> An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo Finance’s Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch:
>> When I was there they just got an extra paid day off and a gift card after Peak [pre-holiday season]. This is what I got. A paid day off (that expired in 3 weeks lol) and a $50 Amazon gift card. Plus, they gave us lunch. Coldcuts and sandwich bread. I absolutely did not get paid more to train people.
>> Ambassador isn’t a ‘job’ you do every day, its just something you are trained to do. You go to a 4 hour class and they teach you how to teach others to tie a knot using a set of instructions. This is how new hires a supposed to be taught. You are supposed to teach them right from a script using a set protocol. Becoming an ambassador was a way to get out of loading trucks, or packing boxes for 10 to 12 hrs. You may ambassador 1 day then unload trucks for the next 3.
>> I stopped doing it after the first year I was there because it didn’t pay more. It’s voluntary. Your manager picks them. Generally speaking ambassadors are the “kiss asses” of the department.
> In case it isn’t obvious, Chris is no longer at Amazon and is happy to speak his mind. Thanks for helping us clear this up, Chris.
For decades, I never thought people who kiss ass could have been serious. I was sure they were just cynically playing a game of advancement, and I despised them for it. What I've come to learn -- as disappointing as it is to me -- is that some people view this sort of thing as actual, legitimate opportunity, and are acting out of internal integrity. They don't see the hypocrisy of the power imbalance and how the company is using them when acting this way. It just doesn't factor into their equation.
Higher-ups look for these suck-ups, of course, but I see now that the "real" ones are the ones that really advance because of it. The process optimizes for what I call the "true believers." They wind up in positions where they can, and often do, impede the progress of people who want to make significant contributions to the bottom line.
The remaining open question in my mind is to what percentage the "true believers" actually occupy positions of serious power in a Fortune 500 -- say, at the highest 3 levels -- and how many people promoting them are just knowingly using them and their precious lack of objectivity.
I knew this was going to be posted. I've been thinking about this post for a decade now and I can't help but feel that, although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais Principle is overly cynical in my opinion, and those who adopt the view will have it compounded by confirmation bias because it is partially true.
The things described happen at toxic organizations but the author leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.
To the author of this post, finding meaning in your employment means that you're necessarily a sucker or a psychopath. Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
And God forbid you find the real nobility in doing your workaday job and doing a good job at it, and feel good about yourself. According to the Gervais Principle that makes you the ultimate sucker.
Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
Not a doctor, but a college professor. I love my job, take pride in it, and work hard at it. But I think of myself as working for my students, my collaborators, and my immediate colleagues. I pay little attention to my university as a whole, don't view it especially positively, haven't learned how to work its bureaucracy, and feel little loyalty to the institution in general.
It seems that, according to the article, I'm a "loser". As such, "it is clear that I am an idiot". Probably true lol. But a fairly happy idiot.
Just as a note, the article specifically lays out that you are only a loser in a pure economic sense, you have not maximized monetary profit and have chosen to prioritize something else. Not an idiot at all :)
> I love my job, take pride in it, and work hard at it. But I think of myself as working for my students, my collaborators, and my immediate colleagues. I pay little attention to my university as a whole, don't view it especially positively, haven't learned how to work its bureaucracy, and feel little loyalty to the institution in general.
>Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
Making positive contributions to society doesn't change the fact that you're being exploited. It's become increasingly clear that Doctors (at least where I'm from) have low pay early in their careers, unsafe working conditions, and have almost no life outside of work. On top of that they have a stressful job involving interacting with members of the public.
Given the fact that nowadays doctor is mostly a rote memorization educational path, I often wonder if increasing the number of doctors but reducing hours and somewhat pay would be an overall improvement.
Both me and my girlfriend were majors of our promotions and had more than enough in the way of academic achievement to become doctors, but the insane workload was a very effective deterrent.
This is purely anecdotal but, please, no more influx of antibiotic and steroid dispensing doctors that don't know anything else. I'm so tired of doctors that give me the distinct impression they're the equivalent of a tier 1 desktop support rep for the human body.
Or if we must have them, please keep the confined to the minute clinics at the drug store and bar them from billing themselves as real GPs.
Don't blame the doctors, the entire medical establishment from pre-med undergrad to the hospital has been captured by the insurance companies with the backing of federal regulation. They've removed any doctor/patient relationship with a simple heuristic that (surprise!) always results in some pharmaceutical intervention.
Australia has tried to get some of the way there with Nurse Practitioners.
I'm in Tasmania, so here's the a PDF from the Tasmanian Department of Health Services explaining what a Nurse Practitioner can do, including prescribing some medication and interpreting diagnostic test
This is partly because in Australia, regular nurses can do virtually nothing on their own initiative.
A friend of mine was an ICU nurse in Canada before moving to Australia. It was a long and painful process to get qualified again, and when she did, she found out she had been demoted from being able to meaningfully improve patient care (eg the prescriptions and diagnoses you mention) to a robot carrying out orders.
Both scenarios can be true, you can be "clueless" and optimistic at the same time. Even if the Gervais Principle is real, it doesn't mean you need to be nihilistic. If your work is giving you meaning and joy, does it matter if sociopaths are benefiting more than you? It's kind of like being resentful of professional athletes, it simply wasn't in the cards... Saying this as a definite "loser" btw.
An alt-side is never ending pleasure of closing laptop at the bell .. in anticipation of bbq, wine, family, and friends. Knowing fully well it’s ephemeral. IMO there is no doom and gloom in this view.
+1 For Dietrich's version of it. He renames sociopaths, clueless, and losers to opportunists, idealists, and pragmatists, and in general tones the theory down a bit, and I think the result is something that is both more palatable and more reflective of reality.
The opportunists see the corporate world for what it is and do what is best for their careers, the idealists believe in the shared corporate myths and put in the hours to uphold the values they're taught, and the pragmatists value being home for dinner more than climbing the ladder. It describes the broken system without implying all the people in it are broken, and since the focus is really on the incentive systems that create this situation I think that's a better take.
Is the corporate world "what it is" without the actions of these categories of employees? You may have the causation arrow pointing the wrong way, because to me, being more "reflective of reality," it's better worded as, "the corporate world is composed of the decisions, actions, and personalities of (sociopaths|opportunists), (the clueless|idealists), (losers|pragmatists)." Your choice of terminology is only a value judgement on each of the categories, but it's all the same people, working in a company, and making it a living thing. The specific words don't change the meaning of the principles being discussed.
I don't think the subjects of the Gervais categories are broken people so much as dangerous ones, careerwise (and possibly mental healthwise).
The words absolutely do change the meaning of the principles. The idea that actual literal sociopaths are common in corporations is much more contentious than opportunists being common. Losers implies that going home at 5pm because you have other things going on in your life is morally wrong, in a way that pragmatists doesn't. Clueless implies that believing in the corporation is wrong, in a way that idealists doesn't.
The existence of "actual literal sociopaths" does not depend on the words used to describe them. If you use words other than "actual literal sociopath" to describe the actual literal sociopathic acts of a person, that doesn't mean they aren't an actual literal sociopath. I mean, if I understand your stance here, you're arguing for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to be true, which experimentation tells us is not[1]. See also: the "euphemism treadmill."[2]
I'm arguing that if you look at the actions of the group in question, "opportunist" is a better description of what they do than "sociopath". If you use the word "sociopath" then you've changed the meaning of the principle under discussion, because the language suggests "sociopaths" are real Antisocial Personality Disorder sociopaths, when that is observably not the case.
The research on linguistic relativity focuses on sensory perceptions that differ across languages. It's not applicable to the decision to claim that most of the managerial structure have a diagnosable mental illness when they clearly don't, by an English speaker in an essay read by other English speakers.
I have been 'studying' Dilbert since the first time I laid eyes on it/him 20 years ago.
This cartoon prepares you for life in large-corp environments. I've seen so many (real life) scenarios play out exactly as some of Dilbert's (and the other chars) stories.
Edit: for clarity, the article does refer to "The Dilbert Principle".
> although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais Principle is overly cynical in my opinion
Of course it is. That's what comedians do: they take something with enough basis in reality that people will recognise and identify with it, and then caricature and exaggerate it to extremes.
> leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.
There's plenty of meaningful work to be done, but most of it doesn't generate profit, so it doesn't get done. That which does get done, often pays poverty wages. Raising good citizens, caring for the elderly, educating our children, producing high quality nutritious food, cleaning our streets of litter - all meaningful and vital, all pay buttons.
Many more jobs pay so little, we dont even bother doing in the West anymore and give those jobs to other countries.
> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?
What percentage of the workers Doctors ? Bonus : why isn't everyone a doctor ?
> Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
Pretending you are happy and contributing to society while you are required to piss in a bottle is to concede all human dignity. To pretend that giving up 70 hours a week crunching numbers so a Corporation pays less tax that is to sell your soul and work to the detriment of society. To think anything else, means it's already too late for you.
tldr : meaningful jobs exist, but are rare as rocking horse shit and great swathes of us never get to experience meaningful jobs, because our culture needs obedient workers to make profits ahead of anything else.
He does mention meaningful work, that's done by the clueless. But to the author it's a sidenote that he doesn't bother explaining. It's this bit where he briefly touched on it:
the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever they are needed
I agree with your analysis here, although from what I understand he argues that these phenomena have to do with working for big companies. The book “developer hegemony” makes a similar argument and argues that the “way out is to have lots of small software consulting shops.
>why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?
But why not be discontent with your reality? That's typically a sign to enact change and willingfully settling is an acceptance of how things are.
I think the problem lies in the way that capitalism treats companies and labour. Im not proposing we abolish capitalism but selling our time at a loss* to our employer doesn't "feel" good. Maybe you feel rewarded by your work and maybe you don't but you shouldn't destroy that feeling for the sake of complacency.
*Loss is possibly controversial, but an employer does seek to get more value out of an employee than they pay them.
As I was reading the above post, I started to remember reading an article on ribbon farm. The next response is someone posting the article I remember. The Hn bubble is real and in some cases has surprisingly low-entropy.
Wow. And what's so startling about this breakdown is that you can figure out which of the 3 groups someone is in within 10 minutes of your first meeting with them.
This article is interestingly promotes kinda flawed communist thinking about 'overperforming losers'.
Most companies make 'reasonable' profits or even losses. You could say normal range for profits is -5% to +10%. When the company is people intensive, it basically means, that revenue is paid in salaries.
For better salaries to be paid, profits must grow first. For profits to grow, existing people must perform better. If profits don't grow, salaries can't follow.
Now when profits grow, we face a decision on how to split the new profits, and it does not always fall on the existing employees. Sometimes profits go into hiring new people, sometimes they go into pockets of the owners. But I have also often seen in my 25 year career, that performers are compensated.
I have also always seen the costs rise, and the costs been mostly salaries. So profits eventually go to the pockets of the employees.
So actually it is good idea for everyone to perform, because if the profit growth stops, salary growth stops as well.
Anyway, my bottom line is that this 'sociopath, clueless, loser' is flawed thinking, but probably something people genuinely believe in just like many people believe that vaccines are bad.
The article addresses this. You're just talking about the early stages/small company part of the lifecycle. In my case, working for a 100-year-old manufacturing company, I looked around the cube farm one day, and realized there is a small army of people who's job it is to festoon every vertical space within eyesight, at scores of facilities across the globe, with flyers and promotionals and health insurance factoids and retirement plans and educational resources and on and on and on. (And maps of the cube warrens, because people thought wacky floorpans were cool 40 years ago.) Those are the definition of "Loser" jobs, and they're everywhere.
My company is so far down the article's referenced lifecycle that there are several large groups of people who copy information from the mainframe into Excel sheets, and then hand this over to another group who take that information, and put it back into the mainframe. And the "Clueless" have fought me, tooth and nail, to try to improve these kinds of barbarous workflows.
This rings so true and is seen in a lot of other industries as well. I believe the world of gaming is among the worst for this where hordes of customers ardently defend the clearly abusive practices of multinational companies that do not give the slightest shit about them except their influence on their bottom line.
Gamers find it easier to be up in arms about journalists being bad at video games and women having too many opinions on their hobby than the fact that they are getting actively screwed over by the hyper-predatory monetisation tactics of the game publishers and the fact that a company like Activision let go of more than a hundred employees on the same week as they gave Bobby Kotick a $200 million bonus.
Sure but you are being disingenuous if you think that the outrage on Activision is even remotely comparable to the backlash against feminism in gaming.
There is also no actual objective problem that feminism has caused to gaming that gamers can point to and I would argue that the vehement backlash against it is as driven by the "invasion of political activists into the hobby" as Anita Sarkeesean and other feminist pundits.
