Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com. Mike Daisey

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СКАЧАТЬ year is 1995. We begin with Jeff Bezos—geek savant, investment banker, and entrepreneur, like a latter-day Johnny Quest. You can see his face, determined and resolute, as he drives across America in a Toyota hatchback. His wife is at the wheel and he’s composing their business plan. They don’t know what it is they’re going to sell. They don’t know why they’re going to sell it. They don’t even know what city they’re driving to—they’ve told the movers that they will call them from the road to let them know where to go. But they know they’re going to do it on the Internet. They have seen the future and they are going to grab it by the horns.

      Jeff Bezos has vision and he’s got moxie, he’s got stamina, he has very little hair, and he’s rolling his way into Seattle, City on the Sea. His wife and he have taken an enormous risk, abandoning high-paying jobs to chase a dream of 400 percent annual growth, which is what the net was doing in those days. All he needs to change the world is a large garage in which he will build a lot of desks made out of doors—flat, cheap doors from Home Depot, thus showing with one sharp symbol that this new company values money, eschews comforts, and has a warm, friendly atmosphere in which the CEO helps the new people build their desks.

      You can sell anything on Jeff’s Internet: books, CDs, DVDs, lawn furniture, cat litter, used medical waste, elephant ivory, lunch meat, slaves, anything. Jeff will be there, plugged right into each and every consumer, giving personalized recommendations, and people will find that just what they wanted has been brought right to their door and they will love it.

      Thank God for this—before Jeff we were all concerned about the future of commerce. Who knew what they were going to buy next? Who knew what book would go best with their veal? Amazon will be there to guide us, to tell us what our favorites were, are, and have always been, to keep us fed with fresh things.

       The army of settlers, outfitted with wagons, babies, and Palm Pilots, hail Jeff. They say, “Yes, you’ve got a vision,” and they have purple hair and piercings and MBAs and greed and hunger and want, and they all crowd into that one garage! No one can stop it from growing and growing until it boils over into the city of Seattle, then America, then the world.

       Market analysts, stunned and staggered, kiss the hem of Jeff’s robe. The settlers build huge warehouses with backhoes and bulldozers. CEOs of old-school companies are impaled on spikes beside the road where children from Yahoo!, DoubleClick, and iVillage laugh at them. The digital village celebrates.

      Everyone gives thanks that they are selling things, that they are getting big fast and never forgetting their humble origins. “It’s still Day One,” Mao once said—actually that was Jeff Bezos, but it sounds like something Mao would have said about the egalitarian workplace Amazonians now call home, where bureaucracy vanishes and only the best come to work each day.

       At night, the settlers huddle around their fires as crotchety old-timers recount stories of the old days to growing masses of eager newcomers. A man eerily reminiscent of Lorne Greene speaks: “We’d sit by the fire, every day after work, cookin’ a pot of beans, just thankful for the hard, hard work we’d done, makin’ history. Thankful for the stock options. Ah … the stock went up twenty-five points today. Why?” He grins. “Nobody knows why. It’s a mystery, just like the stars above are a mystery. Just like Amazon.com is a mystery.”

      And if we look up into the digitally enhanced stars, we can see Jeff Bezos himself, as a great Prudential ad, appearing as a seven-hundred-foot-high, googly-eyed Jesus, telling us, “You know, it’s more than that—it’s our dream. If you dream hard, if you work hard, and if you believe hard, you can make anything happen. Everybody who works at Amazon knows that. It’s what brings us back to work every day.”

       Now we can see the workers and owners of Amazon.com triumphant, standing on the bodies of their enemies. Drunk and magnificent, the employees chug microbrewed beers and drive SUVs recklessly across the prairie, hitting buffalo. These noble workers were brave enough to say, “Goddamn yeah, we’re gonna work hard” and “Goddamn yeah, get rich too!” They put their hearts and souls on the line, and the world did listen, and the markets did listen too. And the stock did rise and rise and rise and Amazon had a bright future ahead of it for at least the next twelve fiscal months.

       You hear the sweeping power chords, watch the slowmotion doves flying into the sky like a bad Hong Kong flick. As we head off into the future it seems certain that Amazon.com will be the single-most customer-intensive company in the history of the world. Amen and hallelujah, praise Jesus and God and Shiva, and may the market forces bless and protect us in infinite growth, all our charts running up and to the right in infinite progression, amen.

      Then the training film fades to black, the word END appears, the lights come back on, and we blink in the brightness of the new day.

      In retrospect it seems so foolish—many will read this and wonder how grown men and women could get so worked up over a website that sells books. It seems impossible that we could have believed that it would change the world, but the evidence was all around us: the television coverage, the magazine and newspaper articles our trainers showed us in endless succession. Immersed day after day in the language of success we became heated and insistent to everyone who asked, letting people know that the digital revolution was happening right now. Quick, get on board before it’s too late!

      There was the Old World and the New World, and a war was coming in which Amazon would play a vital role, vanquishing bad, brick-and-mortar corporations. We began to believe that by supporting Amazon.com we would be helping to crush chains and monopolies and faceless bureaucracies. We were hopelessly naïve.

      Overwhelmingly white, pale, doughy, and directionless before arriving at Amazon.com, we now talked incessantly about what books we were reading, and in the process discovered that our new colleagues were very well read, well spoken, highly educated. There were anime lovers, film critics of obscure Japanese horror pictures, scholars of Middle English literature, botanists. Pick your flavor of obscurity. We didn’t know it at the time because we were all too well read, but we had another common denominator: we all wanted desperately to believe in something.

      “Jean-Michele?”

      “Yes?” We were in bed.

      “I was wondering if you wanted to go to the Amazon picnic this weekend.”

      Jean-Michele cleared her throat, stalling for time. “Ah … you want to go to the Amazon company picnic?”

      “It’ll be really cool—they’re going to have thirty different kegs, with a different microbrew in each one, and the Velcro wall thing, and Jeff will be in a dunking tank along with David Risher.”

      She counted out her points on her hands: “One, you never like to go to company picnics—no one does. Two, we’re supposed to be performing at a fundraiser. Three—who the hell is David Risher?”

      “He’s a vice president of operations.” As soon as I said it, I knew I was way out of my league.

      “You want to meet a vice president?”

      “Well, I wouldn’t mind. I mean, he’s a person, too—you shouldn’t judge him so narrowly because of his success. Success is something we create.”

      “Michael, you aren’t even hired yet. You’re still a trainee.”

      “I know.”

      “You want to go to a picnic with a company that hasn’t СКАЧАТЬ