Amazon Workers' Sci-Fi Writing Is Imagining a World After Amazon (jacobin.com) 39
"The Worker as Futurist project assists rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short speculative fiction," explains its web site. "In a world where massive corporations not only exploit people but monopolize the power of future-making, how can workers and other people fight and write back?"
I couldn't find any short stories displayed on their site, but there are plans to publish a book next year collecting the workers' writing about "the world after Amazon" in print, online and in audiobook format. And there's also a podcast about "the world Amazon is building and the workers and writers struggling for different futures."
From their web site: A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 workers gather online to discuss how SF shed light on their working conditions and futures. In 2023, 13 workers started to meet regularly to build their writing skills and learn about the future Amazon is compelling its workers to create... The Worker as Futurist project aims, in a small way, to place the power of the imagination back in the hands of workers. This effort is in solidarity with trade union mobilizations and workers self-organization at Amazon. It is also in solidarity with efforts by civil society to reign in Amazon's power.
Four people involved with the project shared more details in the socialist magazine Jacobin : At stake is a kind of corporate storytelling, which goes beyond crass propaganda but works to harness the imagination. Like so many corporations, Amazon presents itself as surfing the wave of the future, responding to the relentless and positive force of the capitalist market with innovation and optimism. Such stories neatly exonerate the company and its beneficiaries from the consequences of their choices for workers and their world...
WWS doesn't focus on science fiction. But it does show the radical power of the imagination that comes when workers don't just read inspiring words, but come together to write and thereby take the power of world-building and future-making back into their hands. This isn't finding individual commercial or literary success, but dignity, imagination, and common struggle... Our "Worker as Futurist" project returns the power of the speculative to workers, in the name of discovering something new about capitalism and the struggle for something different. We have tasked these workers with writing their own futures, in the face of imaginaries cultivated by Amazon that see the techno-overlords bestride the world and the stars.
Thanks to funding from Canada's arms-length, government-funded Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, our team of scholars, teachers, writers, and activists has been able to pay Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers, copy editors, MTurk workers, and more) to participate in a series of skill-building writing workshops and information sessions. In each of these online forums, we were joined by experts on speculative fiction, on Amazon, and on workers' struggles. At the end of this series of sessions, the participants were supported to draft the stories they wanted to tell about "The World After Amazon...."
We must envision the futures we want in order to mobilize and fight for them together, rather than cede that future to those who would turn the stars into their own private sandbox. It is in the process of writing and sharing writing we can come to an awareness of something our working bodies know but that we cannot otherwise articulate or express. The rank-and-file worker — the target of daily exploitation, forced to build their boss's utopia — may have encrypted within them the key to destroying his world and building a new one.
I couldn't find any short stories displayed on their site, but there are plans to publish a book next year collecting the workers' writing about "the world after Amazon" in print, online and in audiobook format. And there's also a podcast about "the world Amazon is building and the workers and writers struggling for different futures."
From their web site: A 2022 pilot project saw over 25 workers gather online to discuss how SF shed light on their working conditions and futures. In 2023, 13 workers started to meet regularly to build their writing skills and learn about the future Amazon is compelling its workers to create... The Worker as Futurist project aims, in a small way, to place the power of the imagination back in the hands of workers. This effort is in solidarity with trade union mobilizations and workers self-organization at Amazon. It is also in solidarity with efforts by civil society to reign in Amazon's power.
Four people involved with the project shared more details in the socialist magazine Jacobin : At stake is a kind of corporate storytelling, which goes beyond crass propaganda but works to harness the imagination. Like so many corporations, Amazon presents itself as surfing the wave of the future, responding to the relentless and positive force of the capitalist market with innovation and optimism. Such stories neatly exonerate the company and its beneficiaries from the consequences of their choices for workers and their world...
