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June 25 - June 27, 2024
precarity
For the first time in our relationship, the feeling of my work life is already fundamentally unknowable to John.
I’m a fan of customers easily finding and buying whatever makes them happy—isn’t that enough?
And Arjun’s right: everyone here is operating on partial information. No one really knows what the fuck is going on.
But it does mean that from the very beginning I’m attuned to the fact that a lot of people see my employer as, you know, pure evil.
As vendors paid up to have potentially millions of eyeballs on their products, the merchandisers’ curatorial skills became less relevant, and their writing skills were redirected away from thoughtful, persuasive reviews on books, music, movies, and video games they love and toward neutral descriptive copy about products they likely hadn’t read/listened to/watched/played. Gradually, the skills they’d been hired for came to be viewed as quaint, and their taste considered a potential liability, as though a devotee of freak folk or opera couldn’t write competently about Maroon 5, too.
Second, Amazon discovered that letting an algorithm make recommendations for customers resulted in many, many more sales than an editorial recommendation. Which makes sense: an editor’s pick is aimed at what you “should” like, while an algorithmic recommendation is based on what you’ve actually bought.6 Plus, if Amazon shows a Regency romance novel to millions of customers, maybe a handful of them will click or buy it. But if it shows the same book to just a few thousand people who’ve bought multiple other Regency romances, maybe half of them will click or buy, making the latter strategy a
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Still, there’s an unmissable undercurrent of passive resignation. Many of them bring their laptops to meetings and work right through them, with no pretense of paying attention.
But already I understand that at Amazon normal human limits are an embarrassing affliction like IBS or erectile dysfunction, not to be discussed in public.
“It’s just interesting,” I say. “Because I took the job with the mandate to solve editorial problems, and then I got here and realized they were actually operational problems. And now I’m starting to think, no, they’re cultural problems.”
Is it a man thing, to keep doing what you’re best at even when no one wants it anymore?
Welcome to Amazon, kids, where the provisionality of your existence is right out in the open.
Everyone already knows the merchandisers can stay miserable and inefficient and Amazon will survive.
Vibrams
orthogonal
taking it all the way to eleven.”
He insists he doesn’t mind, but I worry a little more each month that my job is forcing him into a housewife role that no human should have to play.
listicles
plogs,
Viognier.
“Kristi, please try hard not to be an idiot,” Arjun says. “You know how to manage people, yes? You know how to write a solid document and think critically. You understand how Amazon uses data. You can persuade people on other teams to do things. This is 90 percent of most jobs at Amazon. The other 10 percent is just shit to learn, which you can also do.”
William Bruce Cameron quote in her email signature: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
“Being tough isn’t the same thing as being mean, you know. I think you need to internalize that.”
polyvagal
Maybe expecting myself to work here and look presentable and light my own home is just too much, and it takes professional sister-wives to make the center hold.
deliquesce.
Dave Eggers’s The Circle
Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In
fungible.
“I just want to reiterate that the vlookup thing threw me,” he says. “That’s basic, basic stuff.” It’s tempting to confess that I also don’t know how to do a vlookup, but this probably isn’t the moment.
diurnal
Amazon didn’t create our yearning for recognition, but it exploits it for maximum return by holding the rat pellet just out of reach and then frowning on any rat who looks hungry.
No one has ever sat me down and said, “Hey, your job is probably going away and that’s literally all the information I have for you, and we’re not going to involve you in the planning process, and by the way this is a secret.” Even at Amazon, that’s just not how you treat people.
This is the narrative I sell myself, and I buy it the way I’d buy a hyped new anti-aging serum: not quite believing, but grasping at anything that might stave off collapse.
sanguine
Quiet by Susan Cain.
This is the moment it finally truly lands that I will never outrun my gender. Of course on some level I’ve known that for years, but never so starkly. I will never overcome the belief that the presence of women means a slower, softer, weaker Amazon.
aphoristic
I scribble it in my Moleskine like a koan to contemplate later.
“Social cohesion.”
She’s wrapped in plastic.
Manchester by the Sea,
The Store Knows. It instantly takes on capital letters in my mind. Like Newspeak, or Big Brother.
INSIDE AMAZON: WRESTLING BIG IDEAS IN A BRUISING WORKPLACE.
It may be the freedom of the truly fucked, but I suggest you take it.
