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Automation after Amazon

In Bet On Yourself, a blend of personal memoir and business management which offers a unique window onto the corporate culture of the world's leading tech companies, Ann Hiatt chronicles the daily habits, strategic actions and long-game plans of top CEOs. First and foremost among these leaders is Jeff Bezos, whom Hiatt once reported to in the capacity of executive assistant. She describes the Amazon founder and multi-billionaire as 'relentless' and 'unforgiving'. Driven, determined and no holds barred, it was primarily Bezos's relentlessness - says Hiatt - that propelled Amazon's growth from a small-scale online bookstore operating out of the family garage to a multinational technology company valued at over $1 trillion and the second largest private employer in the United States. More than anything else, it has been Bezos's incessant, interminable, unabated drive and persistence which has advanced the Amazon ecosystem in the cut and thrust of data-driven capitalism. 'Relentless', observes Hiatt, 'in a single word, is who he is and who he wants his employees and his company to be'.1

Notwithstanding Hiatt's rose-tinted glasses, her stress on Bezos's unforgiving character disposition is noteworthy because Amazon has also received sustained criticism over many years for its reportedly ruthless approach to employees and its exploitation of gig economy workers.2 An obsession with automation pervades the ecosystem of the world's largest retailer, such as the automation of its management system as well as its algorithmic-enabled approach to performance management and close technological surveillance of staff in its distribution centres. Perhaps no wonder: Jeff Bezos is on record as saying that his time as a sixteen-year-old working at McDonald's left him obsessed with the possibilities of automation - first and foremost for re-engineering retail as a way of life. Bezos, of course, isn't the first billionaire to build an empire out of harnessing technology to uplift the productivity of employees. Henry Ford depended upon the Taylorist model of time-controlled factory engineering to introduce a 'scientific organization of labour' in which monitoring, measurement, targets and psychological prompts were deployed to accelerate the productivity of workers. But there is a massive difference between the archetypal Fordist factory of yesteryear and Amazon's automated, data-driven and algorithmically personalized operations of today. Amazon's innovation in supercharging the automation of management and the algorithmic surveillance of employees has been dubbed by Christopher Mims, writing in The Wall Street Journal, as 'Bezosism'.3 I shall argue in this chapter that it is difficult to overestimate the social, cultural, political and historical significance of this digital shift in the management of workers, and in particular its psychological fallout.

'You're Not Dead': Living with Automation

The new experience of living and working in this supercharged ecosystem of automation might best be captured in the following thesis: employees are exploited and humiliated in the brave new world of precarious work under the constantly evolving conditions of algorithmic-driven capitalism.

In her book Seasonal Associate - an acclaimed account of working at Amazon which was published in Germany in 2014 and translated into English some years later - Heike Geissler describes in piercing detail the mind-numbing labour underpinning one of the most colossal automated networks in the world. Her captivating blend of chronicle and memoir, documenting her time working at an Amazon distribution warehouse - dubbed, ironically, a 'Fulfilment Centre' - will provide the launching pad for our discussion, which will however contain some supplementation concerning the extensity of human-machine interaction in order to broaden Geissler's own persuasive exposition.

In her book, Geissler provides a remarkably direct, honest and disconcerting account of Amazon's labour practices today. Somewhat akin in approach to such celebrated works as Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Emily Guendelsberger's On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Geissler tracks the relentless psychological and physical pressures of gig economy work with a uniquely agile understanding. For many people today, employment means learning to cope with ever-increasing amounts of stress in the constantly evolving economic conditions of tech-driven capitalism. Geissler shows it is that and a great deal more. Her highly personal, narrative-based meditation on how contemporary work, with its demand of being permanently 'switched on', is all-enveloping and destructive of body and soul is pursued through three interlinked perspectives.

There is, first, Geissler's powerful dismantling of Amazon's futuristic fantasy of fully autonomous fulfilment centres - consisting of floating warehouses, robotic packaging and global drone delivery. The story told in Seasonal Associate lampoons Prime Air's promotional videos, which had promised 'the future now' on the basis of technological innovations in 3D mapping, breakthrough machine learning and drone delivery systems, all in order to fashion the perfect customer experience. Whilst Geissler's account of her spell at Amazon-Germany in Leipzig validates the company's global reach, the soul-destroying processes of human labour she describes expose the fiction of 'automated systems of production' - even if enmeshment in those very systems reduces the employee, in a psychological sense, to little more than an automaton.4 This is, arguably, the main point of Geissler's warnings about the oppressive working culture she witnessed at Amazon. Our way of being-in-the-world, she seems to be suggesting, is undone by unendurable production quotas, exploitative labour practices and automated management techniques. The much-touted 'flexibility' offered through working in the gig economy is, for Geissler, cancelled out by a raft of liabilities - from unpaid sick leave to missing out on retirement income. Thanks also to the predetermined, repetitive, semi-robotic work practices demanded by Amazon, low-paid contract workers suffer from declining mental health. Aspirational images of the desirable working life are juxtaposed with the daily realities of fulfilment centre demands, which might in turn be linked to spiralling anti-depressant consumption and escalating suicide rates.

Second, Geissler positions these burdens and liabilities of the precarious working life in more subjective terrain. She presents a profoundly harrowing account of the personal despair and emotional powerlessness she experienced whilst earning a meagre wage from one of the world's richest men. It is this affective sense of drudgery and devastation that gives Seasonal Associate its poignancy. Geissler recalls that working at Amazon was an exercise in survivalism, a state of affairs requiring 'sheer endurance':

You're not dead, that much is for sure. You're alive in the physiological sense, and also alive in the figurative sense, but your potential lies deeper than usual, buried beneath your fatigue. You count the days, calling each day one day down and heading for a boundary, a dotted line of a fold-in that you'll subsequently place on top of the other dotted line located before the beginning of the seasonal associate job or, even better, before the time when it became necessary to take a seasonal associate job.5

For Giessler, what comes about under Amazon's automated system of management is a stripping of the worker's subjective senses and a plundering of the body's powers.

Geissler also anticipates a third dimension of the precarity of working at Amazon, one which betrays a heavy technological connection and is similarly future-laden. She highlights not only the extent of the rearrangements, readjustments and repositionings of employees in relation to technology-induced work practices; not only the lifestyle changes and associated bodily or emotional troubles arising from work in the gig economy; and not only the innumerable minor, marginal, momentary and marked intrusions into the settings of private and family life. She also directs our attention to the all-encompassing, multifaceted and cumulative impact of automated processes upon life tasks, raising the prospect that both the individual and our culturally shared existence are on the verge of becoming swamped by digital connections and the influences of smart machines. Employees of Amazon, Geissler fears, are becoming 'nothing but a placeholder for machines that have already been invented'.6 The damage is so broad-ranging in scale and scope that she is left wondering whether any facet of our social connections, or the tissue of human dignity, will emerge from the current digital transformation unscathed.

Even so, the forces of technological automation, machine-learning innovation, corporate demands for smarter and cheaper digital solutions, algorithmic management techniques and the rise of global offshoring and electronic outsourcing seem to be intricately intertwined...