WWS doesn't focus on science fiction. But it does show the radical power of the imagination that comes when workers don't just read inspiring words, but come together to write and thereby take the power of world-building and future-making back into their hands. This isn't finding individual commercial or literary success, but dignity, imagination, and common struggle... Our "Worker as Futurist" project returns the power of the speculative to workers, in the name of discovering something new about capitalism and the struggle for something different. We have tasked these workers with writing their own futures, in the face of imaginaries cultivated by Amazon that see the techno-overlords bestride the world and the stars.
Thanks to funding from Canada's arms-length, government-funded Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, our team of scholars, teachers, writers, and activists has been able to pay Amazon workers (warehouse workers, drivers, copy editors, MTurk workers, and more) to participate in a series of skill-building writing workshops and information sessions. In each of these online forums, we were joined by experts on speculative fiction, on Amazon, and on workers' struggles. At the end of this series of sessions, the participants were supported to draft the stories they wanted to tell about "The World After Amazon...."
We must envision the futures we want in order to mobilize and fight for them together, rather than cede that future to those who would turn the stars into their own private sandbox. It is in the process of writing and sharing writing we can come to an awareness of something our working bodies know but that we cannot otherwise articulate or express. The rank-and-file worker — the target of daily exploitation, forced to build their boss's utopia — may have encrypted within them the key to destroying his world and building a new one.
So... (Score:3)
...a world where we can't suffer any more ads about "Rings of Power"...
I can't imagine it!
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So I can deduce that my anti-advert systems are reasonably effective.
To be honest, I was wondering what Amazon had done with the hole in Tolkien's universe. Not necessarily expecting anything good, but curious. Obviously, I'd wait until the product had made it to the second-hand shops on disc, because you don't want to give them any sort of information about yourself.
Fight back? (Score:3)
I know this may come as a shock to some, but no one is forcing you to buy the $4 box of cereal or or the $4 bag of 7 ounce chips. No one is forcing you to buy the latest piece of plastic from China. No one is forcing you [businessinsider.com] to buy from Amazon [aol.com].
If you want to fight back against corporations, stop buying things. Put fear into the hearts of CEOs by making them realize you are the one in control. Their existence depends on you, not the other way round.
That's how you fight the future envisioned in this story.
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Socialists insist that life isn't possible without the goods corporations provide, thus a revolution is needed to take it by force. Or something like that. But all these businesses really do is provide convenience and nothing more. There are people who can and do live off of the land, though it's generally not possible to do this in a city unless you live like a racoon or something. And doing so means most of your time and attention is dedicated to foraging, but socialists believe they have an inalienable r
Re:Fight back? (Score:4)
Socialists insist that life isn't possible without the goods corporations provide
That's an odd definition of socialism considering all the taxpayer money handed over to corporations every year.
but socialists believe they have an inalienable right to survive without having to do anything at all,
Still talking about corporations, aren't you? After all, when anything bad happens it's not up to the company to figure a way out, it's up to the taxpayers.
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That's an odd definition of socialism considering all the taxpayer money handed over to corporations every year.
That's not what bothers them. What bothers them is that somebody other than them owns it.
Still talking about corporations, aren't you? After all, when anything bad happens it's not up to the company to figure a way out, it's up to the taxpayers.
You mean like GM, Ford, and Chrysler? I was then, just as now, arguing that they should be allowed to fail. Democrats were having none of that, (socialists mostly went along with it as well...weird right?) which arguably has its roots in this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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There is a (far too true) joke that Siemens is Germany's last VEB ("volkseigener Betrieb", what the "corporations" were called in the former GDR, because they were state-owned).
Siemens still gets more subsidies and state funding than it pays taxes.
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There are people who can and do live off of the land, though it's generally not possible to do this in a city unless you live like a racoon or something.
Even the Amish haven't figured out how to be completely self-sufficient and we're talking about a large community of people there. They shop at Walmart and go into town to visit the doctor, just like the city folks.
You'd have to be willing to accept a "tribe in the woods" standard of living if you really wanted to completely avoid society, and even then you'd still have to initially have enough money to purchase the land you intend to go feral on.
