James Gleick

I'm so old I remember when Jeff #Bezos seemed like sort of a good guy who chose books as the focus of his clever new internet store.

Now he will always be remembered as the toady who paid tens of millions in tribute to the Trumps while ruthlessly destroying one of history's great newspapers.

Feb 8 at 8:27pmWeb
Show threadJohn BreenFeb 8
@gleick May he be exiled to an island of hungry, vengeful Amazon women.
Show threadnoplasticshowerFeb 8
@gleick yep. Pathetic weasel.
Show threadJohn SocksFeb 8
@gleick I said just a few days ago that I thought Jeff Bezos represented chaotic neutral. It's sad how regularly these billionaires slide off neutral .. to the wrong side.
Show threadClaire, The Ultimate WorrierFeb 9

@John @gleick they're all cut from the same cloth

if they're not openly supporting trump they're secretly funneling money to him through a super PAC

Show threadTed ReFeb 8
@gleick I only remember Amazon destroying physical book stores, paying employees so little they need food stamps, and working them so hard that they had to pee in a bottle rather than take a toilet break.
Show threadJames GleickFeb 8
@Tedre123 Yes, I remember all that, too. It came later, believe it or not.
Show threadTed ReFeb 9
@gleick I see.
Show threadAndreas KFeb 8

@gleick
Sorry, as an European he never was a good guy.

Amazon was convenient and still is, for buying foreign language books, but convenience does not make it ethical.

And me personal I was always sceptical of concentration benefits. As these bluntly lead to monopoly and that leads to extortion games to the disadvantage of the consumers, that's a given natural law, like apples fall from trees downwards.

Show threadLRFeb 8
@yacc143 @gleick indeed. the way germans learned about bezos was that it was his fault all small book stores had to close.
Show threadAndreas KFeb 8

@lritter @gleick Well, it was more or less inevitable.

The fact that he did ugly things with accounting, like literally making sure for decades to run at zero profits while making sure to grow as fast as possible, is another thing. Strictly speaking, legal, but only possible because he managed to sell it to the investors.

But yes, it killed the competition.

Show threadJames GleickFeb 8
@yacc143 I didn’t say he was. We all know what Amazon did and what it became. What I said was that—unlike you, apparently—I’m old enough to remember when that hadn’t happened yet. And didn’t have to happen.
Show threadChard NelsonFeb 8
@yacc143 @gleick I even remember when they had great customer service! I naively thought that might persist.
Show threadAndreas KFeb 8

@chardlee @gleick Only till the competition was dead.

As a cynic, capitalism was much nicer to the peons until about the time the USSR collapsed.

Show threadLa Dame d'AzurFeb 9

@yacc143 @chardlee @gleick Yeah, that was kinda the whole point: be nice to the proles or we'll Romanov the upper class.

And we fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Show threadDagnabbit, Pascaline! 💥Feb 8

@yacc143 @gleick

That came later though.

Show threadSam Bowne Feb 8
@gleick It's amazingly poor judgment to jump on the Trump train when it's already falling apart. Most people are distancing themselves from him now.
Show threadBill SeitzFeb 8
@gleick not to mention
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-let-its-drivers-urine-be-sold-as-an-energy-drink/
https://www.newsweek.com/jeff-bezos-venice-wedding-was-relatively-cheap-2092162
Amazon Let Its Drivers’ Urine Be Sold as an Energy Drink

Amazon sold bottles of urine marketed as an energy drink, a new documentary alleges. The company is said to make it alarmingly easy to sell dangerous items to children.

WIRED
Show threadColorblind CowboyFeb 8
@gleick I saw him as a guy trying to put bookstores out of business (while not making a profit himself for years). And he’s just gotten more evil from there.
Show threadJohn Q McDonaldFeb 8

@gleick
“Don’t be evil”

really means

“Don’t be evil until you’re obscenely rich.”

Show threadAcin ☆Feb 8

@gleick @jf_718

I'll always remember him for what I first learned about him: (1) for campaigning against the closure of Borders and indie bookstores (destroying my favorite date night, gift-buying, and meeting places, leaving a vacuum for years that hasn't filled in) then (2) for a candid interview in which he described his dream for Amazon was to collect as much info on behavior as possible so he could provide the goods needed by the master class orbiting around a toxic Earth where only the enslaved working class remained.

It's ever since been stuck in my mind that he expects or expected to be alive to witness that dystopian future and that, if his words were quoted accurately, seemed to fill him with hope.

This is what people support with "just buy it on Amazon. It's easy." This is what Amazon's buyers money and browsing data were meant for.

Show threadAcin ☆Feb 8

@gleick @jf_718

I can't imagine him only being a clever entrepreneur who supports books. That's too different from how I learned about the existence of Amazon.

(Hasn't helped that I have experience as an Amazon author and peer to authors who've been jerked around by the company again and again and again....)

Show threadsalguod, man 🍂🍁 lazysupperFeb 8

@gleick
He deserves more credit than that.

He also destroyed independent shops, department stores, the publishing industry, and more!

Show threadMegatronicThronBanksFeb 8

@gleick

Hey I've been sucked in by both the Steve Jobs and Elon Musk reality-distortion fields, and I used to be a pagan!

Hmm, maybe I should be more forgiving to Jonathan Blow for supporting Trump initially ...

Show threadMegatronicThronBanksFeb 8

@gleick

The Bill Gates reality-distortion field is a persistent one, his PR people are very good at what they do.

