original comment that I was not diminishing the accomplishments of previous civil rights and labor activists. It's hard to deny how even they are primarily admired for their complaining rather than organizational abilities, and this is what activists primarily try to emulate now.

I agree that Tesla deserves their poor reputation, but Amazon genuinely seems like they care about workers' well-being. People perceive labor to be "exploited" because automation and globalization mean that American workers no longer have a monopoly on labor. It's a simple function of supply and demand. No amount of cherry picked anti-Amazon narratives is going to change that. Increased government spending would, as it does for the Nordic countries. However, nobody cares to detangle the web of perverse incentives baked in, so Americans will always view taxes as a waste of money.

[teachrdan]

You're right that the work of civil rights organizers is misrepresented today. It's described as "They spoke truth to power, and power listened."

Of course that was never the case. They risked their lives and struggled for years to make progress. But that risk and struggle is minimized; to describe the people who undermined and attacked and killed them would be to indict the same groups of business people, police officers and law makers who perpetuate the same anti-civil rights agenda today. This is how Martin Luther King ends up being described as a Black Santa Claus rather than a radical organizer who was building a cross-racial, class-based movement for civil and economic rights. It's how schools across the country teach whole lessons about MLK for every grade, every year, and never talk about how the FBI harassed and targeted him and other civil rights leaders.

[kgog]

> Stories they have been fed by the media and have accepted without thinking

Seems like you would rather drink the kool aid given to you in press releases by companies! Good going!

> Tech companies are the only inspiring institutions

Yes, I do feel inspired to hire vulnerable people and squash all their rights, make them work to the bone, violate all their privacy, and make them pee in bottles.

[EdwinLarkin]

I have yet to find a tech company that is not about extracting as much wealth as it can by min/maxing on human suffering.

[illumanaughty]

Exactly. This is such an awful take that it makes me think maybe Bezos has time to spend on HN.

[Super_Jambo]

I suspect Bezos would have a more nuanced view.

[decebalus1]

I have rarely seen such cloying low quality hyperbolic patronizing comment on top on Hackernews. Well done!

> Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.

If the government is in decay and losing all its legitimacy, what exactly are you doing here and why are we following laws in the first place?

[sergefaguet]

i'm not in the US for that reason. and very many people are not following laws.