Great sentences on the modern condition.

This explains the “Order filled by Shub-Niggurath” label on my most recent purchase.

pulsing

Yuck.

Here’s what Amazon is really.

Throw in the FT piece on Rugeley for comparison’s sake. But Amazon is clearly more than just a mega-Argos, or Sears, as Cranky O notes, and I can only imagine how Sears shipped its stuff off in the late 1800s. It’s a mega-Argos that sells {products that exist} alongside {products that exist if you want them to exist} in a merging of wholesale, commodity retail and custom production.

Etsy and eBay sellers do commissions all the time, but with Amazon, you might describe these proffers for on-demand work as “raised to the status of inventory.”

nick s,
Exact same way Amazon does today, except they use the Post Office, telegram, and railroad to do it (trucks & UPS by 1980, just as today). Including pick-to-order and drop-ship.

Internet does allow more complex assemble-to-order/kitting schemes, but the principles were all in place by 1890. You should have seen the pneumatic tube system…

efforts to comprehensively explore a desire-space and see if there is anything there that connects to customers

Isn’t there an understanding that it WILL connect to someone? All you have to do is have the idea of it; someone will want it and then you make it.

“Internet does allow more complex assemble-to-order/kitting schemes, but the principles were all in place by 1890. You should have seen the pneumatic tube system…”

That was the whole point of Sears; they realized what the combination of mass production, railroads, telegraphs/telephones, post office and banking/check/money order system could do. I have a feeling that it was the communications and banking part that did it; it meant that ordering, production and shipping could be coordinated on the order of days and weeks, rather than weeks and months. The banking system meant that Mr. and Mrs. Farmer could easily send payment across the country in days (or same day, given Western Union). On top of this/built by this was sophisticated, large-scale office systems.

when let loose, these algorithms destroy actual economies, generating vast and self-proliferating networks of largely imaginary trades in their place

Sort of like Goldman Sachs?

More sort of like if the deli had on display a plastic replica of every conceivable sandwich configuration, and you ordered by pointing to the one you wanted.

I’m sort of not grasping why this would be an improvement of the current system of algorithmically generating sandwiches on the fly.

What is the concrete thing that Amazon is doing that this metaphor is pointing at?

When you go to the printing place to have them silk screen some shirts, and they decide whether it’s in bad taste and they don’t want to print it up. I’m not getting the difference between their failing to vet someone’s silk screen and this. They would be getting the same criticism if they weren’t using “algorithms” and they’d forgotten to train staff to refuse to print those shirts.

Yes, it is technologically interesting that what’s essentially a database or search engine (Amazon works about the same as Google does in this regard, AFAICT, when you’re searching for something) can find “the place where this could exist if you wanted it to.” I’m not sure whether this is a violation of the search engine metaphor. Should a directory give me “the place that would hire someone to ghostwrite my book, if I asked them to,” by letting me ask for “where was my book ghostwritten”?

“No. . . more like a deli whose menu lists sandwiches at random. . . zebra on rye, quail egg salad, pumpernickel between two slices of turkey with chutney gravy. . . on the off chance someone might buy one.”

I think it’s more like you punch in an order, the sandwich shop makes whatever it is. I think that the shirt in question was made by somebody typing in words to the ‘Keep Calm & …’ template.

Reminds me of Private Eye more than anything else.

New technolohy baffles pissed old hack.

It offered you every letter and you took the ones that appealed. Modern!

I bought an Xmas present for my Dad last year ın November. It arrived in March. I then bought a book for myself. I was faffed around for about two months and then they told me it was out of stock. Finally I tried to buy an item of jewellery for my partner. They said it they would deliver it in four months (!) and then when that time was up said it was out of stock.

Amazon isn’t a store. In a store you buy stuff and then take it away. Amazon is just shit.

Although their tax dodging is quite impressive.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-british-operation-corporation-tax

No, the sandwich shop advertises every possible sandwich. This attracts a lutefisk-and-Nutella customer.

The sandwich shop doesn’t list all the sandwiches they make. They list popular ones, if you ask for a specific sandwich they will say “sure, we make that”, and if you ask for sandwiches with turkey they’ll give you a bunch of options that they may or may not have made up on the spot.

Which actually sounds a lot like my neighborhood sandwich shop.

Sorry I should have added that as well as being amazed that Amazon is the shittest company in the history of the world and that its only discernible ability is to dodge tax and treat its workers like zombie slaves I am also amazed that Amazon is completely unable to turn a profit (like all internet companies, as I have pointed out before on CT to widespread apathy).