Bobby Kotick has a PR department, strong incentives not to antagonise the community he sells to, and enough power within his company to fire anyone who does.
Activists have an incentive to be as incendiary as possible to gain media attention, smaller PR departments if any, and little to no control over what other activists say.
It's an unfortunate reality that if my local supermarket fires a bunch of workers for trying to unionise, but my neighbour gets in a screaming match with me because he thinks I scratched his car's paint, then I'll be mildly disappointed by the supermarket but frothing mad about my neighbour. It doesn't even matter what the confrontation is about: I'll be frothing mad about any topic that my neighbour brings up if he's screaming it at me, the medium is the message.
I mostly agree except for the fact that I don't really think the gaming community are that dangerous to antagonise for a company at all considering that Activision and EA together are some of the most hated companies in both the gaming community and the world in general yet sell the most games.
It's not about the medium or even the message here. It's all about the product. As long as you control the product, it doesn't matter how much grumbling gamers do under their breath, they will still fork over their cash.
Activists on the other hand do not have a product to offer. Instead they make you think uncomfortable thoughts and try to get you to reconsider or reflect on your viewpoints or biases. That's a lot harder than buy and consume product. That's a difference that even god-tier PR is not going to easily be able to overcome.
Gamers don't care about women having opinions on their hobby.
Gamer care about opportunistic women's study majors who know nothing about gaming insulting their favorite pastime to try and justify their wasted lives.
Probably because the actual influence of "official" video game journalists has waned significantly compared to individual critics on Youtube and other platforms.
Yes, it's pretty pathetic that somebody who's job involves playing video games got stuck on the tutorial of Cuphead but then again, who cares? I don't consider it a real concern simply because outlets like IGN are waning in influence anyway.
A far more insidious concern that bears barely no attention is the fact that publishers practice shady shit like deliberately withholding review copies to overly critical reviewers or how journalists are incentivised to prioritise officially mandated press releases over reports of abuse. Notice how the very recent case of the rampant sexual and racial abuse in Ubisoft has been nearly forgotten by video game journalism.
Movements like Gamergate failed because aside from the rampant sexism within their ranks, their focus was narrowly on individual bad actors in video game journalism when the real problem is more systematic than that.
Well considering the sheer extent and breadth of influence that Amazon has, I'm not sure how narrow it really is to write on Amazon's abuses.
Besides, you're comparing apples and oranges. It would be a better comparison if there were loads of attack articles on specific employees of Amazon instead of a giant multi-national company engaging in aggressive union busting behavior that is one of the largest employers in the world.
It's tough out there. There aren't many jobs out there for that skill level that pay as much as shuffling boxes in warehouses. There isn't much opportunity for advancement no matter how hard you work. It may seem a little immoral, but I couldn't fault people too much for trying to better provide for their family using whatever means are necessary.
The incentives for each layer are geared towards maximizing shareholder value. First layer managers aren't trying to soley optimize box throughput, else they could give raises to incentivize employees better. They are trying to get as many boxes through as possible while keeping costs low. They cut hours to avoid paying OT and sometimes Healthcare. They rule with fear. This forces employees to fight for scraps and do other things they normally wouldn't do like become an ambassador to try to better provide for their families. The moral managers don't advance their careers while the ones good at exploitation do and are promoted. It's a darwinian survival of the most vicious and cunning.
It's not just Amazon. You'd be surprised at how middle-upper management operates the same way at large enterprises. At least from my experience. Some were good at their jobs, most were there because of who they knew.
I've worked at various enterprise-scale companies over the past 2 decades, and this has been my observation too.
As you say, there are exceptions, but a lot of managers are there because they've "played the game" well - they're good at networking, know the right people, say the right things at the right times, and when they think it will help them, they don't hesitate to throw other people under a bus.
You'll get millions of dollars invested in hype-and-nothing-really-to-show-for-it startups, or sold for hundreds of millions of dollars to a fortune 500 the product which is then phased out into a black whole in an year two from the buyer company's portfolio for the same reasons – having found a right connection at one of those three levels.
When all this bullshit actually works, I feel like there's something deeply wrong with the way modern bureaucracies are structured. If people have knowledge of field they are going to manage, this is less likely to happen.
As Joel Spolsky puts it, The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
I was going post that link but you beat me to it. When I wrote that it was as I suspected, disingenuous but not wholly invented - these were real people being bribed with cold cuts to parrot scripts, if I'm honest I might have done it to get off my feet for a couple hours in that situation. It was stupid and risible but you could understand it.
Now it's gotten much weirder. There are fake accounts that, looking at them, you're not sure who they actually benefit. I think a bunch just got purged. No one took them seriously anyway, so navigating the motivations in the space is super difficult. It's fascinating in some ways but in others I just want to ignore the whole thing.
This reminds me strongly of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. These poor folks are overworked and used up and the "kiss asses" get a little something extra for busting up any hint of unionizing.
Wow, does that ever sound inspired by the Kapo system in Nazi camps.
(edit: It was wrong of me to evoke Nazism due to its emotional connotations. I was reminded of the psychological systems of coercion that have been used all through history to efficiently keep oppressed people in line--which Amazon's actions reek of--but could have more effectively expressed my thoughts by saying "that sounds like a psychologically abusive system", or something of the sort.
"Inspired by". And yeah, the conditions are far less extreme, but the dynamics of using prisoner's dilemma to reinforce order in the warehouse is deeply cruel, psychologically. Please don't argue that.
It’s giving people the option to do something else for awhile and get a small bonus on top. I had numerous jobs when I was young that had similar incentive structures if you wanted it. I doubt my managers were picking it up from Goebbles.
But were you specifically being the manager's patsy, training other workers and inducting you into a psychological culture of aligning with the manager?
I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all you need to communicate with the world is an ISP and a keyboard. But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing.
Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. The problem is previous generations who don't really understand this.
Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Since HN loves to veer wildly into rampant ageism, I'll bite... :)
When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking about people who are non-technical.
Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would also be 40yo+ by now, who predicted that their company's accounts would be used for shill identities for things like manipulation, and the implications of that.)
Passive consumers, of your under-40 group, who grew up in it never knew anything else, have had things framed for them, and are just starting to realize the situations we're now in.
Wouldn't that happen in perpetuity for every generation growing up in technology? We want to shield our children from the rest of the internet, and so children grow up with an internet framed for them. Then, as they grow, they are forced to deal with the concept of the internet not being framed anymore and may therefore have some time in their teenage to young adult years where they may be susceptible to shit like eg. outrage culture.
It's much easier to just pick someone to frame everything for you than it is to develop critical thinking skills. I would wager the majority of people from any generation wind up choosing the former, even if it's not a conscious choice. I don't think it's something people 'grow out of' by default.
Critical thinking is not enough. You can’t derive the actual working conditions at Amazon, or off-camera information about a police killing, from first principles. Someone has to be on the ground observing it, and you need to know whether they’re telling the truth or not.
I agree on the need to educate people, but disagree on the age group criteria. I've met enough people under 40 who believe whatever they read online, especially if it confirms their existing set of beliefs.
I've found this very disturbing, the generation I grew up in might be the most tech literate but I think that's a false impression due to the friends that I've chosen. When I joined a guild in an MMO and got to see some truly random folks from other walks of life that was a fair bit eye opening.
My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it.
I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
> the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets
this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'.
> we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
I think people conflate a high degree of modern GUI proficiency with general technical literacy.
I'm not sure kids who grew up with an iPad appliance are really more generally technically literate on average than GenXers who entertained themselves trying to write Choose You Own Adventure-type stories in BASIC on their Commodore 64s ... or who, at least, managed to get their pirated copy of Stellar 7 to run.
This was me in my old research lab. I had to teach an undergrad how to copy and paste text into notepad and save the file on the shared drive. The kid grew up on iPads and had no idea how to work a desktop, nor had a great understanding of what a file or directory structure is. Things I took for granted.
It used to be the GUI was basically the same as a CLI but with clicks instead of typing out "cp" "mv" etc. Now the GUI to CLI relationship is severed. You have an iPhone and the GUI it runs is basically running on top of the underlying CLI that apple hides from you (and you need to jailbreak the phone in order to gain access).
Imagine if Apple just gave these kids root and a terminal app, and the files app actually showed you the directory structure of the device. They could be scripting on these machines and learning about how they function same as we did growing up.
Instead, apple things we need to hold these kids hands and should learn Swift and other low code efforts instead. IMO these kids don't need an easy bake oven to learn to cook, they need a kitchen and the freedom to learn how to burn themselves like we had. Apple is afraid of letting their customers operate the stove they bought.
Yeah, I actually think the group that is least susceptible to this is millennials, who group around the anonymity of IRC / early 4chan / etc, but before people were even pretending to use real identities on the internet.
The difference is that we got to make mistakes when we were young.
Did you once have a myspace page or live journal where you said very controversial things or vented angst in a manner that you'd rather your co-workers didn't see? Well sorry but all that stuff now goes into your facebook feed where it will be with you forever.
It takes real determination to stay actually anonymous on the internet today and someone trying to stumble into it is likely going to screw it up - when we millennials were growing up that personal data you accidentally leaked onto a forum (maybe during a spicy exchange of direct messages) can't follow you since that forum no longer exists - it was probably hosted on PHPBB and either an admin accidentally deleted the DB at some point or the whole server was chucked in the trash - even if someone had access to those messages it would be harder to definitively tie it back to someone since user fingerprinting was so non-existent.
That all said, I was in the middle of University when folks were learning that bong-shots on your facebook page might hurt your long term job prospects so we did get to see it start to emerge as a concern.
> Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Unfortunately this isn’t just limited to the over 40 crowd. People are willing to believe whatever affirms their beliefs. Growing up on the Internet does not change this.
There was. But the Internet makes it so much easier to deliver it with bad faith in industrial quantities, using manipulative sources who are not who they pretend to be.
The impersonation can be more damaging than the content, because it's a variety of toxic mental pollution - a form of betrayal - that lowers the SNR of the entire Internet.
Media literacy, marketing techniques, and propaganda techniques really need to be part of an elementary school education. But the US's education system is a giant underfunded mess, so good luck adding anything useful like that. I got a decent education in that sort of thing but it was entirely through my parents and stuff they got for me, Consumer Reports used to have a great kid's magazine that combined reviews of kid products with that sort of education, for instance.
If you go back through every major media development, from cheap novels to television, you can find moral panics and calls for formal education to help kids deal with it. It takes time, and it happens unevenly, but culture, social norms, and market pressures demanding new technology to fill the gaps left by the previous media, do catch up.
Any propaganda from more than a couple of decades ago seems immediately corny to kids.
I don't buy the age thing at all. Younger generations are superficially more tech savvy but it doesn't really help here.
Just go browse reddit for 10 minutes if you don't believe me. I recommend the /r/GME cult for instance, but there are many others. People will gladly listen to anybody if they tell them what they want to hear.
Agreed for sure, but even the younger generations seem susceptible to believing whatever they read on Twitter, etc. There have been countless times I’ve seen people share info as de facto truth when they simply glanced at a headline Twitter pushed them without bothering to read deeper.
My hope is that it all seems like a joke to the youngsters, and they don't take any of it seriously. In other words, they know its a lie but share it anyway because it's funny to do so and a lie has a group momentum that can crush you if you stand in its way, so why bother? Look at gay marriage - the lie that it's akin to beastiality, or the lie that it will ruin straight marriate, these are lies that are actually quite funny as satire. But to treat them as sincere beliefs, and argue with them, is not worth the inevitable trouble and negativity.
Young minds know how to deal with the polluted informational space and learn to get value out of it one way or another.
The informational gems that we need to hold up with high regard are examples of sincere discussion and debate between those who disagree with each other and yet have a genuine goal to hear and be heard by the counter-party, a deep reluctance to deploy rhetorical tricks, and a willingness to support controversial views if they are supported by uncontroversial fact.
everyone supports things they don’t necessarily believe is ‘truth’. it’s why political discussions are often tiresome and distracting. they posit that one side believes a falsehood (like the election was stolen, masks will save the world, or qanon anything) and then argues about that incessantly, rather than understanding the underlying emotions and motivations and then having conversations based on those understandings.
for instance people insist the election was stolen, not because they literally know it to be true, but rather because the outcome, that democrats control national politics, is somehow unacceptable. a productive discussion would start here, with why that’s unacceptable, not quibbling over whether the election was actually stolen or not (it wasn’t).
My sense is that there are a lot of people who literally believe the election was stolen. I don’t know how we could tell if people believe what they are saying.
then you may want to talk to those people more intimately rather than simply accepting projected puffery. part of the deception is baiting you into an unwinnable (because you’re beyond reason at that point) non-sequitur rather than exposing their soft underbelly of emotional vulnerability. the vast majority of people are neither evil geniuses nor naive morons, but people trying to get by and getting a fair shake at that.
also, those false projections are 99.9% of the content on twitter, facebook, etc.
