#MakeAmazonPay

#MakeAmazonPay and build alternatives. I’m all for the movement to support their workers and to make Amazon pay all kinds of taxes instead of doing some charity of their choice and at the same time I believe consumer shaming isn’t the way.

Especially the ongoing pandemic season with lots of lost income and more need for working notebooks and tablets for anything from communication to homeschooling is not the time to shame people for doing some cheap online tech shopping.

btw my impulse for writing this comes from seeing a local initiative going all “repair, swap, recycle, etc. instead of Amazon” today. As if those were in any way alternatives to the massive infrastructure Amazon has built. Such initiatives to go local and LoHaS (and at worst: offline, back to nature etc.) are not exactly what we need to bring on the massive international alternatives we need. They often are escapist at best and elitist at worst.

What we need is not withdrawal but more (internationalist) politics and activism to strengthen workers’ rights and build the huge tech infrastructures we need and want for our shared future (or expropriate Amazon and the likes, but then we still would need the skills to keep such an infrastructure running and updated and looking at public sector’s tech skills… well, pardon my scepticism that this would work. ? ).

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