Moira Weigel listens closely to entrepreneurs working within Amazon’s empire

Moira Weigel is a scholar and founding editor of Logic magazine. Originally trained in modern languages, including German and Mandarin Chinese, she now studies digital media in a global context. You might have heard of her first book, Labor of Love: the Invention of Dating, from 2016, which is about how modern dating co-evolved with consumer capitalism and other forms of gendered work. Her second book, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff, is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It. It is based in interviews that Weigel and Tarnoff conducted with workers at every level of the Bay Area tech industry, from startup founders to cafeteria workers. Her current research focuses on transnational e-commerce entrepreneurs, and that’s really our main focus here, since Moira recently published an incredible overview of Amazon’s reach and global strength: a lengthy report that she titled “Amazon’s Trickle-Down Monopoly.” (https://datasociety.net/library/amazons-trickle-down-monopoly/) What’s interesting is that she acknowledges the fact that we might not be particularly keen to sit and theorize the impact of the restructuring of the retail business in the 21st century, but it’s actually really important. What, we might ask, does “Amazon’s lack of accountability to the sellers that use it” indicate, in terms of the nature of platform capitalism? Weigel points out that “businesses [like Amazon] are really governed algorithmically in a way that undermines their [sellers’] entrepreneurial autonomy.” And yet, the way that Amazon often justifies its existence is by saying that it is a staunch “ally of small business.” Weigel unpacks this paradox by looking at what her interviewees said about negotiating the Amazon marketplace. The lack of accountability that Amazon enjoys, despite employing hundreds of thousands of people, expresses itself through, in part, these seemingly arbitrary decisions that the company makes—so, things like banning accounts, restricting certain sellers or constraining the flow of certain products. Those decisions are often experienced by sellers as “mistakes,” according to Weigel’s research. But in her analysis they could be part of what she describes as a sort of “regulatory risk shift,” a means of both policing an increasingly complicated marketplace and navigating a complex regulatory environment. Making things circuitous benefits Amazon by keeping things opaque. And understanding the make-up of the company’s power is similarly muddy. It was difficult for Moira to even do this research because of how hard it was to actually locate people to interview. That difficulty itself, she says, revealed something about the way that Amazon’s monopoly is maintained. As she puts it, “recruiting failures [were] an important finding.” Nonetheless, the report she’s put together came about as the result of building trust with sellers and realizing that people, if given the chance, wanted to talk about their experiences in the world of Amazon. And they had specific words for describing that world: they talked about the “old times,” the “wild west,” and “the jungle.” These terms were ways for people working within the system to understand that system.