Amazon and me ------------- As mentioned in the introductory post[1], I want to examine my relationship with Amazon. They stand out as kind of an exceptional case for me amongst Sterling's "Big Five". I don't think I've ever given Apple a single cent, nothing they do interests me in the least. I'm not sure how people feel comfortable buying things from them when every design decision they make underscores how they view their customers as nothing more than gullible piles of cash to be harvested. Laptops covered in exotic ports so you have to buy a fistfull of white plastic dongles to connect to even the most overpoweringly bog-basic universal standard connectors; phones with non-removable batteries; hell, phones now without 3.5mm headphone jacks so you have to buy Bluetooth phones. Blech. And, to be honest, I'm not sure why Microsoft were included in the list. Perhaps Sterling was feeling generous, perhaps I'm missing something (I know Windows phones *exist*, but I've never seen an actual human owner and user of one), but MS seem to me to be on the verge of irrelevance. There are plenty of people who give *no* thought to technology ethics who doesn't use MS products anymore. And Facebook and Google are the obvious problematic giants. I know I don't like them and I know why and I have been actively taking steps for a long time to involve them in less and less of my online life. But Amazon? I don't really put them in the same mental basket as the others, and far from trying to cut them out of my life, heck, I actually kind of *like* them (more on this later). While preparing this post it occurred to me that I kind of misconstrued the Big Five list. It's not intended as a list of evil internet companies that people who want to "keep their hands clean" should avoid. But because 4 of the 5 companies on it are companies I think of as *exactly* that, the whole purpose of the list kind of twisted in my mind. The Big Five are companies who have used internet technology to obtain very powerful monopolies by providing some kind of "infrastructure as a service", and since Sterling sees the IoT as primarily an attempt by other big companies to try to achieve this same kind of dominance "in the real world", they are kind of intended as case studies. And just like Google and Facebook aren't on the list because of their public facing fronts (search, social media) but instead because of their actual business (surveillence), Amazon aren't on there because of the kinds of thing that *I* think of them as providing (again, more on this later), but rather because of some gargantuan behind-the-scenes thing, which in this case is logistics. And I freely admit that I know nothing and, to be honest, don't care an awful lot about logistics. And I really had no idea that Amazon was a big player in that field. When I lived in the US and thus used Amazon regularly (I had a Prime account, which entitled me to free two-day shipping on anything and everything), I recall the vast majority of my packages coming via very traditional means like UPS or something like that. However, with some quick web seraches it is pretty apparent that Amazon is, in fact, successfully "disrupting" logistics (see https://logistics.amazon.com/). Actually, perhaps this should have been obvious, I *did* hear all the stuff about Amazon drone deliveries a little while back. And since this is arguably the most "real world" activity that the Big Five engage in, this is probably an *especially* important case study for IoT purposes. But it's well outside the realm of my expertese or, really, the scope of this phlog. So, the rest of this post is going to be a bunch of stuff I wrote *before* I properly grasped all of this and was thinking naively about my interactions with the public face of Amazon. Which is not worthless, afterall, I would like to optimise *all* my interactions with big companies for ethicality, not just my computing-related ones. I have no idea how interesting what follows is to anybody else, but since I made a post promising to talk about this I feel obliged to upload *something*. I said earlier that whereas I actively dislike and happily try to avoid the rest of the Big Five, I actually kind of like Amazon, and it's true. It pains me a bit to say that, since I'm so interested in a minimal, simplistic, sustainable, frugal lifestyle. How can I like a massive online store that sells huge piles of crap nobody really needs? Well, it's not because I like shopping for the sake of shopping. It's because I have lots of unusual hobbies and interests, many of which I enjoy at least in part *because* they are opposed to materialistic consumption, in that they involve repairing or restoring and using old things that many would consider obsolete and throw out. And because of these interests, I often need to buy really quite obscure odds and ends; unusual cables or adaptors, special lubricants or cleaning agents, oddly sized batteries, weird tools. And the simple true is, that Amazon has *all* this shit, no matter what, and it all comes with a huge number of reviews, so you can research your choice carefully. Amazon makes what little shopping I *do* engage in as painless and efficient as possible. Let me assure you that having niche hobbies without access to Amazon *sucks*. An era ended recently when early this year (or maybe very late laste?), amazon.com.au appeared. Yes, we finally got Amazon, maybe two years after we finally got Netflix. Before this, there was effectively no Amazon in Australia or New Zealand. You *could* order from the American or UK Amazons, but they were very selective about what they would ship, and shipping was invariably very expensive and took weeks, making the whole thing so unappealing that almost