Amazon has an Orwell problem. Back in 2009, Amazon surprised Kindle owners by reaching into their devices over the network and deleting their copies of Nineteen Eight-Four, along with their annotations. Amazingly, this was just a garden-variety screw-up and not a piece of self-critical theater to demonstrate the risks of connected devices that allowed their manufacturers to override their owners.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

The company’s love affair with Orwell never ended, and they never figured out that old George wrote those books as warnings, not suggestions.

Take the company’s forthcoming employee chat app Shout Outs, which will “gamify” performing grueling, low-waged work by rewarding workers with virtual stars when they “add direct business value.” Leaked minutes from a high-level Nov 2021 meeting to plan this app record that Dave Clark, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, believes that “some people are insane star collectors.”

The minutes of this meeting were leaked to The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein, whose reporting reveals that the chat app has a long list of blocked words that cannot be electronically uttered by Amazon workers, in the name of promoting a “positive community.”

https://theintercept.com/2022/04/04/amazon-union-living-wage-restrooms-chat-app/

Included on the list:

I hate
Union
Fire
Terminated
Compensation
Pay Raise
Bullying
Harassment
I don’t care
Rude
This is concerning
Stupid
This is dumb
Prison
Threat
Petition
Grievance
Injustice
Diversity
Ethics
Fairness
Accessibility
Vaccine
Senior Ops
Living Wage
Representation
Unfair
Favoritism
Rate
TOT
Unite/unity
Plantation
Slave
Slave labor
Master
Concerned
Freedom
Restrooms
Robots
Trash
Committee
Coalition

A cursory glance at this list makes it clear that Amazon is very anxious about its workers discussing their working conditions (“restrooms” is a particularly telling inclusion, given the company’s notorious work-station pee bottles).

But controlling its workers’ vocabulary won’t be enough. After a pitched battle, employees at Amazon’s Staten Island JFK8 warehouse have had their union certified:

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/amazon-labor-union-alu-staten-island-organizing

The union drive was led by Chris Smalls, the former Amazon warehouse team lead who blew the whistle on unsafe working conditions in the warehouse at the start of the covid lockdown and was fired and subjected to racist smears in retaliation.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#instacart-wholefoods-amazon

Amazon has since doubled down on its duty to murder warehouse workers, for example, when it prohibited Illinois workers from seeking shelter last December as a deadly tornado bore down on them.

https://theintercept.com/2021/12/13/amazon-illinois-tornado-safety-protocols/

Given the depth of workers’ grievances and the thickness of Amazon’s margins, the idea that imposing Newspeak via a chat app will neutralize worker power is laughable.

Image:
Kheel Center (modified)
https://flickr.com/photos/38445726@N04/5279610622

CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/