“Amazon kept up its streak of being awesome this afternoon by announcing a 45 percent year-on-year decline in profits measuring Q4 2012 against Q4 2011. Not because sales went down, mind you. They’re up. Revenue is up. The company’s razor-thin profit margins just got even thinner, and in total the company lost $39 million in 2012.

The company’s shares are down a bit today, but the company’s stock is taking a much less catastrophic plunge in already-meager profits than Apple, whose stock plunged simply because its Q4 profits increased at an unexpectedly slow rate. That’s because Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers. The shareholders put up the equity, and instead of owning a claim on a steady stream of fat profits, they get a claim on a mighty engine of consumer surplus. Amazon sells things to people at prices that seem impossible because it actually is impossible to make money that way. And the competitive pressure of needing to square off against Amazon cuts profit margins at other companies, thus benefiting people who don’t even buy anything from Amazon.

It’s a truly remarkable American success story. But if you own a competing firm, you should be terrified. Competition is always scary, but competition against a juggernaut that seems to have permission from its shareholders to not turn any profits is really frightening.”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_profits_fall_45_percent.html

“Sort of like when I tell the guy at the deli I want my roast beef with extra hot peppers and no cheese?”

No, I feel there’s more to it, it’s different. Capitalist economy is good at producing cheap identical things. That’s what’s efficient, that’s what big companies do. The guy at the deli is more like a craftsman; as a restaurant chain grows bigger, it becomes more and more standardized: you’re getting the meal number 4, maybe super-sized, but that’s it; that’s so far as it goes.

When a big corporation manages to sell – as a routine, without hiring a ‘dealer’, like car companies – a highly customized product, that’s something new. I think.

Just curious what the innovation(s) specific to Sears were. My understanding (from Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis was that Montgomery Ward was the real innovator. (Sorry kind of off-topic.)

Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis

Ooooh, great book. I read that at the same time as Norris’ The Pit. Now there was a strange pulsing network for you.

“On the one hand, you can see this as something qualitatively new – I don’t think there is a close historical parallel for algorithmically generated products like the offending (and non-offending) t-shirts.”

“Algorithmical” seems to be a big deal here. But why?

If you go to a car makers’s site, you can make thousands of different types of cars. It’s not a big deal. It’s been that way since the late 90s.

It’s the same way at 3 Day Blinds. It’s not like they HAVE the blinds at the store. You go and tell them what you want and a few days later you have one of hundreds of thousands of different combinations of wood, fabric, styles, colors, etc.

None of this is new, except that there’s a tee shirt maker who’s got an “algorythm” (which, here, seems more like “random word generator. Color me unimpressed) that’s making the combinations. And?

“Amazon ‘stocks’ more than 500,000 items from Solid Gold Bomb. ”

As of today, Amazon ‘stocks’ 0 items from Solid Gold Bomb. This stuff is spam and I am not sure that you can blame Amazon for it.

If you go to a car makers’s site, you can make thousands of different types of cars. It’s not a big deal. It’s been that way since the late 90s.

Oh, come on. If you go to a website or a dealer with a set of very specific custom options, the car is not going to show up for you to drive off within a few days. You will be asked to put down a hefty deposit and wait your turn. All of those sites have a section for “dealer inventory”, the set of actual existing cars within a feasible distance.

Was the slogan algorithmically generated, or created by a person and judged (poorly) by a computer to be relevant to the user’s search?

Scripted from pre-existing verb lists, according to the person responsible.

Cafe Press used to clog search engine results with not-yet existent or demanded products.

But CafePress is nothing but mockups, and the store templates used to make that clear, because you’d go in via a specific seller and see the same logo slapped over the same generic items (random example); it’s a bit less so these days. But the uncanniness kicks in when those mockups are juxtaposed with tangible products, and especially when the mockups aren’t so much “designed” as “churned out”.

“Salespeople size you up based on what you wear, what you drive, your history with them, etc.”

No human salesperson would have suggested a “Keep Calm And Rape A Lot” T-shirt.

‘No human salesperson would have suggested a “Keep Calm And Rape A Lot” T-shirt.’

Exactly!

Or, well, it might depend on what part of town you are in. But anyway I do take your point: the algorithm is a clompy salesclerk. Score one for flesh and bone.

Which is a good thing, not?

Also too, Amazon packaging, which is (I think) the foremost cardboard innovator of the century. There’s an abstract sense in which they’re making less money on the product you buy than on the box it’s shipped in.

