An obvious falsehood resides at the heart of Bezos’s account. He may have no wish to play the role of gatekeeper, but that’s exactly what he is. Yes, the old mode of gatekeeping excluded books from shelves and articles from magazines. Amazon, by contrast, sells nearly every cultural artifact produced by Western civilization. But let’s not confuse Amazon with a utopian experiment in participatory democracy. Amazon always gives better treatment to some artifacts than others—promoting them in email, on its home page, and through its recommendation algorithms. This is tremendous cultural power,
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