Amazon and the Robots

Last year I complained to Amazon that a book sold on its website had infringed my copyright. Amazon quickly adjudicated in my favour and de-listed the title. But their high-handed anonymity and avoidance of any dialogue that could not be reduced to ticking a box made the experience memorably unpleasant. They were like robots!

Beyond their seriously impressive selling operation which has elevated getting stuff to being as easy as in the blink of an eye, they were an intimidating, faceless corporation, with a tick for a faceless smile, that seemed designed in every detail to help itself before the people who used the platform, whether customers, “Selling Partners” or an author like me complaining about a book on sale that had plagiarized his work.

Yanis Yaroufakis offered an accurate summing-up of what Amazon has become when he wrote last week in the Guardian: “Amazon is no ordinary corporation. It is the clearest expression of what I call technofeudalism: a new economic order in which platforms behave like lords owning the fiefs that have replaced markets.”

Only, in my experience, Amazon was much worse than a lord. At least with a lord you can appeal to his pity. But Amazon, in its remorseless, self-serving efficiency, had no pity. Having to deal with the company when – for a change – I wasn’t just buying something from it reminded me of one of those dystopian movies where the rebel humans of the future – vastly outgunned and with inferior technology – take on the machines.

One thing that particularly struck me was the palpable fear of the small businesses that sold products through its platform. When I made my complaint, I had to fill out a “Report Infringement Form”, which required me to give my email address. Then, as soon as Amazon de-listed the book I had complained about, I began to receive emails from third-party sellers who had been selling it through the Amazon platform.

These sellers could not reasonably be expected to know that the title was infringing my copyright, but they told me that Amazon was still penalizing them as a result of my complaint. The flurry of emails I suddenly found myself having to field was disturbing for their desperate tone.

Take “John”, for example. I won’t give his real name because I wouldn’t want to risk his business incurring yet some further penalty from the Amazon overlord. “You have filed a claim against our small business regarding your book on Amazon,” his email to me began. This wasn’t actually true. The only complaint I had made was against the book that had plagiarized me – I had no idea John’s company even existed. But John’s point was that Amazon was acting as if I had made a compaint directly against him.

He went on: “WE ARE NOT THE PUBLISHER!!!! We are not the distributor.  We simply are a retailer, a small business. We buy from reputable distributors. We have no control over the publishing of your title.  Your claim is harmful against our company and employees. Yet we have nothing to do with the publication of your book. PLEASE REMOVE YOUR HARMFUL CLAIM AGAINST OUR COMPANY IMMEDIATELY. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH US.  You should contact the proper parties. It does nothing to file your claim against us, we are nobody, other than now we are being blamed and penalized for whatever your problem is.”

I replied that, while I had filled in Amazon’s report infringement form, I had not made a complaint against his company and that I would contact Amazon to tell it so. I asked him if he had any idea who might be the best person there to speak to. “Dealing with them online is extremely difficult,” I explained, “because it seems impossible to get through to a human being to talk through the issues involved. It will help to expedite things if I can talk to someone directly.”

“Yes, they are extreeeeeeeemly difficult to deal with,” John replied. “Unfortunately people do things without knowing the implications. In this case, it’s a horror story for us. We have no control over any of it. They specifically post that the only way we can have the black mark taken off our account is by you. There is no other way. A large publisher made this same error a while back. I have no idea how they did it, but they fixed it in a few days. On the other hand, others never get it done and we have to pay for it for 180 days. It is a horror story for us small businesses.”

John emailed an Amazon link that he recommended I try. When it proved to be ineffective, I decided that it was time to revert to old technology. I found the fax number of Amazon’s legal department in Seattle and faxed a letter to make it clear that I had no complaint against John’s company.

When I got no reply, I emailed John again to say that I would still persist in trying to make it clear to Amazon that they had no valid grounds to penalize him. It was a hugely time-consuming exercise, but it seemed to me a matter of basic fairness. I wanted to make up for all the trouble that my original complaint had caused him.

But a regard for fairness is the sort of inefficient human emotion that Amazon wants to eliminate from its business. And a similar tendency among the other technofeudalist corporations is what makes humanity’s blind march into the Age of AI so terrifying.

John’s engagingly human emails were an index of someone who had known life before 2001: “Yep, Amazon has no care for sellers. I’ve been in business for 53 years and have worked with some of the biggest and smallest companies in the world, but Amazon wins the prize for being the worst relationship of them all. I know many sellers that have closed their accounts so they can sleep again... I hope you understand that getting caught up in this, out of no fault of ours, is not so good. And no matter what we have tried to fix it, it falls on deaf ears, and hundreds of wasted hours... ”

I had similar email exchanges about the awfulness of dealing with Amazon from other third-party sellers. Their livelihoods depended on a staggeringly unequal relationship that placed them in a position of effective subservience. As I learned about their problems, I began to feel more and more of a rapport. A human thing again. I could not help but resent the cruelty of their overlord even if, in my particular case, it had ruled in my favour.

Determined to stand up for the penalized sellers, I made it my mission to try to connect with a human being at Amazon. With the aid of that other technofeudalist overlord, Google, I found the name of the legal director of Amazon UK. Through the Law Society, I was then able to get her email address.

I thought it might make a difference if, as well as an email, I also sent a real letter – in an envelope with a postage stamp – to her real bricks-and-mortar office. Some quaint, nostalgic gesture, I suppose, to the analogue world I had grown up in. I couldn’t help laugh at the address – 1 Principal Place, Worship Street – which seemed so much of a piece with Amazon’s routine high-handedness.

When I didn’t get a reply, I followed up a week or so later: “I am very anxious to do whatever I can to protect responsible sellers from any adverse impact caused by my report to Amazon while at the same time protecting my copyright. Your advice concerning how best I might do this will be hugely welcome.”

Finally I received an email response not from her but the Amazon UK Services Legal Department: “We have investigated this matter thoroughly and confirm that the print book is not being sold by Amazon.  You will appreciate that Amazon is unable to ensure that the author and/or publisher does not attempt to relist for sale and/or republish the Book (including under a new ISBN). Similarly, other Selling Partners may make existing or new copies of the Book available for sale on Amazon’s websites, including Amazon Marketplace. In the event you become aware of the Book being offered on for sale, please notify Amazon using the Public Notice Form. This will ensure that the correct team is able to promptly review such notice and take any action we deem appropriate as soon as practicable.”

While the Legal Department’s letter addressed my own issue concerning the copyright infringment, it made no response to the concerns that I had raised about the third-party sellers, beyond stating: “At this time we are unable to share any further details regarding the specific workings of the Amazon Marketplace.” A few more exchanges with the Amazon UK Legal Department followed, but never once did I receive a response from a named human being. I found the tone of their letters routinely courteous but coldly impersonal. They could as easily have been written by a robot. Perhaps they were.

It became clear to me – as I really ought to have realized from the outset – that the absence of a human presence was a central tenet of Amazon’s operation – anonymity the core virtue of a virtual world that had been constructed to minimize messy personal interaction. The goal was to maximise automated processes, which put human beings, with all their time-consuming, profit-threatening inefficiency, on the far side of a firewall.

I found myself thinking of that dystopian movie again. This, I’m afraid, is what we have come to: a struggle between humans and machines. To rework the words of resistance fighter Kyle Reese: Listen and understand.  That Amazon is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity. Or remorse. Or fear. And it absolutely will not stop. Ever.