I keep getting warm fuzzies about him every now and again. He keeps recreating himself, like a rock-star re-styling.

Then a memory or new fact drops, and I remember he's a greedy, ruthless, devious, self-serving thug.

Show threadcognitively accessible mathFeb 9
@megatronicthronbanks @gleick Back in the last century there was a little documentary comparing him to STeve JObs and ... they were both manipulative greedy thiieves but Steve Jobs was a little crazier with wanting to take over the world.
The damage he's done to education is the part I feel directly.
Show threadMegatronicThronBanksFeb 9
@geonz @gleick Oh hang on, was that the docudrama 'Pirates Of Silicon Valley' ? - that was a really good movie.
Show threadcognitively accessible mathFeb 9
@megatronicthronbanks @gleick I don't remember!!! Perhaps!
Show threadDagnabbit, Pascaline! 💥Feb 8

@gleick

Well, James, judging from many comments, no one is old enough to remember the more innocent days.
As my Nice Ex, very geeky, remembers when PayPal seemed such a new, sweet initiative.

Show threadWoozle HypertwinFeb 9
@gleick I started an online retail venture at about the same time as Bezos -- it wasn't hard to see the possibilities. (Unfortunately, I had no money and no investors; writing all the code yourself only goes so far.)
Show threadMother BonesFeb 9
@woozle @gleick Yeah. Bezos had specific networks and parental connections that allowed him investors. (I bet your thing would have turned out better for the world.)
Show thread0px autoFeb 9

@woozle @gleick My incarnation of a ‘social network’ predated that ‘other one’ by a couple of years. My social life took all my time. And I could not afford to spend money on the infrastructure needed to make it grow.

Or maybe it’s that I did not enjoy the constant requests to ‘find out who posted something’. Moderating is a thankless job. So a big thank you to our moderators!

Show threadKhleedrilFeb 9
@gleick I'm so old I remember when Bill Gates... oh, no, he was always a complete and utter c**t, right from the start.
Show threadLa Dame d'AzurFeb 9
@gleick Imagine unironically calling an imperialist rag like WaPo one of history's "greatest" newspapers. 💀
Show threadJames GleickFeb 9
@blueorchestra It was. I gather that you have a short time horizon and don’t know much about, well, anything really.
Show threadLa Dame d'AzurFeb 9

@gleick I know quite a bit about the bourgeois propaganda machine that manufactures consent for regime change in foreign countries to plunder their resources while agitating against the labor movement at home.

Americans need to stop idealizing journalism. It is just as capable of being used for disinformation and manipulation as it is to counter those things. WaPo wasn't an exception, even before Bezos.

Show threadJames GleickFeb 11

@blueorchestra There's good journalism and bad journalism. It's our job as citizens to discern the difference. Admittedly that takes work. In my lifetime, persistent and honest journalists at the Washington Post brought down a corrupt presidency. Without them, the crimes of Richard Nixon and his co-conspirators would never have been exposed.

That's just one example. The Post was a great newspaper and made the world a better place. Now it has been perverted and destroyed by an oligarch.

Show threadLa Dame d'AzurFeb 11

@gleick And why should anyone care that the crimes of Nixon were exposed? There were no consequences. Even the "opposition" party looked the other way. Nixon's legacy would be continued by the GOP after he stepped down. Nothing changed.

Why should I put the Watergate Scandal above the countless lies WaPo has spread to justify U.S. aggression abroad like the rest of legacy media? We're talking about entire countries full of innocent millions being terrorized, murdered, and robbed.

Show threadLa Dame d'AzurFeb 11

@gleick I care much more about that than some election fraud or similar corruption.

WaPo is a pro-war rag and always has been. Ghouls and monsters; complicit with genocide and fascism for as long as it has existed.

They will never have my sympathy, period.

Show threadMother BonesFeb 9

@blueorchestra @gleick

I mean, it was?

You could make the argument that ALL legacy news media was and is imperialist, but not the WaPo more specifically and individually.

"1973 Pulitzer Prizes:
Journalism - Public Service
The Washington Post
For its investigation of the Watergate case
Woodward and Bernstein"

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington-post

{{(global.pageOgTitle) ? global.pageOgTitle : global.pageTitle}}

{{(global.pageDescription) ? global.pageDescription : global.pageDefaultDescription}}

Show threadpunIssuerFeb 9
@gleick yeah, who knew that was just the Enshittification playbook all along...
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadᛋᛁᚵᛁᛋᛘᚢᚾᛑ ᚾᛁᚾᛃᛅFeb 9
@gleick is Bill Gates the only one of the tech billionares who seemingly aged quite well?
Show threadOpen RiskFeb 9

@gleick he started his career in a hedge fund. This already primed to see humanity via the distorted lens of financial data and having an "edge". Surveillance capitalism did not happen by accident, it is the programme of frontrunning and exploiting society by monitoring all its activities the way financiers could only do within the confine of financial markets.

Bezos, the Googlers, Zuckerberg etc. are evil in the deepest sense: they conceived and scaled a modern era dehumanization for profit.

Show threadSofaFernsehFanFeb 9

@gleick

Not only destroying the post but also shoving the money saved there up Trumps bum by having the "Melania" movie done.

Show threadRiley S. FaelanFeb 9
@gleick Maybe he has changed over time for the worse. Exposure to sillitrons radiation can't be good for one's mental health.