It's easy to knock people for 'lacking critical thinking' but the truth is we're all predisposed to believe what aligns with our personalities and worldviews. And people like to harp on the idea that we should be teaching critical thinking in schools, but we already do this and we have been teaching it for decades.
Have you ever dissected a novel in English class? Did you discuss motivations for various historical events in history? Did you talk about theory of public speaking purposes and styles?
I did, in a very rural, very underfunded school district - all of those things are critical thinking.
It is integrated into other studies. But there tend to not be "This lesson is critical thinking" sorts of headers on the lesson plans.
Look for the phrase "lifelong learner". That tends to be where the "critical thinking" lives for many schools.
CT is ambiguously defined and complex in theory and practice. While analysis and evaluation of selected novels is intended to enlighten perspectives idk that curricula is rational or skeptical based on reading lists. Maybe an effect on bias.
It’s been awhile, but would wonder how unbiased today’s history books are. I can’t see the State of Texas board being nuanced about the Alamo.
I can see a rural district where teachers/schools have much more control over curricula, so enlightment or indoctrination is easier to influence. I dont see this scaling to large administrative/measurement bound districts. How does one test to CT outside perhaps secondary effects of STEM or AP results? It does appear that higher percentages of students are taking AP tests though.
Being educated by Jesuits, we started with Socrates/Plato. But looking at my classmates FB feeds I don’t see any evidence of sober CT skills. Skepticism is a synonym of conspiricism in today’s generations. Biases are polar bound.
My experience with dissecting novels is the opposite - you're expected to contort yourself, and often insult your own intelligence, to make sure that the result of your analysis doesn't deviate from the "correct" one too much.
The United States, where I went to school. I also want to apply some critical thinking myself and ask "why wouldn't schools have critical thinking as part of their curriculum"?
Teaching critical thinking skills is not some revolutionary idea and it's not like educators want to avoid teaching people how to do it.
> "why wouldn't schools have critical thinking as part of their curriculum"?
"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
I never felt like critical thinking was part of the curriculum in the United States. I've always been kind of amazed how poorly it's taught if it's taught at all.
Since we're just comparing anecdata at this point (or at least I am), if you have any data/studies or anything like that it would be appreciated.
To be honest I don't want to go into JStor to search for studies that support my viewpoint and lob them at you in a game of citation tennis. But, I will distill my viewpoint down as best I can and leave it at this:
People claim that critical thinking is not taught in schools because it's an easy claim to make when you perceive that so many other people are thinking uncritically. But, make a claim they disagree with and watch how good they become at it. Everyone falls into a trap of thinking that society at large lacks 'common sense' or 'critical thinking' because we all assume our worldview is true and anyone who disagrees must have deficient thinking. Ultimately I think people are taught how to think critically, but the real problem is when they choose to think critically. And that, I think, is a result of human nature, not lack of education.
Sorry, but I strongly disagree with you. Allow me to respond with my own anecdote.
I remember when I was dating a doctor being appalled by her complete inability to think through a problem, and I later learned medical school is basically mass memorization. I am obviously cherry picking medicine here, but if doctors aren't even taught that by the time they're practicing in the United States I think it's fair to say critical thinking is sorely lacking in our education system. She was a neurologist who was unable to help me with my migraines, and I later figured them out on my own using ~drumroll~ critical thinking. I also saw at least a half dozen specialists at prestigious hospitals, all of whom were equally unhelpful in solving my problem. They were all very quick to prescribe pain medication though, in fact it seemed to be the only thing any of them were ever interested in doing. Some of them accused me of lying about my symptoms, and some told me I shouldn't even bother trying to get better.
If US doctors - some of the best educated and most highly trained professionals in the world - aren't good at thinking critically about medicine, I'm not confident that it's being taught in the US. In fact I'm quite confident it's not taught in the US (or at least it wasn't). I was never taught critical thinking in a classroom setting, and I have multiple degrees from the US.
You base this on one doctor though. I have enough life experience to know that some doctors are better at their jobs than others. Maybe that's on the individual. Maybe some medical schools are better than others. I don't know what the explanation is. But I don't think you can extrapolate to "US doctors" in the plural.
I have seen enough anecdotes like this about medical school to feel comfortable saying that, at the very least, there is no nationwide systematic effort to teach critical thinking within them or the primary and secondary educational institutions that precede them.
Also, the nature of most schooling goes against using it to teach critical thinking. Most schooling is forced on the students. It is difficult, though not impossible, for a system that coerces people to also teach those same people critical thinking. There is an inherent contradiction there.
I've definitely seen Facebook posts that appear to be weaponised alignment with one particular view I happen to agree with, but which really just seem to be there to stir up conflict and create division.
It's gotten to the point that I don't really trust anyone on Facebook in certain contexts - although I'm more likely to trust someone if their position shows some flexibility and avoids purely tribal thinking, and also if they show some evidence of background knowledge and general thoughtfulness.
I'm less likely to trust anyone whose position encourages extreme polarisation, who appears to be disguising intent, whose posts are repetitive, and who tend towards inflammatory emotive language and insinuation.
This isn't infallible and I know I've made mistakes in both directions. But I hope it's better than just getting astroturfed.
Edit: I don't think critical thinking skills help as much as they should. This isn't about assessing evidence, it's about assessing intent - which is a different problem.
Strangely, I see a lot of the same people complaining about the critical thinking skills of others and also lashing out at others for thinking critically about whatever conspiratorial narrative the former are selling.
Age has little to do with that. No idea why you'd draw the line at the early 80s (the time SMTP/email was born). Given the influencers' target demography is predominantly people in their teens and 20s, trusting all you can read online should be related to lack of (critical) thinking rather than age.
The problem is previous generations who don't really understand this.
No, this isn’t the reason, you’re missing some crucial context about the early to mid 90s Internet - most people were using institutional accounts. It was very clear that someone with a whatever.ac.uk or .edu or .mil or even most .com that weren’t ISPs were who they said they were, and anons were explicitly anons. Many people even had phone numbers and addresses in their .sig blocks posting on Usenet, or on their homepages. There was a pretty high degree of trust, it was comparatively civilised!
The problem is that people got stuck in that assumption.
There is a book called Because Internet. It's about linguistic change on the internet. It starts out by dividing internet into different periods and defining meaningful cohorts of users. The later part makes for a much more meaningful separation than old vs young. In fact younger users are often less techy than older cohorts since at some point you had to be technically fluent to even get on the internet.
I understand it but realized I haven't knowingly seen it. Are there any good examples of Reddit or HN comments that are not genuine? I don't do "posts", but do participate in comment sections / conversations, and would like to see some examples of conversations where one party is confirmed to be a bot or troll.
>Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this.
I really don't think that's the case. The issue isn't knowing how to use a computer or not, it's being able to vet sources. That is taught at few schools and actually applied by fewer still.
Digital natives are even more susceptible to internet propaganda imo, since listening to obscure internet voices (with no real credibility beyond the size of their flock of sheep of subscribers/followers) has become so normalized over listening to actual domain experts. A lot of people like to get their current events from some talking head on youtube who selectively explains these topics in a biased way, rather than reading primary sources and developing their own interpretation themselves.It's not geriatrics and baby boomers buying this dropshipped junk from all these influencers, after all. Plus look at all the millenials who stormed the capitol a few months ago based on some conspiracy theory. No, being able to use gmail and microsoft office do not make you tech savvy or immune to propaganda.
> But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing.
If you strike the word "online" this statement works for most of history.
The only things that have changed are the sheer scale, speed, and cost of it. We have small teams that can generate more noise than a nation state could have prayed for just a generation ago.. and they're doing it faster and cheaper than ever before.
Unfortunately, most of the proposed solutions - real names, verified identities, fighting "disinformation" - come with catastrophic downsides.
What about just requiring companies to identify paid messaging (like political ads: “Paid for by XYZ”)? Obviously this doesn’t solve any messaging coming from overseas, but it at least helps with companies with an American presence astroturfing their own reviews etc.
Enforcement is the challenge. Without tracking down every reviewer, there is currently no way to determine whether a review was left by an employee of a covered/relevant company, or just a 'civilian.'
5% of revenue. Don't need to catch many, or often, to get the message across. The cost has to outweigh the risk. If it's still prevalent after 5 years, double it.
Don't take this as a serious criticism, but I look forward to the bizarro world where corporations compete to infiltrate and astroturf each other in ways that get their competitors fined into oblivion.
What are the catastrophic downsides to real names and verified identities? Those things weren't catastrophic downsides before the internet existed when publishing your opinion in newspapers or books or whatever.
I think the argument is that those systems DO contain significant downsides (ease of censorship, discouraging socially unacceptable viewpoints, etc) that you’d be porting to the web.
censorship and discouraging socially unacceptable views is the upside. What else do you think throwing Amazon shill bots off your platform is? That's the entire point of identity systems. Deciding who stays in and who stays out and sanctioning bad actors. Identity makes it so that harming a community has costs, and helping a community accrues trust. That's all it is.
Everyone has 1 million different opinions that are going to be controversial to someone out there.
I don't want it to be easy for anyone who disagrees with people, on anything, to track down someone physically, in real life.
> Deciding who stays in and who stays
Ok and I don't want you to be able to decide who stays in and stays out.
It should be very difficult to keep others that you don't like out.
And for the very extreme situations, that are exceptionally bad, we have the police and court system.
You should only be able to "keep people out" of engaging in speech if their actions are so bad that you are literally willing to lock them up in prison for it.
That's not the same as having a consistent identity on the internet. You can easily think of an identity provider on the web that doesn't expose who you physically are, think of like a crypto wallet, or something like Urbit attempts. Having a consistent identity is what matters with an incentive to be a good member, we don't need to expose your real world name at all.
>It should be very difficult to keep others that you don't like out.
No, it should be very easy to keep people out, because that's the fundamental mechanism behind any community, defining its borders and limits. That's what freedom of assembly is. There should be many different communities and they all should easily be able to set differentiated rules for who can participate and who can't. This is the basis for pluralism.
A sort of free-wheeling over-connected hivemind like Twitter where it's either call the police or post what you want doesn't work precisely because it is not a community at all. The reason discourse has gone to hell is because there literally is only one and everyone's part of it.
That's why we're having a somewhat sane conversation on hackernews right now. Because this community is smaller, it's moderated, and we can to a degree escape from the shitstorm of mass social media. And that's only because the rules here are much more strict than they are on Twitter.
> That's not the same as having a consistent identity on the internet.
Its effectively the same thing, for most people.
If someone is only allowed to have 1 identity on the internet, then people would have to link it to their real life identity, for practical reasons. How else would people find me, when I want them to?
Most people have a public identity, and other private ones. If I am only allowed to have 1 identity, then most people aren't going to give up the ability to have a public one, because there is large practical value to having a public identity.
People only having 2 choice, choice 1 being to give up their public persona completely, or choice 2, having everything on the internet that they do, permanently linked to their public identity, is a horrible choice, that will have a huge chilling effect.
> There should be many different communities
Oh, if you want to participate in your own community, that require people to give you their government ID (Or crypto identity, or whatever) in order to participate, then I have no problem with that.
What I have a problem with, is the authoritarian crazies, who want to take away other people's right to participate in the communities of their choosing.
If most other people choose to participate in the normal internet, where most websites do not require you to have a singular ID, then leave us alone and let us do that.
Go ahead and participate in your government ID facebook. (Or I guess that is just facebook already?) Just don't going around saying that no other communities, that value privacy more than you do, should be able to exist.
> That's what freedom of assembly is.
Freedom of assembly also includes people choosing to participate in communities where singular IDs are not a requirement, and alt accounts are allowed.
> No, it should be very easy to keep people out, because that's the fundamental mechanism behind any community, defining its borders and limits. That's what freedom of assembly is. There should be many different communities and they all should easily be able to set differentiated rules for who can participate and who can't.
Sounds like you oppose Inclusion.
For your sake, I hope no one finds that controversial.
One counter-stance would be: authenticity of any communication is an unsolved problem. Lying, bias, cheating, misconstrual, forgery, libel, etc. are all problems that go back hundreds of years, societal rules can simply be broken for selfish reasons.
The Internet has given all speech a larger platform and more reach, which means that both authentic and inauthentic voices are amplified. Maybe the inauthentic voices gain a comparative advantage to non-Internet worlds, since they gain more attention via outrage or exaggeration. Does the fault lie on social media, content websites, or users?
So do we modify the Internet, or do we attempt to modify ourselves, or both?
I completely agree. But it's hard, since "politics" is broad and almost everything touches it in some way.