Also also: as grows Amazon, so goes Internet censorship. That 1% of web traffic is pretty much under state control — the U.S. asks Amazon to stop hosting a site; Amazon complies; boom, gone/marginalized, since literally nobody else provides bandwidth and hostage like AWS.

The Pit is like the Octopus only much less readable, and the Octopus is pretty stuff. The Pit is fun if you’ve a tolerance for bad novels, as there’s lots of neat stuff in it.

Hm, maybe it was The Octopus I read? Altho it was in a class on Chicago… Anyway, what I remember — the relevance to this post, and the connection with Cronon — is the sense of whole social universes in the hinterland being torn up and rebuilt in accordance with the blind operation of anonymous commodities markets.

Mao Cheng Ji@38: “When a big corporation manages to sell – as a routine, without hiring a ‘dealer’, like car companies – a highly customized product, that’s something new. I think.”

Just so. “Capitalism” implies industrialism and that implied mass production. Amazon is beginning to reach beyond that into somewhere else. Amazon is also very good at retail. They ship on time, handle returns, and do a fair job of recommending products. Compare this with the common eBay sharks, and you realize that Amazon is, in fact, doing a pretty good job of customer service. This is something that previously took a human salesperson, and was only done for fairly high-end products; good-quality clothing, for instance. Now internet retailers can do it—not as well as a human salesperson, but still do it—for fairly inexpensive products. But only some of them do.

Phosophorous @45 said:

Someone searched on Amazon for let’s say, the book “The Rape of Nanking”. . . and then was informed that “you may also like. . . ” a certain t-shirt with an algorithmically generated slogan. Nobody specifically requested such a shirt. . . and yet there it was, for sale at a reasonable price.

I think this is a slightly incorrect description of the process, and I think a few other commenters have described it this way too. It seems to suggest that Amazon is inventing products in response to customer searches, which just isn’t true (apologies if this is not what was actually meant).

As I understand it, Solid Gold Bomb is a manufacturer of t-shirts (amongst other things) and they sell their t-shirts via Amazon. They do this by providing a list of all of their t-shirts to Amazon, and Amazon will list them on their website. Customers can find them via search and recommendation systems operated by Amazon. These range from the fairly straightforward (‘you searched for “rape”, here are some products with the word “rape” in their names or descriptions, please narrow your selection by department’) to the slightly more advanced (‘customers who bought X also bought/looked at these items’).

Solid Gold Bomb noticed the “Keep calm and [verb] [object]” meme, and created an algorithm which generates new variants, providing it with a list of verbs and objects. I don’t know how sophisticated this system was, but I assume it works on similar principles to the Daily Mail-o-matic. SGB then submitted their list of t-shirts bearing these generated slogans to Amazon, where they were listed as ordinary products.

The suggestion that the Amazon website itself is using “algorithms” to invent products credits it with a lot more power and intelligence than it really has. SGB’s products are no different from anyone else’s – they have a catalogue of stuff they list for sale, it just happens to be algorithmically-generated stuff, no different from algorithmically generated Daily Mail-o-matic t-shirts would be. Someone still needs to submit the individual t-shirts for sale and there are, presumably, still some limits on how many t-shirts SGB could have in their “inventory” at any one time (the figure of 700 was mentioned somewhere, which doesn’t sound like a number high enough to justify the claims that we’re entering a totally new phase of capitalism here).

Maybe I’m just too inured to this kind of thing, or the fact that I have a good idea of what’s going on behind the curtain means that I don’t believe in the wizard’s powers, but I’m just not all that impressed by the hand-wavingly portentous way this is presented in the linked story. To call it “Strossian” is to do a disservice to Charlie Stross, imo.

bandwidth and hostage

Nice, Salient. Hosting and bondage.

I read that Amazon doesn’t make a profit and wonder if that’s like old-school recording contracts never breaking even (or modern movies, etc).

Well, wikipedia lists Bezos’ net worth as $23.2 billion. Who needs profits?

Hidari @32
If your anecdotes are true, they are truly amazing. How did you manage that? I have used Amazon quite often and have never had that sort of experience. Not once.

Was the retailer Amazon – or were they just acting as a agent?

“If your anecdotes are true, they are truly amazing. How did you manage that? I have used Amazon quite often and have never had that sort of experience. Not once.”

No honestly it was Amazon. I can’t even remember what the book for the present for my Dad was but it was fairly mainstream. I booked well before the Xmas rush too. I have had other experiences before now I come to think about it with more obscure books where they kept me hanging about for months before telling me the book was “out of print” (took my money first obviously).

