- Amazon
By comparison with Facebook and Apple, Amazon ’ s model for Cloud Polis emphasizes an agora of objects rather than of humans, logistical expertise over tactile affect and self-identity, and white label services instead of brand patriotism. By far the largest online retailer, it has made post-Fordist supply chain compression and retail distribution chain automation into a long-tail mass medium. Through its gargantuan website and its network of warehouses and distribution centers, the Amazon platform centralizes connections between producers and retail consumers at a massive scale. The sum of individual items listed in the cosmic Amazon.com inventory index is measured in the hundreds of millions and is kept in check by the company ’ s own proprietary object identifier, the Amazon Standard Identifier (more in the Address chapter below). The Amazon Cloud model is based not only on expertise in faster-than-military-grade point-to-point logistics and mega-retail, but also the linking of these two with algorithmically driven pricing, recommendation, profiling, and proprietary purchase functions like One-Click and Prime. This gives Amazon visibility into small-volume supply chains similar to Walmart ’ s into mass-volume merchandise. The results are price constriction, delivery time compression, and a general undermining of brick-and-mortar retail economics. Of those discussed here, Amazon ’ s model is the most demonstrative of how what was once called e-commerce has transformed how goods are made and consumed, and how spatial and temporal economies of production, habitation, and labor have been refixed accordingly. But the “ flat world ” initiated by these logistical integrations is far flatter for objects than it is for people, as Amazon has orchestrated an incredibly precise scattering of commodified molecules coming and going.
In his 1950 essay “ The Thing, ” Heidegger lamented what he saw as the “ going ” of the organic, situated thing gathered from natural ingredients and the “ coming ” of the technological object, all placeless, anonymous, and cosmopolitan (I do not share his view on this). Scanning the landscapes of shipping containers, we assume that renewed philosophical interest in the agency of inanimate objects — the globality of material cultures, object-oriented philosophical speculations, assemblages, and networks — cannot be coincidental. These are overly timely reactions to an apparent if also unnamed predominance of object flows and freedoms, as supported by planetary-scale computation. This interest variously valorizes or rejects that predominance and those flows, more or less uncomfortable with the anti-anthropocentrism that rootless objects suggest and, as discussed in more detail in the Interfaces chapter, the post-Internet globalization of inanimate and animate substances presents a challenge to disturbed everyday sense of place and agency. For many, logistical distance and nearness bring not systemic transparency but mystification. Objects somehow appear on the doorstep, their origins opaque to their consumers and Users. Perhaps, from some vast and distant reservoir of a Spinozan ursubstance, a pure clay of stuff, commodity form is given to each one of these iterations, then packed in containers with millions more just like it. When this mass arrives at the shipping port, that sequence of smaller components assembling into larger aggregate states is reversed. <sup>59</sup> The packed shipping container is opened; pallets are removed, trucked, tracked, broken down into boxes; and then finally a single-User unit appears for delivery, a pebble peeled off this unseen boulder and delivered to your porch-become-retail interface.
Cloud Layer
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