The main way I've tried to achieve this is by largely limiting what I read to:
1. Authenticated contributors, either people I know personally or hired by companies I trust (e.g. NYT).
2. Anonymous contributors with heavy moderation and filtration (e.g. Twitter, but with O(100) muted words and accounts. My feed is basically just art now and it's delightful).
Again, that's hard to do. I'm still on here for instance.
Interesting, so you've managed to create your own Internet bubble. Isn't this another example of confirmation bias?
I would think it would be better to just scroll past the content you are not interested in engaging in. It certainly will be better to know of something happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it.
If you don't filter, best case scenario your SNR is going to be too low. There's also a pretty good chance that you will end up with a GIGO situation because all you hear about is whatever cable news, Cambridge Analytica, and Amazon's twitter astroturfing squad are pushing today.
If you do filter, you're correct that it opens the door to all kinds of biases.
Totally. I'm deliberate and happy with the the bubble I've created. It's actually quite diverse in terms of authenticated sources-- the anonymous content is what's heavily filtered.
> It certainly will be better to know of something happening, even if in brief terms, than to be completely in the dark of it.
I don't think so. It's impossible to hear about everything and I feel whatever is newsworthy enough to hit the sources I read is important enough for me.
I think that the sockpuppet problem is a manifestation of the larger crisis of truth. Look how, now that we've even better access to easily verifiable information, we still have salaried media professionals and politicians pushing lies about simple objective facts.
Whatever unwritten structures that used to prevent that kind of thing have broken down, and it's not just social media doing it. Trump was a perfect manifestation of this problem - he was able to lie about everything and everyone in the most trivially contradictable ways, but faced no consequences for that. Instead, some professional media organizations backed him up.
Only now are we finally seeing lies crest into the territory of legal action, and only with the most extreme cases - like the Dominion lawsuits.
For every smaller kind of dishonesty, it seems like there is no consequences to brazenly lying. Anybody can lie about anyone as long as it's crafted such that the victim isn't in the position to sue (particularly if the victim isn't an individual but an amorphous group, and so showing standing and damages is functionally impossible).
I mean, we've basically left it up to the social media companies like Twitter to enforce basic social contracts like "lying about a global disease in ways that encourage the spread of disease is a bad thing", and their users are bristling at that.
Wasn't that always the case though only the medium changed? If you had a newspaper you could print whatever you wanted (as long as it wouldn't be against government or law), the same happens on social media only that everyone and their dog have their "newspaper".
I just got a clearly fake robocall, from "amazon" about auto renewing prime but my renewal doesn't come up til December. There is a campaign here and I doubt it is amazon. And I'm not renewing prime, all companies turn evil at this size.
Your comment shows how the web _is_ a democractizing platform, and how democracy is imperfect. Just like in meatspace, the winners are the people who can get the biggest crowds to support their ideas, not just the ideas who have the most supporters.
The core problem of all of these things is basic financial inequality. Powerful corporations, whose views represent those of powerful individuals, can marshal absurd quantities of resources at a high level of coordination, neither of which can be matched by the less powerful. (This also applies to governmental bodies, which often function like corporations.)
Issues like astroturfing are just expressions of this imbalance of power.
You have to solve for the gross imbalance of power if you want to solve for anything else.
Once I saw the deep fake video of Tom Cruise, I realized we are entering a new phase of the internet. One that will require a blockchain-based identity and trust graph. All content will have to be signed with a private key linked to a zero-knowledge proved biometric user account. Every node must have at least one path to a 'real account' otherwise users will learn to totally and completely dismiss it.
Please let me have the last remaining bits of what used to be a fun wild west. Kick corporations out of the internet instead of making it corporation friendly.
> I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem
Someone else pointed out Voice.com in this space, which at least is trying to do it. Although if you read the fine print, the seem to require you to send them a "selfie", I'm not sure how that solves anything.
>The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform
It is. The problem is that democracy is messy. It means you get to hear from communist and qanon wackos as well as paid shills. Now we're pulling back on this democratization so that we have 'trusted' gatekeepers to tell us what we should and should not be exposed to.
>But if there's no way to control for authenticity,
I don't see it as a pull-back as much as a curation.
The wooly part of the Internet is still out there. But it's not what you're going to see in "polite conversation" as much, because the whole thing has passed the critical mass point of too much information for anyone to know. Much as with books before it, expect the equivalent of Reader's Digest to come along and a whole generation of consumers who are not only tolerant of, but in the market for, such curation.
Disagreed. Authenticity is incompatible with Anonymity. All the surveillance companies would love to tell you you can authenticate your identity with them and be anonymous elsewhere, but they, and Governments, are the exact entities we should be hiding out identities from.
People need to be trained to be skeptical of voices online.
But, hmmm, I don't think a call for education is a solution. That's basically whack-a-mole. Stupid people are born every minute, there's no stopping stupid. Better to put bumpers on them and keep the rest of us safe.
As much as the idealists in me would like to, I can't disagree. How do you go about achieving that in a democratic society though?
Misinformation is like a virus, and it spreads through a population easiest when they accept and share it. All that takes is for it to confirm some preconceived idea or to flatter them. Critical thinking, or at least base line skepticism, seems like the only inoculation.
You're not wrong that that may be too much to expect from people though.
You'll be surprised how far misinformation goes. Even among the non-stupid (smart?) people. Some form of Internet literacy needs to be done. We'll be fighting some of it very soon with deepfakes made by AI, and we are still not prepared for that.
> You'll be surprised how far misinformation goes.
Not a whit.
It's been a hobby horse of mine for the last two decades. From Mk Ultra to Potempkin Villages to Contemporary Psyops, propaganda has provided nearly limitless dark entertainment for me. In fact I've sculpted my own aphorism:
"Intelligence has the ability to construct reasonable sounding reasons for anything." It might have been pithier in an earlier iteration, but that's the gist.
In the end education is expensive and there's no end run around that. In the end there's no algorithm for the truth and there's no end run around that either.
I again find myself in agreement with you. As someone who has thought about this for some time, what's your take on what we actually ought to do about it? Is it simply intractable? Is it that from Odysseus to Bernays, the cunning will always fool the fool?
Less free stuff. Free online stuff does not feed quality. Money is the tie that binds. And free stuff binds us to advertisers. Youtube, twitter, facebook, etc, all go to paid tiers and registered accounts.
Eradicate the widespread use of comments. I hate to sound like an old, but go back to established gatekeepers for commentary like well educated editors at newspapers and magazines. Everyone doesn't need a publishing platform.
If that sounds class-ist I guess it kinda is, in a way. Everyone will still have access, but not everyone needs a voice because the structure to support that is corrosive as we've seen.
What I think is possible:
Like everything we learn mostly by making mistakes. Eventually we'll bang our heads against enough walls to find our way out.
In a generation or two people will discount online speech. Already the youngs are discounting facebook.
There will always be bullying, in person or online. There will always be fraud, in person or online. "Education" isn't a magic wand to sprinkle smart dust over the population. Again, even smart people make fundamental and sometimes existential mistakes.
The best we can do is make it harder for those shitty things to happen by performing tourniquets to the flow of free channels that feed online malignant cancer.
Assuming this is a genuine comment and not a troll, how would a blockchain solve authenticity? Never mind the fact that we already do have a way to verify authenticity in the form of digital signatures. The problem is: how do you know the signature signer is who they claim they are? The best solution we have to that is the “web of trust” and “key signing parties”[0]
I don't know if this comment is sarcastic and I should up vote for it giving a good laugh, or my second realization that it might be serious and I just hold my head in my hands.
I swear I'm one step away from asking for a chili recipe and someone responding 'blockchain?'. It's beyond parody at this point - I feel like I'm in some Kafkaesque reality.
As far as I know, the authenticity of communication in general is an unsolved problem. The web just reflects this. Just like with communication in general, if one wants authenticity, one has to add procedures for verifying authenticity on top of a system that doesn't have any built in.
This feels written by someone that was never in a bbs scene. They were usually far smaller in scope, but these emergent behaviors were fairly clear even then. Same happened on prodigy, compuserve, and aol.
Heck, the same mostly happens in your community center in really small towns, without care.
Neal Stephenson's latest novel deals with this a little bit.
The solution he found in the book basically involved signing everything with your own personal identifier and putting it into a blockchain so everyone could verify it.
"Fall; or, Dodge in Hell"? Is it worth reading? I think I've read only his Cryptonomicon, which was sort or good for a first half, and then rolling downhill ending with something so pompously pathetic I had to cringe sometimes.
According to a loose interpretation of Plato in The republic referencing the story of The Ring of Gyges anonymity basically ruins people.
IMHO we'd need what we can't easily have, single-confirmed-identity-accounts for everyone. If Tim Berners Lee had been more of a pessimist, a historian, and a psychologist he might have baked in some end to end encryption with public/private key pairs and account centrality. But he didn't. I'm curious if the USA or any state power could have required an SCIA for everyone. Maybe it could have come from Apple? I could see some kinda of pre-AOL online thing being baked into MacOs, maybe.
But yea, Facebook tried it and people made a fuss. We really kinda need it. It being a lack of wide spread anonymity for online personas. Invisibility really does bring out the worst in people.
I don't think verified identities would address the fakeness/authenticity problem because you could simply pay someone to shill with their verified account. Sure, you would know 'who' posted the opinion but you could never be sure if they were being compensated to do so. You also run into the issue of people being seemingly authentic with their views, but also being paid to promote them. Brooklyn Dad Defiant is a great example, he's consistent with his views, he's not anonymous, and he also got paid $60k by a PAC.
Yes, but it would cut down on the magnitude of promoted views. As it is now it's free. A motivated party can easily generate a seemingly honest and true and good faith crowd of thousands with some code and a bit of creativity. With verified accounts (again, it's nearly impossible to implement at this point) it would take a lot of money to get those thousand actual people.
IMHO getting rid of free twitter bots would be a good first step. And yes, I know lots of them do good. But does it balance out? Likely not. Maybe tie them to registered accts? There must be some way to clean house. And, no house is 100% clean, but 80% is better than 5%.
As a current AWS employee, I can say I'm proud to be working for AWS (at least my organization) but incredibly embarrassed to be working for Amazon.
I had written a much more scathing comment about the Amazon side of the business but I'm not sure what is allowed under hacker news's community guidelines.
At a risk of sounding holier-than-thou, this is why I never cared to apply to FAANG like my fellow CS students did. You can spend your entire career doing useful, impactful work that helps millions of people and all it takes is one out of touch bozo in management to pull some embarrassing stunt like this to ruin all the trust you've built with disadvantaged communities. Of course this is true for all large companies, but nobody fights fire with astroturfing quite like big tech. I wish these people would get it together so we wouldn't have to be ashamed of working for them.
No way a company with the resources of Amazon is using several day old twitter accounts with first google result profile pictures. This is the equivalent of someone spray painting "We hate workers! signed, Amazon" on a wall
I don't think even twitter can verify who made those accounts because it's so easy to vpn and use google voice numbers. You can choose what to believe, though
There have also been aggressive tweets from the official "Amazon News" twitter account. It seems like this is the initiative of Bezos or some SVP who is too powerful to stop for normal company controls.
Spot on. It's too hamfisted to be believable - if there isn't a full team somewhere on red alert scrutinizing all outgoing media after the PR storm caused by the news tweets I'd be extremely surprised. It's too easy to get people to antagonize Amazon.
Amazon knows full well the benefits of fake reviews, and they absolutely would pay their employees to give fake reviews. As they were reported to have started doing in 2019.
Their employees would likely be the ones creating cheap profiles.
If they're paying employees, why make fake accounts? Personally, as a trillion dollar entity, I would pay people to use their real accounts and give me glowing reviews. I would pay $0 for a tweet from an obviously fake account, what's the point in that?
To amplify the sentiment. They could pay people/organizations to take care of that. Those organizations constantly create fake accounts to change how something is perceived. Remember the Net neutrality FCC fake comments?
What's not believable about that? These several day old twitter accounts with stock image profile pictures have been influencing the masses for years now on twitter. You don't need a clever deception here. People are emotional enough on issues that they never vet a source or fact check something that validates their own world view already. Making a more clever burner account would take more time and money for little benefit.
It's not that it's not believable, it's that the it's equally believable that a number of other vested parties could be doing it plausibly. You yourself just argued how low the barrier-to-entry for a campaign like this is.