Re:Fight back? (Score:5, Insightful)
The best times were when there was a connection between the work someone did and the pay he received for it. Right now, there is a huge disconnect between them. There is a very tiny sliver of the population that gets an enormous amount of money for essentially doing nothing (quite seriously, how many board positions can you fill in the time you "work") while an increasing number of people work two jobs just to somehow make ends meet.
Looking back into the 1960s, we had single-earners being able to afford a house, a car, two kids and a homemaker spouse on a single income. And we're not talking about a top level engineer, we're talking blue collar work.
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The best times were when there was a connection between the work someone did and the pay he received for it. Right now, there is a huge disconnect between them. There is a very tiny sliver of the population that gets an enormous amount of money for essentially doing nothing (quite seriously, how many board positions can you fill in the time you "work") while an increasing number of people work two jobs just to somehow make ends meet.
Looking back into the 1960s, we had single-earners being able to afford a house, a car, two kids and a homemaker spouse on a single income. And we're not talking about a top level engineer, we're talking blue collar work.
Ah yes, the good old days.
One of the things with those good old days is that when modern Womanism cane along, the suits in charge managed to turn it to their advantage. Sounds like BS? Of course it does. But!
Convincing millions of women that the path to happiness is to be independent of men, to not need a man, was a career instead of a being a housewife was a womanist mantra, and while women were being convinced that men in the workforce had it easy, supposing that men spent all day around the water c
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Don't think that's a unique feature of capitalism. One of the big, shiny examples of how progressive communism is was that women were now "valuable workers" in the kolkhoz. Women could drive tractors, work machinery and build houses just like any man!
Weird that none of them every ascended to any leadership positions, though...
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Don't think that's a unique feature of capitalism. One of the big, shiny examples of how progressive communism is was that women were now "valuable workers" in the kolkhoz. Women could drive tractors, work machinery and build houses just like any man!
Weird that none of them every ascended to any leadership positions, though...
One of the things that shocked old Adolph was how Russia used women as cannon fodder.
The working woman concept is somewhat related between communist and modern far left ideologies. Our group just exploited it differently.
What is interesting to me is the WW2 "Rosie the Riveter" business. Women did great work in factories producing war materiel. But after the war, they happily went back to being housewives.
I'm wondering if a bit of the same is happening now, just in reverse. There are a lot of women th
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I know this may come as a shock to some, but no one is forcing you to buy the $4 box of cereal or or the $4 bag of 7 ounce chips. No one is forcing you to buy the latest piece of plastic from China. No one is forcing you [businessinsider.com] to buy from Amazon [aol.com].
If you want to fight back against corporations, stop buying things. Put fear into the hearts of CEOs by making them realize you are the one in control. Their existence depends on you, not the other way round.
That's how you fight the future envisioned in this story.
Amazon chanced upon an interesting model. They can get me something delivered to my door with free shipping, and it will not only cost less, but I won't have to travel to the box store to be told they don't have it.
And I don't need to be told how I'm not supporting the local business. Those places abandoned me long before that. Starting from way back in the day, when companies like Radio Shack decided that the future was selling Cell phones, to the detriment of their parts and electronics. From the time
The snowball of capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
One problem with capitalism is that an ever-smaller group of people tend to wind up with most of the capital. And enormous amounts of capital is commensurately powerful. You can smother your competitors, drive them out of business or buy them up. Given time and patience you can eventually run the entire society from behind the scenes, an oligarchy. Some people say we are there now.
I commend these folks who are endeavoring to write some stories about a post-Amazon world, it's nice to think about. I don't see how it could occur at this point without government intervention. Maybe its not too late.
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And enormous amounts of capital is commensurately powerful.
Even small amounts of capital is quite powerful.
There is an issue in my city that a lot of 'public engagement' done by the local government is done during the week, during officer hours. That means that anyone who works in a normal job needs to take a day off work to be able to turn up to those meetings to express their view.
For someone who has money to spare, that's not an onerous task. For everyone else, giving up a days earnings to 'possible' influence what the government does is a huge cost.
One result o
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And enormous amounts of capital is commensurately powerful.
Even small amounts of capital is quite powerful.