Kobo iare another bunch of sharks and vipers who also took money off me for my Dad’s e-book xmas present THIS year and have so far refused to either deliver the book or reimburse me.

On the other hand I have never had any problems with E-bay.

Amazon is pretty quick with reimbursement in cases like that, I have found.

It’s necessary to make some distinction between print-on-demand (or the equivalent) products sold through Amazon, and the kind of scamming that Hidari seems to have encountered with obscure books. There are a whole lot of products offered for sale through Amazon that don’t actually exist at the moment when they are offered for sale because the seller relies on the assumption that they will buy a copy for resale if anyone buys a copy from them through Amazon. This means that their prices are generally inflated (sometimes hilariously so) because they have to charge enough to make a profit on a product that they don’t yet know how much will cost, except through some average of past purchases they’ve made. And yes, if they can’t find the book at all at a price they like, they’ll just return your money several months later.

When a print-on-demand company advertises random variations of T-shirt slogans, it’s a kind of stupid, but not fraudulent as such because they really can make a T-shirt with whatever you want printed on it. But a lot of the “strange pulsing network” of “isn’t a store, really” is just because it’s a lot of con men. Similar to the way that the classified sections of many allterna-newspapers will offer you a whole range of jobs that you can do from home that you never knew existed.

I guess I always thought amazon was selling convenience at a reasonable price more than anything else and relative to many internet retailers – was also selling reputation/trust (i.e. a return policy and some belief that the goods on offer are legitimate).

While its certainly possible to buy mass-customized goods and/or obscure titles (even if massive delayed – which has been my experience as well) that’s a tiny fraction of Amazon’s total revenue and not really all that amazing since – as others have noted – amazon is really just a rent taking intermediary selling its high trafic internet storefront to those who lack the presence or reputation to drive their own flow.

The vast majority of what they are selling is identical to what you could buy at Wal-mart, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble etc. only you don’t actually have to go there, don’t have to talk to interact with actual people and can marvel at the fact that you “recieved your item in 1-2 days” when in fact you could have had it in a matter of hours or minutes if you had just chosen to leave your home to do so.

Hidari – Your point on profits is somewhat valid, but excluding non-cash costs and accounting driven accruals, the business is in fact profitable. Like most retailers the cash flows are more important than accounting profits and their cash flows are substantial so there is really no realistic risk of bankruptcy.

This gargantuan Amazonian digital utopia/dystopia reminds me a lot of the old Napster. The universal jukebox was an almost incredibly gratifying idea, but the reality was often just confusing. 4397 copies of Jumpin’ Jack Flash, at varying bitrates, degrees of completion, clarity, etc., some of them fakes seeded by the RIAA, and in the midst of downloading one, you had to pray that the poor shmoe offering it up wouldn’t close his laptop and go out to the kitchen for a bologna sandwich or a bowl of jook, or a day-old pakora. iTunes, on the other hand, just works, even though no way is it complete, nor, thanks to the marvelous order-bringing facility of capitalism, is it free. (Not that I’m suggesting that it should be free, mind you — I don’t want the cosmodemonic market enforcers coming after me, thank you very much.)

Right now, Amazon is kind of like 18th century London, in that if you have money in your pocket, and want to survive a trip across town in your sedan chair, you’ll need an armed escort. Maybe it’ll get better, but then again maybe it won’t. Caveat emptor.

“Right now, Amazon is kind of like 18th century London, in that if you have money in your pocket, and want to survive a trip across town in your sedan chair, you’ll need an armed escort”

What? I think you are talking about the wrong Amazon here. Not the jungle in South America, the online retail portal.

Reason – fair point….but in the context of your usage (i.e. info gathering, reviews ) isn’t that just another description of convenience.

In your case its looking at one site for all the info you want. For another guy its the convenience to not get into his car. For a third guy its buying a book on lacross, a TV soundbar and a tent pole all on the same order ticket. Most companies choose to upcharge for convenience, Amazon usually doesn’t.

William Timbermann,
you are clearly digitally literate (you are commenting on a blog). This feigned helplessness doesn’t fool anyone.

Further, on the library thing: a possible solution might be this. The library makes ebooks available for reading through an Internet connection. Only one user can access a given “copy” at a time, but, as soon as she logs out, someone else can access that copy. This makes more sense with digital books than given someone exclusive access for weeks at a time, when they are only using it for a small portion of that time. The reasonable response from Amazon (not that one should necessarily expect the reasonable response) would probably be to charge libraries more, which might still be acceptable, and might still preserve libraries as a way for people to get publicly-funded or cheap access to a vast array of material.