"My Week as an Amazon Insider"

In a fascinating article in the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr describes a week she spent working in an Amazon.com warehouse. I read this article today after spending a week thinking about a recurring theme: how the technology economy functions like so many other economies, brutally and by exploiting the powerless. The recent spate of stories about the working conditions in Amazon's warehouse build on the foundations laid by Apple's workings with Foxconn, the use of "conflict minerals" in our electronics (including by Apple), and reports of Spotify's crappy reimbursement rate (including the analysis done on this very blog by ComputerScienceStudent7).

We are poorly served by the tech world's focus on novelty. It is telling that the New York Times' technology section is a subsection of the business section. (This fact is not true of the paper's science or environment reporting.) The NYT's long-time technology reporter, David Pogue, who recently announced that he'll be leaving the paper to go to Yahoo, is a gadget reviewer, and he brings all of the critical facilities to bear that you would expect of such a person—that is, hardly any at all. We need writers and analysts who are going to help us understand how industries and economies function, not boosters who are going to glorify some new Samsung phablet, or whatever.

In the tech world, it's always the new, new, new, but sadly when we examine how the tech sector works, it sounds like something out of a Charles Dickens' novel, rather than something from a forward-looking science fiction story. I think the real question—a question I'm constantly wrangling with John Horgan about—is this: where are the critical perspectives that we need on these issues going to come from? Because, so far, there isn't a dependable, go-to outlet.