There is an issue in my city that a lot of 'public engagement' done by the local government is done during the week, during officer hours. That means that anyone who works in a normal job needs to take a day off work to be able to turn up to those meetings to express their view.
For someone who has money to spare, that's not an onerous task. For everyone else, giving up a days earnings to 'possible' influence what the government does is a huge cost.
One result of this is that retirees are much more influential than they would be otherwise, as they can attend many more meetings than working age people can.
Do you really have to take an entire day off in order to counteract the enemy - retired people?
What is your definition of a normal job? Hell, the people at our local McDonald's can get flexible time off.
Re: The snowball of capitalism (Score:2)
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If everyone was as selfless as the average person than we could have balance, but too many people want their success to be out of an inbalance that they create.
The average person is no where near as selfless as you might want to think. That's because they are human beings.
And the problem with things like communism is that it completely ignores human nature. Of course, the most aggressive will take over a system like that. Now Capitalism - well, all by itself, any pure 'ism except pragmatism will fail, and Pragmatism is never pure anyhow.
But modified Capitalism at least gives a nod to human nature. Where it can have issues is when it is practiced with no mora
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Trump may get elected again after "losing" top secret papers, being found guilty of millions worth of insurance and mortgage fraud and twenty or more felony charges against him. It just makes him more popular. Not only have you not fixed anything, there is probably never going to be any fixing it. You don't believe in your laws, you don't believe in allowing the forces of democracy to work and to anyone outside of America it sure looks like you are trying to destroy it.
Me - Are you in America? You post like you are being paid in Yuan. Seriously doood. You appear to believe that all Americans are MAGA, and lockstep want to destroy America. No, Your favorite Boogeyman is being taken care of, It just takes some time.
Your prejudiced bigotry would make a Ku Klux Klansman blush and tell you to pump the brakes a bit.
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The average person is no where near as selfless as you might want to think. That's because they are human beings..
Whatever makes you feel like a good person dude.
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The average person is no where near as selfless as you might want to think. That's because they are human beings..
Whatever makes you feel like a good person dude.
What I feel or do not feel like is irrelevant to my comments.
All ideologies will fail quickly if people attempt to apply them in anywhere near pure form. They warp. Russia's communism, ended up being a horrifying experience. Perhaps if Josef Stalin never became Chairman or General Secretaryt, it would have become a workers utopia.
Probably not, as the situation that allowed a villain the equal of Old Uncle Adolf would have just been filled by another.
Wonder if the new boss would have held the Holodo
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an ever-smaller group of people tend to wind up with most of the capital.
Sounds like a description of the old Soviet Union.
Oh the irony (Score:2)
on Amazon!
Read Marshall Brain's "Manna" (Score:2)
If you haven't read it, Marshall Brain's Manna [marshallbrain.com] is essential reading. The prophetic aspects of his dystopian view seem truer every day.
Slashdotters with good memories may remember Marshall Brain as the entrepreneur behind the "How Stuff Works" web site, which he sold for a fortune during the dot-com boom.
shrug (Score:3)
Unsurprised that this is published in the Jacobin.
As I was reading their plaintive screed, I literally thought that these are nothing more than garden-variety Jacobites.
As such, they can rot.
Their workers paradises have caused more death and destruction in the 20th century than the Nazis ever dreamt possible.
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Without defending things or ideologies I don't believe in, it's really uncontroversial that Russia, China, and company have always been, and currently still are, workers HELLS, not paradises (eg. China has none of the protections for workers that are typical of western, more capitalistic, countries).
So, sorry but no, your last sentence is false and a flamebait.
Won't THEY be Surprised (Score:1)
Just wait until they discover what Amazon does to books.
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A one line story (Score:2)
"...and there was much rejoicing"
The summary is the book (Score:1)
Seriously, The summary is itself an article At 602 words, it’s its own novella.
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Please leave /., and go back to Faux Noise and Newsmaxxx
NDAs (Score:2)
Because that's what companies confident of the public's opinion of their business practices do ...