In addition to Amazon itself, what if it's:
1. A huge investor in Amazon (like some hedge fund) who is doing it on amazon's behalf
2. A media outlet who wanted a scoop, so they manufactured one
3. A random 4chan troll looking for giggles
4. A foreign entity with some vested in sowing chaos into the discussion
5. A competitor of Amazon making them look bad through this easily debunked fake
I really can't believe your comment contains both of these quotes:
"What's not believable about that?" and "People are emotional enough on issues that they never vet a source or fact check something that validates their own world view already"
"Wow!!!!! this product exceeded all my expectations. When I travel through space, I have always wished there was a way to measure my vital signs without bulky hardware and uncomfortable wires! Arun's project report taught me everything I needed to know about the benefits and limitations of astroskin! Now I can purchase this system for myself and my crew with confidence that I did not have before. I highly recommend this report to anyone wanting to measure their blood pressure in space or other extremely harsh environments."
As for the peeing in bottles thing, Amazon is not that smart. There are people that look completely normal, that experience life-threatening autonomic dysreflexia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_dysreflexia) from having to hold their bladder, even if it is just for seconds, like me. Perhaps I should try working in a US Amazon warehouse. It would be perfect lawsuit material and the ultimate power play against their inhumane policies around toileting breaks.
Because that sort of cynical sarcastic person with too much time on their hands is pretty rare given how many of these blatant fake reviews I see all over Amazon and elsewhere on the internet, where there is a strong financial incentive to game reviews. I'm also aware that people are far more likely to leave a negative review than a glowing one. I'm not going to review some toaster I like positively, why would I waste my time on this $30 toaster that does the job it's supposed to do? But if I have an axe to grind, I get serious catharsis warning future people from buying this toaster from hell. It's especially telling when the reviews are highly bimodal: you see either people all have the same exact fault with the product, or borderline cult level derangement 5 star reviews that don't even mention the name of the product and could have been written about anything from a hair dryer to a garden hose.
I don't think they are making it illegal to go the bathroom they are just making it economically awful. If you miss X minutes in an hour, the whole hour doesn't count. You have to deliver X packages per hour everyday and one miss gets you written up, which can lead to firing.
You seem to forget that a lot of these workers are unskilled and have few choices. Amazon may be paying $15/hr but they will work you like dogs. Some people will accept that because they need the money and McDonald's just doesn't pay enough. It will be interesting to see what Amazon will have to pay if some of the minimum wage increases start to pass.
> I don't think they are making it illegal to go the bathroom they are just making it economically awful. If you miss X minutes in an hour, the whole hour doesn't count. You have to deliver X packages per hour everyday and one miss gets you written up, which can lead to firing.
Which is actually worse. Doing it that way gives Amazon and its apologists deflect the blame back onto the victim (e.g. the worker made voluntary choice to work at Amazon, and a voluntary choice to take the break and accept the cost, Amazon fully supports the voluntary choices of its workers, if the worker is in a shitty situation, it's their fault for making those choices, etc.), even though Amazon is actually responsible for creating the situation and its consequences. If they made it "illegal," at least it would make their responsibility clear.
> I don't think they are making it illegal to go the bathroom they are just making it economically awful. If you miss X minutes in an hour, the whole hour doesn't count. You have to deliver X packages per hour everyday and one miss gets you written up, which can lead to firing.
It's called disability discrimination. Getting paid less on the sole basis of your disability is generally considered to be disability discrimination in the US. Having to use the toilet every hour or so for 1-3 minutes to take care of business in this case is a reasonable accommodation legally mandated in US law. Considering that it is /immediately life-threatening/ and /immediately quantifiable/ (via blood pressure readings-continuous, spontaneous, or otherwise), it is very clear that Amazon would have an extremely difficult time weaseling their way out of trouble with their strict enforcement of a zero-tolerance, all-or-nothing, policy.
> You seem to forget that a lot of these workers are unskilled and have few choices.
Congratulations for pointing out the obvious. There are a ton of people who have ended up with UTIs and other health consequences from having to not only hold it at Amazon warehouse, but also being forced to purposefully dehydrate themselves, in the short term and long term. The toilet issue is so ridiculous that somebody who can should take them for a ride and fight for the people who are less fortunate. I would look to it as an adventure and a "summer job". I have legal authorization to work in both the US and the European Union on a long-term, permanent basis, so why not test the waters?
As I said, the condition I have is immediately life-threatening, so it's pretty clear cut that they would be putting my life in danger (strokes, seizures, retinal detachment, etc.) by "punishing" me for using the toilet.
>Getting paid less on the basis of your disability is generally considered to be disability discrimination in the US.
I mean, I get what you're saying. I work in Disabilities quite a bit in my profession - and your view is generally correct. But there are literal, specific carve-outs for employers to pay people with disabilities less.
>Section 14(c) of the FLSA authorizes employers, [. . .] to pay subminimum wages - wages less than the Federal minimum wage - to workers who have disabilities for the work being performed.
Going to the toilet once per hour for 1-3 minutes is not going to allow a company to pay subminimum wages when the starting rate is $15/hour. It is a simple, basic, /reasonable accommodation/ necessary for me to be able to work, at any workplace, that Amazon is legally obligated to provide. In fact, it is the only accommodation that I would need to work at an Amazon warehouse!
The law you mention above is exploited by companies utilizing sheltered work environments (i.e. Salvation Army) for people who typically have severe disabilities that are often both developmental and intellectual, with respect to classification. Obviously companies that exploit human labor in this particular context are morally bereft.
The key concept here is reasonable accommodation. It is not some abstract concept or use-case, like the one you pointed out above.
Again, I agree with you. I do want to point out, though that those are not abstract concept or limited use cases. Any business, including competitive employment positions, can apply for that license, as long as they meet the parameters laid our in the law and regulation. I'm assuming that because of its size, Amazon would be excluded.
Honestly, though, I am not familiar with the application process as we refuse to use it.
That being said, I was genuinely just trying to point out that it is, in fact, legal to pay individuals with disabilities less than an individual without a disability.
Language is important. Claiming that trying to pay individual b (who has a disability) any less than what you would pay individual a (who does not) for any work is automatically disability discrimination is just wrong. I've been sued several times by people who believe that fact, and have been proven right in my statements by the courts.
I don't like it, but I don't control the law.
Please note, I am not saying your needs wouldn't be an appropriate accommodation from Amazon. Please note that I am not saying it is morally okay to pay individuals with disabilities less.
Maybe I'm being too pedantic. But honestly, the number of people who genuinely believe that they are entitled to get literally whatever they want however they want it, regardless of any other factor, simply because of their disability is just astounding.
Reasonable is the important part of accommodation.
> Maybe I'm being too pedantic. But honestly, the number of people who genuinely believe that they are entitled to get literally whatever they want however they want it, regardless of any other factor, simply because of their disability is just astounding.
As I said, it's life-threatening, and I can assure you that autonomic dysreflexia is one of the worst feelings that one can go through as a human. This issue is solvable via a basic reasonable accommodation, that I have a right to get. I also have a decent work ethic, and I understand that I am paid to work--and that is the only thing that I should be doing at work.
This is about common decency and basic human rights, not about entitlement. The fact that you are conflating the right to use restroom (a basic human need), at a consistent, non-excessive time interval (so that I do not experience a life-threatening state) to be some sort of entitlement is absolutely ridiculous. I hope you are not a lawyer, because if you are, you really need to change your perception around disability related matters. However, I will be mindful about the language I use, so thank you.
And no, I would not be looking for some settlement, which would be ridiculous, foolish, and incredibly short-sighted. The issue I am trying to address here, besides the matter of disability rights, is just human decency and respect towards others. Amazon does not exalt such values as a company, but especially so by how it treats its employees.
>This is about common decency and basic human rights, not about entitlement. The fact that you are conflating the right to use restroom (a basic human need), at a consistent, non-excessive time interval (so that I do not experience a life-threatening state) to be some sort of entitlement is absolutely ridiculous.
I really want to be clear. I am not doing that. I am genuinely not saying you are one of those people, and I apologize for my words if that's how it sounded. Your case sounds pretty straight forward - just make sure there's a bathroom somewhere close.
My experience is that many individuals in the disability world (keep in mind I work with youth and young adults and their parents/advocates) are very entitled. They believe there are no boundaries on what is an acceptable, and reasonable accommodation. That is what I was getting at.
That statement legitimately had nothing to do with you. It was a statement. I get defensive about this because I genuinely get sued three or four times a year for access complaints that are completely unfounded. I am a huge advocate for disability rights, and believe the current system of basic access is inadequate. But I am also sick of being accused of discrimination because I don't treat every individual that I work with like a small doll made of crystal.
I’m sorry that you go through this. Next time, I will be more considerate when posting and tone it down. A lot of the issues you mention with young adults is a generational divide in the disabled community: the post-ADA generation and the pre-ADA generation.
The post-ADA people never had to truly fight for their rights against people that had true actual contempt against their existence as disabled human beings. On social media, it gets weird. The disabled identity online is completely incongruent with any semblance of a professional life, so if one wants to be successful in real life, it is best to run away from it if you are a disabled person. The disabled culture online scares normal and typical people, and for good reasons: people rage post about the indignities and injustices that they face as human beings on a regular basis. It makes normal people extremely uncomfortable at minimum.
I have self-respect so I don’t have social media accounts besides HN and a Reddit account, which I use to assist others. Of course I could post horrible injustices that have occurred to me. But what would that do? Nothing, besides cause outrage. That is the problem right there. The post-ADA generation often does not realize that there are people out there that have absolute contempt just for your existence as a human being, and to win, you have to fight a nasty battle, take the high road, and chances are, you will lose and lose again. Eventually you may win, but you will probably be dragged in the dirt during the whole process. There are consequences but taking risks and doing the right thing ultimately prevail.
I had the privilege of working with one of the individuals who is featured in one of the iconic protest photos from the 1990 capitol crawl. I'm not as old as this person, and my personal experience with disability, and all of my professional experience are post ADA/AA.
Listening to her story about life in the 50's and 60's and her experience with being (in her words) "institutionalized in hell" was just startling. It really put things into perspective for my professional career, and honestly, I can say that one day had more of an impact on my personal and professional trajectory than most other things I've done.
It's still socially acceptable to mock and discriminate based on disability. People do it all the time. It's just. I don't know what the word is. Terrible doesn't seem strong enough. It's ridiculous.
I don't know that there is a reason for me telling this story, other than to agree with your last sentence.
The problem that I've run into, though, is that those individuals who really could make a splash - in my profession (higher ed), these tend to be folks on the autism spectrum who do not fit into stodgy, higher education 'conventional' expectations - do not have the know-how or the tools or the want to make a real flashy impact. They're afraid of social and economic consequences for speaking up. About half of my job is working with these folks to change systems and modify work/study spaces to implement universal design; for me, neuro-atypical universal design is the hardest to pin-down.
That's what makes being sued all the time such a pain in the ass. It's always by someone who is self-diagnosed, and someone who leans into the 'perceived' part of disability definition. Maybe I'm getting too in the weeds here.
Anyway. Not really sure what the point of all of this was, other than to say, thank you for the discourse. I appreciate it.
You're welcome! You are an amazing, kind, and generous person. I am glad to have "met" you. If for some reason you want to email me, my email is in my profile (no pressure, I am not expecting it and it will not hurt my feelings if you don't).
While I am not as "vocal" as the author of that blog, William Peace, I do agree with him 100% on the issues he brings up, along with his discourse. I say this as an adult in my early 30s, who has seen a lot.
It is definitely possible that I could be autistic (this is the first time that I have written such a statement ever, and I have never, not once, claimed that I am autistic ever), but it is not my place to claim that diagnosis or identity. Plus, it is fun to throw people off. Of course I have read books about females and autism (I am female) and books about autism in general. Such diagnoses are the responsibility of doctors, and it is not my place, nor appropriate, to make that claim, as there are professionals capable of making that assertation. (I did have a doctor who knows me really well ask me if I was autistic, though, kind of like a compliment.) From an accommodation standpoint, academically, I would need none for that disability as I am already on the record for 2 rare neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system plus type 1 diabetes (autoimmune and insulin dependent), and I have enough help. One of those conditions is an autoimmune form of autonomic neuropathy that I have lived with since I was 3 or so, and it is believed that it caused the autoimmunity that caused my type 1 diabetes. The autonomic nervous system affects all sorts of things like even your propensity to socialize. Also, people with ASD often have autonomic dysfunction. Sorry to go off on a ramble, but I hope you found that interesting. This is the disease I am talking about, by the way: https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/11917/autoimmune-...
As for the autistic identity, I don't see the point. I know who I am, so I do not need to claim it as an identity. So, those people who make an unnecessary huge deal out of it being their identity are taking it too far. Yes, it is part of who they are, but it is only a part.