nobody bothers. And because of this, when you need something unusual you have to waste hours of your life searching through a long series of small speciality stores to find the things you need. The range is a tiny fraction of what you would find at Amazon, the prices are higher because small speciality stores need higher profit margins to survive, and there are very few or often no reviews of anything so you never know if you're about to waste time and money on crap. It's frustrating and it's *limiting*. Ironically, I have found that having access to a mega-store like Amazon actually facilitates weird and wonderful mind-expanding hobbies as an alternative to mindless consumerism. That said, I am aware that there is plenty of controversy around Amazon, relating to tax issues, treatment of their warehouse workers, etc. I won't pretend that I'm okay with this, I suppose I just put it in a different mental basket, as a case of "big greedy companies being big greedy companies". It's nothing new and it's nothing specific to the internet. I probably *should* make more of an effort to disengage myself from this kind of thing, but let's be frank, if I'm going to avoid doing business with companies that treat their workers poorly and who try to avoid paying as much tax as they're supposed to, I would probably have bigger and more pressing concerns than Amazon. Besides, I am not using them as much these days as I used to. There is no amazon.fi, but I can and have used amazon.de and amazon.co.uk a few times since moving here. It's more convenient than it is from AU/NZ, but not as convenient as it was in the US. I don't have a Prime account, and now that my hobby bench is more or less fully kitted out, I think future purchases will be relatively rate. All of the above applies to Amazon in their capacity as an online store, which is my default mental model of them, but there is more to consider. There is Amazon as the provider and ruler of the Kindle ecosystem. As mentioned, I own and use a Kindle. I will admit to being conflicted about this. I bought the thing because I move overseas quite often for work reasons, and this lifestyle is totally incompatible with accumulating physical books, which is something that I used to do a lot of. I guess that's a bit of a cop out, in that I could have compensated by buying cheap used books and reselling them after reading, or relying more heavily on libraries (although now that I'm in a non-English speaking country the range of English books at the library is diminished, although still better than you might expect). And I know that Amazon no doubt mine the data about the books I read - I convinced myself that this was not a big problem because prior to buying the Kindle I had bought a heavy percentage of my *physical* books from them anyway, so they weren't learning anything new. And yeah, the books are DRMed, and that's nasty. Despite the fact that I kind of feel bad about owning the thing, at the end of the day, I *do* own it now, and the thing cannot be unmade, so I feel an intense personal responsibility to ensure that it is used for as long as possible and then properly disposed of, to reap maximum benefit from the extensive environmental damage already done to manufacture it and to make sure that as little further damage is done as possibl.e And the best way to achieve this is maintain to-the-grave control of it myself. Of course, I could probably jailbreak or root (or whatever the Kindle-appropriate term is) the thing and use it to do non-DRMey things with FOSS software. But I do find using it for it's intended purpose so convenient that I worry about doing anything that might endanger that use (and I don't imagine that Amazon would have any qualms whatsoever about making sure that devices not running the stock firmware cannot access the Amazon store). So, yeah, I guess no way around it, I'm sacrificing some principles for convenience here. I *do* think the damage done by participating in this kind of ecosystem is far less than that done by participating in those of Facebook and Google, for what little it's worth. There is also Amazon as a provider of cloud services, in the guise of AWS, and I'm a user of this too. Specifically, I use their "Route 53" DNS service. When I first began hosting my own stuff online, I got free DNS hosting from an old friend's internet business. This was back in the days when I used a physical server in my own home and was hosting from behind an ordinary old DSL connection. Once I moved to using VPSes, I suddenly had IPv6 addresses that I wanted to use. For whatever reason, my friend was not set up to handle AAAA records, so I went to Amazon have used them ever since. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I have no idea at all what is involved in providing my own nameservers, but maybe I should look into it. As I've added more and more domains from various hobby projects (including, of course, circumlunar.space), I have noticed my monthly AWS bills getting larger and larger. They are still trivial, about US$2 a month, but then, that's US$24 a year, which is more than what the actual circumlunar.space VPS costs me, so probably I could actually save some money by doing my own namehosting. I couldn't hope to match the uptime or geographic distributedness of Amazon, to be fair, but then it's not clear that I really need to. Maybe this is the most fruitful place for me to try to disengage from Amazon, in that I might simultaneously save money, learn some new networking stuff, and increase my online self-reliance. If anybody has any experience with running their own nameservers, feel free to drop me a line. [1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/the-epic-struggle-of-the-iot.txt