When Juan Espinoza, a picker at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse, opined that ‘Mr Bezos couldn’t do a full shift at that place as an undercover boss,’ anyone familiar with Fritz Lang’s even earlier film Metropolis (1927) would have been reminded of the scene in which Freder, the autocrat’s son, inadvertently descends into his father’s Machine Halls, where workers are engaged in a desperate struggle to keep the massive hands of huge clock-like machines aligned. Shocked at what he finds, Freder holds his head in horror at the sight of machines marching the workers at an inhuman tempo,
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