Yeah, UDL is extremely difficult and I imagine that your specific type of UDL is really just starting to emerge. I guess for neuro-atypical people it comes down to UDL of curriculum, UDL of the physical spaces (arrangement and what is used physically in the space), and UDL of the environmental features of that space (ie temperature, lighting, humidity, etc.), which you likely all do. Also, how to deal with interaction utilizing UDL between neuro-atypical and neurotypical individuals is next-level difficult, which is probably the most crucial component.
Laws usually aren't enforced as they are written. They are discovered in the courts. So even though those carveouts exist, whether they are applicable to this case or not is another question.
Why is it better for Amazon to pay $15/hour and work you like dogs, vs. paying a much lower base rate but a bonus that makes it work out to $15/hour if you work yourself like a dog, and less if you're less effective? Is overhead so high that having more, cheaper but less effective workers doesn't work out?
- Paying $15/hour guarantees a steady supply of replacements for people quitting. Paying closer to minimum wage does not.
- At the scale and level of service demand of Amazon, it's probably better to have predictable headcount and per-employee performance than to try and play the fast food game where finding replacements might take weeks and even when you do, there's a good chance they'll be rather bad employees.
- It's probably a self-selection filter at this point. Pretty much everyone knows that working for a fulfillment center or DSP will be a shitty grind, but the pay is better than 90% of other unskilled jobs. People who can't handle the work will largely self-select out of even trying to work there in the first place, which saves Amazon a lot of time and cost.
That review is pretty obviously a joke. The account has a long history of occasional legitimate-looking reviews on ordinary products -- it's nothing like the pattern that's typical of bot reviewers.
A lot of my work revolves around physiological research of bioelectrical signals produced by the human body. If you have spent as much time in this niche field as I have, you would know that this had to be a fake, both from the apparent context already stated along with details that others do not know. For example, for your 5 person "crew" to be using the Astroskin, let's just say that you would have to invest $10k-$15k to even start. The prices of the Astroskin are obscene and are not publicly advertised. Its extremely similar, slightly less advanced counterpart, the Hexoskin, is much more reasonably priced: https://www.hexoskin.com/
From a technology standpoint, the actual hardware and materials for an Astroskin system cost around $175-$200 (clothing set + processing unit) to produce, so they really are making bank.
It's about as plausible as you being a galaxy brain suggesting that the unions are behind the posts in order to undermine amazon's credibility, in order to undermine the union's credibility.
Who do you think has more time and money to contribute to this kind of thing? Union organizers who are already overwhelmed just trying to reach the people they're trying to help, or the company which delivers almost everything to almost everyone and made more money than most countries' GDPs?
Absolutely amazon. I take your point, but when fighting against a much larger organization this is exactly the kind of guerilla warfare tactic you'd need to come out ahead. This kind of information campaign is exactly the sort of thing that the internet makes accessible for groups of all sizes.
It could also be people behind the cause who aren't affiliated with either party. I think your point is worth noting, though I fully support the workers trying to unionize here.
The ambassador program is real but the most recent batch of tweets circulating ARE from fake accounts (as in created by third party trolls fake, not created by Amazon PR fake).
That's a good point. Unions have never done anything shady, they're too busy feeding the poor and rescuing kittens in trees.
Snark aside, OP never said it was the union doing it. It could just be someone outside the potential union members who just supports unions in general, or doesn't support Amazon, who is doing it.
What other explanation is there? Do you think there is some die-hard Amazon supporter who goes out of their way to generate fake profiles and then post messages that wouldn't sway anyone?
Somewhere in another thread someone suggested that amazon had a program and incentives for employees to represent them positively online so maybe it is just poor PR on their part. Still, these days it's hard to take anything at face value.
Yes, that's their ambassador program. But I doubt that the ambassador program would tell the members to create unverified accounts and try to pass them off as official amazon ambassador accounts.
Essentializing all unions based on the behavior of a few of them, vs summarizing a single company's behavior who has a visible and obvious track record of breaking up unionization efforts via nefarious and underhanded tactics, are completely incomparable.
If you want snark, have some back: where did the big bad union boss touch you?
> What other explanation is there?
Hired a shoddy offshore bot-writing and astroturfing outfit who are obviously not up to the job. It's a very simple, and one of the most likely, explanations. Occam's razor comes in handy occasionally if you just take the time to think a bit.
I never said I was anti-union. I'm just pointing out that unions aren't 100% pure forces of good. They have a good idea at their heart, and frequently they are abused by insiders for personal gain.
> Occam's razor
Amazon has an ambassador program, where they basically pay workers to post on twitter about how good their job is. You're saying they have a program for workers to post on twitter, and they also hire astroturfers to make fake posts of the same thing on twitter, using photos of moderately known celebrities as their backgrounds? I don't buy it. Amazon made the mistake of creating a system where accounts are "verified" merely by a prefix of their name - "@AmazonFC...". Therefore anyone can make an account that looks like "@AmazonFC...", not just Amazon. What amazon should have done is have a single official account, or even a single official account which links to other official accounts.
Occam's razor tells me that the most likely creator of these accounts is a troll who browses reddits ABoringDystopia sub, and is just having fun.
Maybe I'm giving Amazon too much credit but I would think they would do a better job or more likely outsource this out to a group that would do a better job.
And I'm on the side of the employees, hoping they unionize (effectively!).
I'd guess it's neither Amazon or pro-union employees but rather random people trying to make Amazon look bad.
I don't think you need to do a better job to get good results with twitter/internet propaganda. No one vets their sources and hardly anyone reads past the headline. The only people up in arms on this story are people who already know Amazon is a toxic environment for the worker. People who have been sipping the Bezos Koolaid aren't going to be shaken by this, because you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. It's a cheap way to amplify a message and exhaust opposition, and it works wonders as we've seen these last 5 years or so.
I am looking forward to the day that twitter is nothing more than Russian bots arguing with CIA bots arguing with Chinese bots arguing with corporate shill bots. And the only people being fooled are advertisers and twitter investors.
I read an article where Russia's Internet Research Agency learned it was easier to just take existing propaganda and memes, amplify them past the long tail of engagement with their bots, and let the racist hateful online population snowball that message organically for them.
People aren't rational, we are inherently emotional. Reason and logic need to be taught, and controlling your emotions is one of the hardest things you can do as a human. These propaganda just play into our basic primal fears of safety and the unknown at its root. It's not hard to engage with these emotions, especially if what you are sharing already goes along with this established worldview that some have, cultivated by years of past propaganda.
I'm not sure how you reset this, given so many people live in lives where they aren't exposed to other perspectives nor seek them out.
> so many people live in lives where they aren't exposed to other perspectives
I don't think it's that people aren't exposed to other perspectives -- it's that people have been programmed to be vitriol of other perspectives. It's the ever growing polarization of world views.
I think exposure at least offers you the opportunity of engagement with other perspectives. If your dad is racist but you go to school and make a black friend, that might change your perspective vs. if you lived in an area where mostly white people lived, and you had no practical experience to weigh against your dad's racist perspective. A lot of people stay siloed, especially after schooling ends. They work with the same people for decades, attend the same church, or otherwise cement their social circle for the most part, since there are fewer opportunities to meet people from different perspectives as an adult. This is in contrast to say undergrad, where half the kids in your dorm were from another country and everyone is looking to make friends as soon as possible, or public school where you make friends both rich and poor because you don't see class really when you are six years old, you just want to play tag.
They are not "scare quotes", it is part of the BBC's style guide. It is to make clear that they are not the ones declaring that the accounts are fake, but that it is attributed to someone else.
It is not really clear which type of "fake" they are - if it is non-Amazon-employees making a parody, or someone at Amazon making a not-really-existing persona:
> It is unclear whether the accounts are real employees, bots or trolls pretending to be Amazon Ambassadors.
It is clear. Some of those were created with gmail addresses and done with the web client instead of sprinklr like the amazon fake accounts. Those all use amazon email accounts and sprinklr.
Which obviously a real box packer isn't going to have a sprinklr acct so you know at the very best someone is getting a 15 minute break while a pr rep looks over their shoulder and more likely they all work at the same desk in a corporate office.
You start the login process with the account that you want to know about, and then click, forgot password and start a password reset. Then twitter gives you a list with a radio button for the reset link.
It is a way to indicate that you are not asserting the label, somebody else is. So it is actually a very useful way to indicate uncertainty. Amazon has deep pockets, and people don't want to be sued.
Amazon's own spokesperson called them fake. From the article:
> “It appears that this is a fake account that violates Twitter’s terms,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve asked Twitter to investigate and take appropriate action.”
I'm not saying what you appear to think I am saying.
The author is making it clear that they are not the one who called the accounts fake. This implies uncertainty because if the accounts were objectively fake, there would be little need to add the quotation marks.
It’s a common practice in journalism. They’re not using scare quotes, but regular quotes. They’re avoiding asserting themselves that the accounts are fake, and instead, diverting the assertion to the quotee (Amazon in this case).
They're not scare quotes; they're someone-said quotes. It just means someone from the Beeb hasn't personally gone and physically investigated the authenticity of the accounts. It's the difference between the BBC claiming "these accounts are fake" vs. them claiming "so-and-so says these accounts are fake."
> What a miserable existence that must be. Bezos has always struck me as a man who cares about nothing else only his own personal wealth and success.
On the contrary, he is probably very happy with the way things are. You may be buying into the "Just World fallacy"; there are plenty of people you may find despicable who are leading happy, fulfilling lives, by their standards.
I think the antipathy towards workers a combination of 2 things: it takes a fair amount of conceit/self-belief to dare think you can change the world (statistically speaking). The second thing is, even if you didn't start of with that mindset, success usually brings a certain post-hoc justification in the vein of "Clearly, I have been successful, therefore I'm better than most", which easily morphs into "My needs are more important; the little people are too focused on short-term goals and yet I have to compete with them for the same resources to achieve even more important goals I have planned". As someone from a low-income background, I have noticed that the more successful I have been, the less empathy I have, and I'm only middle-class. I don't know if it's because of my increasing income, increasing age, or combination of both.
There's a meaningful distinction between happy and comfortable. He might lead a very comfortable life but I have to agree with GP that he doesn't /seem/ to be a very happy person.
Of course, I (and you) say this from the position of people who don't know the man in person. It's all baseless backbiting.
He always seems smiling and laughing in all the interviews I've seen him in. I know he has children plus a partner (and ex-wife). He's super rich, famous, gets to do what he wants, likes newspapers so he bought a big one, likes rockets so he is giving his own rocket/space company a go...
Obviously this isn't dispositive to say he's happy, but I don't think it proves he's unhappy either. Not wanting your workers to unionize hardly seems like proof of an unhappy life.
how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly? financial worth has nothing to do with it. if he feels that charge is untrue, he should push back against it.
I would not be nearly as measured in my response. no sir, I am not the one
> how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly?
Hopefully anyone with that level of wealth would look into fixing the actual problem instead of trying to cover it up with fake testimony. The point is, he has the money to build a working culture where people can feel like they are treated fairly, he just chooses not to
It's not like he is the only one at Amazon making decisions. Along with Bezos, there's a whole host of bad actors at Amazon who have decided not to treat workers well.
Financial worth absolutely has to do with the fairness or lack thereof. Bezos has created nearly 200 billion dollars (!) of wealth for himself since founding Amazon, so debating the moral value of those gains in comparison to how everyday employees are compensated is well within reason.
And if my employees said I was treating them unfairly, I would try to understand their perspective and make changes to improve working conditions. But maybe that's why I'll never be a CEO.
I don't they they could have done it without him there. The value of the employee's labour is insignificant without the organization and systems he set up.
If they were working somewhere else, they wouldn't be generating 200 billion dollars of wealth at all
Your implication is that Bezos was inconsequential to the creation of all that brand new wealth. Surely you don't actually believe that and this is just your ideological rhetoric to further your politicized beliefs?
> Your implication is that Bezos was inconsequential to the creation of all that brand new wealth
How much wealth would Bezos have created without his employees? I sort of imagine one guy with a computer running an online bookstore running fulfillment out of his garage.
I bet he could make an okay living if he's smart and hardworking and lucky but it's a pretty inconsequential fraction of 200 billion.
Your implication is that Bezos’ employees were inconsequential to the creation of all that brand new wealth. Surely you don't actually believe that and this is just your ideological rhetoric to further your politicized beliefs?
False dichotomy - they never said he was inconsequential, just that his workers have done the majority of the work - which is objectively true.
If Bezos didn't need those workers - if he genuinely created every cent of value in his empire on his own, picked and boxed and delivered every book himself - why did he ever hire anybody?
But it isn't a false dichotomy. The claim I was responding to stated that the workers had created nearly all of the 200 billion in wealth, which would make Bezos's efforts hardly consequential.
