Amazon's Platformization of Risk and Responsibility

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Amazon has these business agreements with its third party sellers in which they basically renounced to any kind of rights over anything. I could tell a million stories about Amazon suspending businesses or suspending products and people losing millions of dollars literally over that. That sort of how this logic of platformization works it's like how do you take the risk and work and shift it onto third parties to whom you own nothing right? It also illustrates the extent to which these two digital capitalisms or these two platform economies are deeply deeply entangled so Amazon not only does this platformization thing but does it at a global scale and in ways that entangle the US and China in particular.

Paris Marx is joined by Moira Weigel to discuss the third-party sellers who supply many of the goods sold through Amazon, how the company’s policy decisions reshape small businesses to act like mini-Amazons, and what that means for regulatory responses.

Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School, and a founding editor of Logic Magazine. Her most recent book is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk about What They Do--And How They Do It, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff. Follow Moira on Twitter at @moiragweigel.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

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