CULTURE In Bezosworld Amazon achieved its world-historical dominance thanks to failed policy and government largesse. BY ALEXANDER SAMMON B
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eff Bezos is unique among his cohort of robber barons. Unlike Bill Gates, he is not really given to global-health, humanitarian, or philanthropic endeavors. He was one of the only American billionaires to resist signing the Giving Pledge, a soft commitment to give away half of one’s wealth that none of its signatories have gotten anywhere near to observing thus far. Mark Zuckerberg endowed a major American hospital; Andrew Carnegie founded a prestigious American college. No one is checking in at Bezos General or enrolling at Bezos U. His ex-wife has been aggressively generous with the family fortune post-separation; Bezos himself has not. After Henry Ford handed off the presidency of Ford Motor Company, he began work on Fordlandia, his idealized society carved out of the Amazon rain forest, drawing on his development of Dearborn, Michigan. Bezos, at a similar age and endowment and recently “retired” from Amazon, has made no such commitment. He has extraterrestrial interests, but seemingly only by process of elimination. “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it,” he said in 2018. What motivates
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Bezos? A Wall Streeter by trade, he moved into a house with a garage so he could claim to have started Amazon in a garage. He
chose Seattle, because Washington was small, and no sales out of state would be subject to sales tax. He sold books, not because he cared about literature, but because there were a lot of them. His mission was not to deliver Eden, but to create an empire. “Right a social wrong? Are you fucking kidding me? Jeff Bezos is a straight-up libertarian,” was how early Amazon
investor Nick Hanauer put it. Amazon is the world’s fourthmost-valuable company, which drastically understates the enormity of its operation. In 2005, when the company introduced Amazon Prime and free twoday shipping, it had just three American warehouses. Now, it is responsible for 50 percent of all e-commerce. Amazon has overhauled retail, cloud computing, groceries, logistics, entertainment, newspapers, pharmaceuticals, and even doorbells. It’s the second-largest private employer in the United States, and that doesn’t count its extreme reliance on subcontractors. According to one estimate, as many as 82 percent of U.S. households have Amazon Prime, and more people use it than voted for either major-party candidate in the most recent presidential election. Which is to say: Jeff didn’t need a patch of tropical rain forest to enact his vision for society. Bezosworld is a place on Earth, and we’re living in it. Alec MacGillis takes full stock of what exactly that world looks like in his new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Calling on a sweeping array of personal vignettes and tracing out lengthy historical through lines, MacGillis chronicles life across Amazonia through the eyes of drivers, pickers, sorters, corrugated-cardboard manufacturers, politicians, lobbyists, activists, artists, and more. Fulfillment also tells the story of how Bezos built Bezosworld. To understand Amazon is to understand trade policy, deindustrial-
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