[Karellen]

Congratulations on being very intelligent. Well done. Good job, even.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Crikey. That comic is nearly 6 years old now. Heck, it was at least 16 years ago that Tom Morello pointed out:

> When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that's where people buy their books. We're not interested in preaching to just the converted. It's great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it's also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060526032423/http://www.ratm.d...

Doctorow himself has also said that he'd like to be able to sell his anti-Amazon audiobooks on Amazon - if Amazon would agree do so without DRM. Because that's where a lot of his customers are.

It's just that he, the author, doesn't want DRM on his audiobooks, and neither do his customers. He sells his audiobooks without DRM to his customers through other channels. All he wants from Amazon is for it to be a reseller, selling the thing he has to sell, to the people who want to buy it, in the place that people buy and sell things.

[randomran01234]

You can pre-order his anti-Amazon book on Amazon. You don’t need to sell your book on Amazon just to live in a capitalist society. To me this is hypocrisy, but I guess not everybody agrees.

https://www.amazon.ca/Chokepoint-Capitalism-Content-Captured...

[Karellen]

> You can pre-order his anti-Amazon book on Amazon.

Um, yes, I know?

What's your point there, exactly?

I was specifically talking about the audiobook version. It's right there, in the comment I wrote.

> You don’t need to sell your book on Amazon just to live in a capitalist society.

He doesn't just sell his books to live. He makes most of them available for free to download on his website. e.g. https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

He sells a lot of his books to spread a message. If you're spreading a message, the important thing is that it gets to as many people as possible. And it's important that it gets to lots of people who haven't yet heard that message yet. That means lowering the barrier for people who aren't yet invested in the message to be able to hear it. It means spreading the message to people who don't know how terrible Amazon are, to people who do most of their shopping on Amazon and wouldn't even think to look anywhere else to find a copy of the message.

Sure, it's great if the insular group of people who've already boycotted Amazon can get a copy of his anti-Amazon book on not-Amazon, and all clap themselves on the back about how smart they are for having already boycotted Amazon. Yay, us! But that doesn't spread the message to anyone else. It won't change any new minds. It won't change public opinion. It can't be part of a movement.

[randomran01234]

Sorry but “he has to sell his anti-Amazon book on Amazon” is delusional, cognitive dissonance in action.

[Karellen]

OK, to make up some ballpark numbers, assume Amazon make roughly $1/book sold, and 20% of the sales of Chokepoint Capitalism on Amazon will get the anti-Amazon message to someone who hasn't heard it before.

The question then becomes, given how awful Amazon is, is it justifiable to fund Amazon by $5 to get someone new to seriously reconsider their whole future lifetime usage of Amazon, and possibly to join the anti-Amazon crusade? (Basically, it's a trolley problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem )

And there are plenty of reasons that the answer might be "No". I think it's reasonable for someone to say that funding Amazon, by any amount, for any reason, no matter the outcome, is inherently immoral and unjustifiable.

Or, someone could reasonably say that it might be moral in some circumstances, but not at that price. Or that my numbers are wrong, my price is way off, and at the actual price of $X/convert (for whatever value of X they come up with) it's wrong.

Or, I think someone could reasonably say, "Yes", at that price, it's worth it.

I even think someone could reasonably say "I can't decide if it's worth it, and I refuse to choose."

I think reasonable people can disagree about where the line is. Your position appears to be pretty firmly on the "Never" side of that line, and while I don't agree with your conclusion, I don't think that part of your position is unreasonable.

However, I think that labelling anyone who doesn't agree with you as "delusional, cognitive dissonance in action" is unreasonable, and lacks a certain amount of empathy. I think it's also unproductive, in that it's unlikely to make anyone who doesn't agree with you to even listen to your counterargument (did you make one?), let alone consider it seriously.

OTOH, if your goal is not actually to convince anyone to listen to you, but to just bathe smugly in the warm feeling of moral superiority, you're doing fine.

[JKCalhoun]

> When you live in a capitalistic society...

Aside: I thought the word for this was capitalistical.

<jk>