The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 330 页

Before discussing the key difference between these two platform actors, one from Arkansas and one from Seattle, we should first quickly revisit Jameson ’ s infamous consideration of “ Walmart as Utopia ” (perhaps in light of Lenin ’ s celebration of monopoly). On the one hand, Jameson sees the incredible accomplishments of this most rapacious of capitalist organisms: keeping prices low enough that lower-income shoppers can afford a diverse range of standardized goods modeled to satisfy standardized desires, driving logistical and production innovations and with them rationalizing the deep chemistry of industrial production in ways that would have seemed impossibly attractive to the early modernists, and many others. He writes, “ So it is that Wal-Mart is celebrated as the ultimate in democracy as well as in efficiency: streamlined organization that ruthlessly strips away all unnecessary frills and waste and that disciplines its bureaucracy into a class as admirable as the Prussian state or the great movement of instituteurs in the late nineteenth-century French lay education, or even the dreams of a streamlined Soviet system. New desires are encouraged and satisfied as richly as the theoreticians of the 1960s (and also Marx himself) predicted, and the problems of distribution are triumphantly addressed in all kinds of new technological innovations. ” At the same time, this extraordinary logistical accomplishment comes at equally extraordinary costs. Jameson continues, “ This dialectical character of the new reality Wal-Mart represents is also very much the source of the ambivalence universally felt about this business operation, whose capacity to reduce inflation and to hold down or even lower prices and to make life affordable for the poorest Americans is also the very source of their poverty and the prime mover in the dissolution of American industrial productivity and the irrevocable destruction of the American small town. ” In other words Walmart ’ s relentless synthetic pricing and production megastructure allows the working poor to afford a diverse collection of commodities from roughly 11,000 stores in twenty-seven countries, but at the expense of keeping them poor. Walmart is known to pay wages so low that many full-time employees may receive regular government assistance just to survive, effectively treating marginal labor costs as an externality and outsourcing them to the state as just another manipulated supplier, and all the while realizing global net profits of over \$17 billion. A platform actor of this scale could exercise its sovereign influence to radically restructure and improve production and labor conditions, but largely does not do so at the scale of need and opportunity. ⁵² Perhaps in an alternate universe (or year to come), Bizarro Walmart will exercise its ubiquity toward another and better Cloud Polis. Amazon ’ s total revenue is still a fraction of Walmart ’ s but it is all e-commerce, a domain in which Walmart still struggles for various reasons, but obviously where the long-term growth in retail will be realized. ⁵³ By comparison, and to the ongoing chagrin of some of its investors, Amazon regularly loses hundreds of millions of dollars a year, with revenues well below the cost of its operations and aggressive infrastructure expansion. ⁵⁴ What is the proper name for this kind of platform actor? Forget your associations with “ Amazon ” as real brand and company and imagine something as yet unnamed that does the following: it aggregates the most comprehensive catalogue of commodities ever enumerated; provides supply chain omniscience, a comprehensive synthetic catallaxy that is arguably rivaled only by Walmart or Google (among remotely similar companies); uses this leverage to lower unit costs by deflationary degrees each year; introduces its own proprietary unit addressing system; innovates the use of robotic warehousing processes to distribute objects with a minimum of physical intermediation; and does so at global scale without making a profit. Public utility? Monopoly? Neoliberal deterritorialization incarnate? Object-oriented Cloud feudalism? What would have the mid-1960s engineers of Red Plenty have called it? ⁵⁵

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