And with your line of reasoning I should be mad when my doctor spends 30 seconds checking me and makes a diagnosis and then receives the lions share of the pay. He couldn't do his job with his nurses, office workers, and other employees. But I'm not mad, because he's doing something they can't.
Just like Bezos did something no one else could do at the time.
The difference is that you could replace the workers with other bodies and the wealth would still have been created. Replacing Bezos would mean Amazon wouldn’t even exist.
At some point, however, it's momentum and people in the engine room driving the ship rather than the captain. Replace bezos with another decent business person and I'm sure they would have made similar decisions along the way and ended up in a similar place today. It's not like bezos has some sacred gut, he just hires experts and listens to them like any other CEO would do.
> Replace bezos with another decent business person and I'm sure they would have made similar decisions along the way and ended up in a similar place today.
I worked at Amazon for 6 years. I don’t think that’s true at all. Nearly any other professional manager would have been too tempted to turn the mighty river of free cash flow into profit rather than reinvesting in the business.
It's relatively common wisdom that you don't become a billionaire without fucking over a lot of people. You can be CEO just fine, but billionaire CEO is probably not in the cards for you.
Why not? The workers have created enormous value, more than any other time in the history of humanity. Why shouldn't we frame this in terms of where that value goes to?
People have rent to pay. The "you agreed to it" argument only works if the person genuinely had other realistic options available to them. Nobody would work for peanuts and pee in bottles if they had another realistic option.
It's not about his wealth. If Jeff had been independently wealthy before starting Amazon this wouldn't be an issue. The problem is the percentage workers receive of the value they generate. Jeff has gotten rich by pushing that number as low as possible, while also working to kill off businesses that might offer alternative employment to low skill workers.
> how would you respond if people said you were treating your employees unfairly?
Not sure how "richest man in the world" version of myself would react. Certainly I wouldn't use my corporate Twitter account to attack (badly) US politicians.
If people said that about me, I'd call off union vote, and just give the union "my blessing" no vote needed, in fact I'd encourage a union from day one for any business I start.
A union will not break Amazon, many companies with unions still are plenty profitable.
Equating every action of a million person company with their (soon to be former) CEO is disingenuous. Jeff Bezos isn't personally directly every action of every employee at Amazon. I know it's popular to hate Amazon, but we don't even have any evidence that this handful of Twitter accounts was created by Amazon employees in the first place, let alone personally directed by Jeff Bezos.
There are news articles floating around now saying that Bezos was a direct influence on the recent aggressive nature of Amazon twitter accounts attacking/fighting back. Not sure how many former employees would be able to wield that kind of power. Granted this former CEO is still the President of the Board or whatever Grand Poobah title he has.
News articles have came out saying that Jeff Bezos was responsible for those actions. But, even if they weren't, you're saying the CEO should be rewarded with billions of dollars for the actions of the leaders under them, but carry none of the blame for those acts as well?
In corporate America, responsibility is on senior leadership, and the CEO is at the top of that chain. If they want to have the W's of that system, they get to take the L's too.
Imagine building a company from the ground up that is succesfull solely because it produces a lot of value to people, and yet random people on the internet still think all you care about is hoarding money and think they can make better decisions than you.
Here is the summary of the issue.
Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to frictional unemployment rates, while Amazon was still able to roll out things like 2 day deliver and same day delivery. This means that it was able to staff accordingly. This in turn means that the pay that people recieve is worth whatever the working conditions are, and people can quit and go find easier job at any time. This is also true of people that are able to work overtime, for double the pay $30 an hour. Not to mention that benefits are also included, which as far as health insurance is a big plus for people.
Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions are far and few in between. For the scale of amazon, its expected that some warehouses are going to be run poorly. There isn't a single shred of credible evidence that this is a widespread problem. Also, with unskilled manual labor, there are people that are going to have a harder time than others. Taller pickers for example, have an advantage over shorter pickers that don't have to use the step stool. But again, 3% unemployment rate.
As far as unionization goes, this is the general gist of it. If the workers unionize, the service capability will undoutably go down. When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their jobs, productivity will go down. While its true that worker conditions will improve, the problem is along will come Walmart thats not as much in the spotlight, and offer better service and shipping while having shit working conditions, and people will just switch over because thats more beneficial to them. In no way shape or form the will continue supporting Amazon just because their workers unionized, out of the "good of their heart".
So Bezos is doing the correct thing by being anti union. Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically.
If you care about the lower income people, then go out and vote for politicains that support higher taxation for the rich, social programs for the poor, so that ones living condition does not depend on ones job.
Also, for your brain health, get of the domapine fix that is the outrage of the internet lefism.
> Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically
There are definitely some true, fair, and pertinent points in your comment (though, to be clear, they're not strong enough to actually make a compelling point, and I still disagree with your conclusion and position), but this is just nonsense. Every single social welfare program is "messing with the free market", and while I do concede that some of them have been failures and some have been inefficient, they are overall a net positive to _human quality of life_, even while they may reduce a business' productivity.
If you modified your statement to "which never leads to good outcomes for a particular company", or even "for the economy", then it would be a truer statement - but it is possible for a company or for the overall economy to take a small hit, while actual real humans (who are, after all, the ones that we should care about) enjoy a far greater quality of life.
>Every single social welfare program is "messing with the free market"
I mean, saying that a human life is worth something so you can't just treat people as expendable labor is "messing with the free market" technically, but thats a very low boundary. Social welfare addresses the lower tiers of income, specifically to aid people in basic needs of housing, food, healthcare and education. Those people aren't putting any significant money into the economy.
Unionization on the other hand is selective inflation of labor value in certain areas. Thats definitely messing with the free market. Didn't work for France very well, not going to work for US.
And where do you suppose that the money to fund those social welfare programs comes from? Not the free market, that's for sure.
EDIT to be more clear-and-explicit and less snarky - taxes are an interference with the free market. I am making the claim that a high-functioning society that cares for its citizens and ensures a good quality of life must necessarily a) impose taxes, in order to b) provide social welfare programs. In particular, I claim that no purely-free-market motivated company will address social welfare needs as comprehensively as public programs would (though I do concede that, for some subsets of society, some companies will often do so more efficiently than public programs would, at the cost of non-universal coverage).
>Amazon warehouses have a far, far, higher turn over rate than other warehouses
True
>probably because the conditions are so cruel.
Ugh, thats the crap I am talking about in the last sentence of my original post.
There is nothing wrong with high turnover at a minimum wage manual labor job. Amazon hires seasonal workers that happily work overtime for $30 and then quit. Nobody is making a career out of being a warehouse associate.
>Nobody is making a career out of being a warehouse associate.
The majority of people on Hacker News, yourself included (I can tell from your comments) have privilege that means we never had to consider something like making a career out of working in a warehouse. But this is absolutely a reality for alot of smart, hard working people, because they didn't have the opportunities you and me had.
If unionization didn't lead to better outcomes for workers, Bezos wouldn't care about it. If it was going to be so bad for workers, he would just let them do it and let them fail. The fact that Amazon is doing anything about it is proof that it will benefit workers.
> Nobody is making a career out of being a warehouse associate.
Um.
I worked a warehouse one summer in college.
A whole lot of my coworkers were, in fact, making a career out of it.
It was a crappy career compared to the easy, high-income gig I was working towards in software development, but it was a career, nonetheless.
I currently work with someone who was career warehouse until he caught a lucky break and was able to move into white collar work.
(Interestingly, his last warehouse job before going white collar was with Amazon, after several others, and he said it was by far the best warehouse to work in.)
Why do you assume it's people leaving because of cruel conditions and not people being fired, especially given that they're open about firing lots of people and encouraging many to quit? They don't hide the ball on that.
Because they have calculated that turnover is more profitable than the cost of quality recruiting, training and on boarding. Firing people is super costly. The math of the churn and burn model is working.
Do they create high turn over because they’re selecting for the best people to exploit?
It’s a gestalt, you can see it two ways and I have no clue why someone would want to see it as a “good practice” unless that view was beneficial to their job and career advancement.
>So Bezos is doing the correct thing by being anti union. Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically.
Tell that to Sweden, with its 80% unionization rate and productivity (GDP per hour worked) at 97% of that of the United States.
And since you said "historically" - it's not a recent change of affairs. In the 1970s Sweden's productivity (GDP per hour) was 90% of that of the United States.
Looking at a narrow metric like GPD/hour as support of unionzation is very selective.
Sweeden also has more homeless people per capita than US, and higher unemployment, and lower GDP/capita, and different labor laws.
Its also not really a good excersize to compare against other countries. With full analysis, you quickly get into weeds of things like cultural values, homogeneity, hysteresis in policy, all of which affect the economy.
Saying that an economic policy works in one country has no relation to whether it works in another. For example (albeit a dumb one, but it illustrates the point) - in most of EU, there aren't really 24 hour grocery stores or food places, unlike in US. Is it better to enact a policy stop economic trade in late hours, with the assumption that people are more productive if they have time with their families, or would you rather have a free market that allows the night owls to make money if they want to?
The answer is that it solely depends on the population. General labor class with more traditional values would probably prefer the former. Younger techies that aren't concerned with families and love what they do and willingly work into later hours would prefer the latter. E.t.c and so on.
Unionization is a correction of the market if anything, as labor has a buyer's market. Both by the immediate need of survival by the seller, and a similarly high rate of exploitation at competing jobs that limits real choices. And arguably an actual monopsony/oligopsony, but that's besides the point.
Edit: It's an interesting admission when you basically say that Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
>Unionization is a correction of the market if anything,
Nope. Injecting money into lower end income levels, through things like raising the minimum wage to $10-11, or social welfare programs, causes every company paying minimum wage to slightly bump up their salaries - thats a market correction.
Unionization is economically equivalent to rent control, which is not a market correction.
The reason why rent control doesn't work is you basically people who cannot otherwise afford to live in an area, and artificially increase their net worth. Of course they want to stay in the area, which decreases availalbe housing supply, prevents building of new housing supply, e.t.c and so on with cascading effects.
With unions is the same thing. People who are not worth $15 an hour because are slow are artificially inflated, and now they get put into a job that is hard to fire from, which then in turn leads to companies less likely to hire people, which decreases labor supply, and has other cascading effects.
>It's an interesting admission when you basically say that Amazon's worker productivity depends on coercion.
As is the case for any non-protected unskilled labor position, of which there are plenty. Amazon perhaps does more metric collection and expects a higher throughput, but they also pay accordingly. And people don't have to work at Amazon if they don't want to.
Its interesting though that people chose to focus on Amazon when talking about this, instead of all the companies that share similar working conditions. Kinda shows you where your priorities are, which is not in discussion of things that could benefit the lower income class.
>People who are not worth $15 an hour because are slow are artificially inflated, and now they get put into a job that is hard to fire from, which then in turn leads to companies less likely to hire people, which decreases labor supply, and has other cascading effects.
To be fair, plenty of huge companies hire all kinds of people that provide zero or negative value to the bottom line. Most of these positions are white collar, well paid and non-unionised: purchasing officers, university administrators (with the exception of that one person who actually does everything), sprawling HR departments, "Agile" project managers that can't code, the "management class" as a whole etc. Interestingly, the more "dead weight" employees a company has, the faster they will hire more.
Using your own brand of "individual actors maximising value" economic theory, it's pretty easy to see how this is the case. The people making these hiring decisions don't actually have any rational incentive to increase the profitability of the organisation, but will receive both increased job security and political power through appointing dead weight hires. So that's what they do.
Amazon is in the spotlight right now because of their very loud anti-union efforts and being the second largest employer in the US. Excluding the Department of Defense, but that's a digression.
You're right that Walmart should be in the overall discussion, but they aren't the ones in a unionization vote happening at this very moment.
And it's weird to conveniently act like the discussion of issues that benefit low income workers haven't been core political topics, like the $15 minimum wage you keep bringing up.
The idea that "workers can't band together to make demands" somehow is in opposition to "market forces" and not ITSELF a market force is how we got into this mess in the first place.
It's like saying "people are boycotting product x because they disagree with company policy" isn't allowed because "cancel culture is messing with the free market".
Unionization is by far more than "workers banding together to make demands".
Unions have things like the ability to force someone to join a union and pay dues. From the point of view of the union, you ofcourse want that in order to stop the union from loosing power to non union members.
And also, if you think that unions are market forces because they represent the interest of workesrs, so are anti union measures because they represet the interests of companies, so by definition you should be ok with what Amazon is doing.
Hmm its almost like goverment regulations that apply to ALL companies are somehow different than selectively unionizing the labor force of a certain company or sector.
Where are all the comments about Walmart unionization?
