James GleickFeb 8

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.

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 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 K

@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.

Feb 8 at 11:37pmElk (canary)
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.