Writing off legitimate complaints about working conditions at Amazon–which are, in fact, widespread–as "outrage of internet leftism" is dismissive and plain incorrect. [1]
By what definition of "free market" is unionization fairly characterized as "messing with" said market? Isn't the idea of the free market that actors within that market have the opportunity to use resources and organize resources the way they see fit? It seems your definition of "free market" only permits corporations latitude in making meaningful choices, but employees and consumers none whatsoever.
If you are going to post any proof, at least read the stuff that you posted. 16 cases of complaints with extremely vague information in them is hardly proof.
Don't bother looking for actual evidence though, because you won't find it.
>A National Labor Review Board (NLRB) investigation has now found that Amazon illegally interrogated and threatened Jonathan Bailey, a lead organizer of the Queens Amazon walkouts, and has issued a federal complaint against Amazon, according to official NLRB documents...
>The case was settled before it went to trial, but the issuing of the complaint means that an NLRB investigation found Amazon broke the law.[1]
Perhaps we could look at another:
>Last month, the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint in Bowden’s case, meaning the agency found merit in her allegations that Amazon threatened, suspended, and ultimately terminated her because she had been talking with coworkers at an Amazon warehouse in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, about pay and other workplace issues, which is a legally protected activity.[2]
Then of course, there is the article that is the subject of this post. Call it speculation, but a corporate astroturfing campaign is not a convincing indication Amazon is on the right side of morality, law, or the facts here.
The free market dynamics you explained force the squeezing of margin which in turn squeezes time and energy from humans with a eventual race to the bottom to share that margin with shareholders. There are plenty of companies who decided to intervene and have learned to compete while balancing the interest of their workers, customers, and shareholders. Amazon is not one of these. The business model and Amazon’s key value of always thinking of the customer first will prevent the model from also considering the employee.
> This in turn means that the pay that people recieve is worth whatever the working conditions are
> people can quit and go find easier job at any time
There's no basis for this, by your own observation. Offering bottles of water in the desert is not a fair trade of value. You have a hostage negotiation.
> There isn't a single shred of credible evidence that this is a widespread problem
Except for all the evidence you want to ignore or have laid before you to dismiss.
It's tiring at how poorly this rhetoric is thought out. I'll skip to my favorite part.
> Unionization is messing with the free market,
What does free market mean in this context? Oh right, whatever you think works because it makes sense in a closed system with immediate feedback. Reality does not match this. Major Airlines don't hire less people because they have unions (white collar and blue collar, typically).
Most of the post is some strange worldview using open language that has no weight or typical strawman theorycrafting.
> This in turn means that the pay that people recieve is worth whatever the working conditions are, and people can quit and go find easier job at any time.
Sounds easy but I assume it isn't so much. Applying regular market rules to the job market is misguided. First, people need a job to live. If all available offers are starvation wages, people can't just say "well I won't work for this". Second, changing job is a big risk regarding healthcare and job security. Some people might prefer lower pay but higher stability rather than slightly higher pay but with a high risk of being fired. Third, different people have different jobs available. For unskilled labor there will always be more people than jobs, and there will always be people that need a job now doing whatever so they don't lose their home. That will push wages down even in an environment of low unemployment.
> Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions are far and few in between.
There are quite a lot of reports in multiple countries and outlets. Taking into account that it's not easy for workers to put their story out there and that they take a risk by doing so, I wouldn't dismiss the evidence so quickly.
> When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their jobs, productivity will go down.
Or go up. Evidence is mixed and depends on the setting. It's not "undoubtely".
> While its true that worker conditions will improve, the problem is along will come Walmart thats not as much in the spotlight, and offer better service and shipping while having shit working conditions,
Walmart employees could make an union too.
> Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically.
Things unions have historically done (some of them haven't reached yet the US precisely because of the lack of unionization):
- Limit weekly working hours.
- Weekends
- Paid vacations.
- Protect workers in bad situations (pregnancy, disability, injuries).
That's just in general. Go into actual unions and see what things they do.
Also, they're not messing with the free market. The job market is not a free market, there's an extreme asymmetry of power and information between a worker and a company. Most workers can't afford to lose their jobs, most companies can afford to lose a worker. By splitting workers they can apply individual pressure to gain an advantage that they couldn't get if workers actually coordinated. Unions restore the power balance and give workers the power to negotiate the conditions in an equal setting.
I depend on Amazon for a substantial portion of sales and logistics in one of my businesses.
Consider it a single piece of anecdata, but I would be more than happy to pay a higher fulfillment fee if it meant the workers didn't injure themselves and burn out in a matter of months.
Non sequitor. Saying that unions were reponsible for those things so they are good is the same thing as saying that Nazis are good because a lot of medicine research and breakthroughs happened under their regimes.
If it was for market alone those issues would never been fixed, full free market is just bad for labor market because of the power asymmetry between supply and demand.
Its us-vs-them all the way when it comes to disinformation and shitting up the internet more. I don't care where your personal beliefs are, the issue is that this brand of online wokness is so widespread its taking over everything, with plenty of misinformation to go about.
For example, Im big into mountain biking, and here is a recent example of this (read the comments)
1) If it's us-vs-them about truth vs disinformation, then I don't see how you can possibly make it a left vs right issue. The Right wing invented the Orwellian term for "fake news" to mean "truths that are inconvenient to me", and spent 4 years gaslighting the public about blatant lies and misdirection.
2) Turning "woke" into an insult for everything progressive completely removes all nuance from a bunch of political positions that while frequently shared between similar people are completely unrelated. "Woke" was a term that came about with regards to social and specifically RACIAL justice.
The fact that the internet left is full of people so far extreme as to be actually Stalinist (and by that i mean would support guillotining the rich or sending them to gulags), does not negate the value of discussion of unions, or social inequalities between the races.
I would urge any sensible-minded individual to dismiss using "woke" from their lexicon as an insult because it immediately devalues your opinion (see also: SJW, Feminist, etc)
3) "For example, Im big into mountain biking, and here is a recent example of this (read the comments)"
I'm super not clear about your point here. Amazon ripped off an independent seller's design. Is that not a problem? Do people not have the right to be upset?
Used to work for an employer that was obsessed with its glassdoor rating. Negative reviews of the company were drowned out with tons of identical-sounding glowing reviews that I'm pretty sure were written by interns.
We were actually "highly encouraged" during new hire orientation to go on glassdoor and leave a good review - that was the first hint I made a mistake in accepting the job. It was a pretty awful place to work.
Well, it definitely means you have far more at stake every time you comment or participate, since you're putting your reputation on the line and creating a public record.
However, I ultimately don't think requiring IDs would be effective and it would probably expose at-risk and vulnerable groups to greater retaliatory action. It's arguably a bit classist as well, since only those who are sufficiently rich and powerful enough to protect themselves would be able to participate with impunity.
> There won't be any anonymity on that network, sure
That's exactly why. It would allow ideas and speech with psychological safety to proliferate while everything else is shut down. It's bad enough already due to voluntary censorship (cancel culture).
This is a problem the Voice.com social platform is attempting to tackle, read more about it here: https://about.voice.com/learn-more/. I'm not affiliated with Voice in anyway, just someone who is eagerly awaiting open registration.
You're right, technically there is nothing to prevent that from happening, but I think the idea is that you only get one "Voice", so if you want to align it to something you don't necessarily believe in for the sake of money, then you will have to suffer the consequences of that. Might be a good way to thwart paid attempts at spinning undeserved corporate-positive narratives.
This reminds me of the "fake" uber drivers who were texting me last election to vote yes on their hand tailored, virtually immutable proposition 22. Unfortunately this sort of easy stuff works on so many people. Prop 22 passed with 58% of the vote and they won. The cynic in me says Amazon knows they won't lose.
You mean the real Uber drivers who correctly understood that Prop 22 would allow them to voluntarily work in the way they want to work, despite the fact that well-meaning busybodies didn't like it?
No, they literally hired actors for their headshots. (1,2). Drivers also sued Uber for the barage of texts sent to them trying to sway their support on the issue (3).
I hated the Prop. 22 campaign as much as anyone else (the notifications from the Uber app were especially egregious) but just because someone is an actor doesn't mean they can't drive for Uber. I remember reading that a lot of actors (who aren't super wealthy) actually drive for Uber as the hours are very flexible.
There are plenty of reason to hate Amazon and their policies, but this doesn't seem like something they'd actually do. More like an amateur anti-Amazon activist stunt to make them look bad.
Just speculating, what if this was a false flag?
Someone against Amazon creates a bunch of fake accounts and posts pro-Amazon stuff. Then sends those accounts to journalists.
Does anyone else think that Amazon news handle is doing damage to their brand? Silence seems like a better strategy. they must view this union vote as the beginning of the end.
Nearly everyone involved in this debate is "fake".
The people railing against Amazon are mostly people who have never done manual labor in their lives and (wrongly) view people who have as little better than slaves. Even the Amazon (or ex-Amazon) employees who speak against the company are doing so in an environment where the only tolerated sentiment is attacking Amazon. There's no room for nuance. Perhaps that's okay and reasonable new provisions for Amazon employees will come out of all this or perhaps the debate will get less and less rational.
This situation makes me think of Ikiru, a Kurosawa movie. The main character is dying. He looks around for meaning in life and eventually settles upon a former employee of his, a young girl. He spends time with her and buys her things just to be around her, not out of any romantic of sexual motive, just because he's drawn to her liveliness, her attitude toward the world. Eventually she gets tired of this situation and no longer wants to see him. As she leaves, he begs her to tell him how she's so happy. She explains that she now works in a factory making toys for Japanese kids and this gives her life meaning. The main character decides that he can make his life meaningful by creating something durable in the world for other people before he dies.
My point is that we often view workers as oppressed but an Amazon warehouse worker contributes in a very real way to billions of people getting things that they need. I write code for a living and I'm not convinced that I contribute any more to the world than an Amazon warehouse worker. And don't think the workers are unaware of this, some of them take pride in it, whether or not they express it on twitter, and they should.
A lot of this comes down to your attitude toward the world. Are you a pessimist? Do you view human interaction as oppressive, is it mainly comprised of corrupt, powerful people manipulating kind, weak people? Or are you an optimist? Do you find it remarkable that things work as well as they do, do you take pride in your part, no matter how small, in keeping civilization afloat?
Neither of these sentiments is wrong but only one is taken seriously in certain circles.
The (fictional) woman in your story probably wouldn't be so happy if she was constantly being pushed to work faster, take fewer breaks, lest she be automatically fired by some faceless algorithm designed solely to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of her and the other workers. The point isn't that this kind of work is unavoidably miserable, it's that Amazon is doing everything it its power to make it as miserable as possible.
You can't fight astroturfing without resorting to astroturfing yourself. You have to play the game and do counter-narratives to stop this. The law can't keep up with sockpuppetry. It's too rampant to kill. Welcome to The Internet.
> It is unclear whether the accounts are real employees, bots or trolls pretending to be Amazon Ambassadors.
Personally I would wait for more evidence to judge (which seems unlikely to happen). It's not so hard to operate a false flag on platforms like Twitter.
Twitter just masquarades as legitimate communication, but more than half ot is is fake, bots, trolls, 'influencers' and psycos.
How does civilised society survive if 90% of our communication go online to platforms like this?
This cannot continue, there must be real consequences for puposeful mass deception.
I have recently gone through some of my old tweets where I replied (respectfully) to some climate deniers and fairly far right-wing accounts. All those posts are now deleted or the accounts have been closed. Where they all fake bot accounts? Who did I reply to? Did it even matter?
a similar article was up yesterday. I only think it's a problem (edit: the ethics are another story..) if these accounts aren't upfront about being employed by Amazon to do such work. The impression i got from reading yesterdays article is that this is not the case.
> An actual former ambassador and three year Florida warehouse veteran Chris Grantham explained it in more detail to Yahoo Finance’s Krystal Hu, who shared the information with TechCrunch:
>> When I was there they just got an extra paid day off and a gift card after Peak [pre-holiday season]. This is what I got. A paid day off (that expired in 3 weeks lol) and a $50 Amazon gift card. Plus, they gave us lunch. Coldcuts and sandwich bread. I absolutely did not get paid more to train people.
>> Ambassador isn’t a ‘job’ you do every day, its just something you are trained to do. You go to a 4 hour class and they teach you how to teach others to tie a knot using a set of instructions. This is how new hires a supposed to be taught. You are supposed to teach them right from a script using a set protocol. Becoming an ambassador was a way to get out of loading trucks, or packing boxes for 10 to 12 hrs. You may ambassador 1 day then unload trucks for the next 3.
>> I stopped doing it after the first year I was there because it didn’t pay more. It’s voluntary. Your manager picks them. Generally speaking ambassadors are the “kiss asses” of the department.
> In case it isn’t obvious, Chris is no longer at Amazon and is happy to speak his mind. Thanks for helping us clear this up, Chris.