Amazon support forums to shut down. Big mistake! Write Jeff. (Updated.)

Never forget that corporations have cultures—meaning attitudes that govern how they think and act. When I lived in Seattle, I amused myself by studying the attitudes I detected in those who worked for Adobe, Amazon, Boeing, Microsoft and the rest.

Amazon employees were the hardest to study, and I felt that was because the company applied pressure to keep them silent. One did open up briefly to tell me “Never trust Amazon’s search results.” Another grumbled that the discounts employees got on Amazon products was tiny. That was pretty much it. In contrast, employees of the other companies were quite open about the good and bad of their employers.

A major factor in Amazon’s culture is not only an obsession with control, but an obsession with controlling what lies outside the company itself, including suppliers and competitors. Amazon is a bit like old Prussia in that respect.

In the nineteenth century Europeans would say that Prussia was “too big for Europe and too small for the world.” Too big for Europe meant that its industrial and military muscle threatened European peace. Too small for the world meant that Prussian global ambitions would fail because on the world stage it was not big enough to dominate, particularly in comparison to the U.S. or the British empire. That’s why Germany fared so badly in the twentieth century.

So it is quite easy to see why Amazon doesn’t like forums that it cannot control. Those focus on Amazon products in contrast to customer reviews of products made by others. Amazon doesn’t mind people saying, “this food blender stinks” because that simply means that people will buy a different company’s blender from Amazon. That contrasts with negative comments about Amazon’s products, where the result might be someone buying a competitor’s product from elsewhere. That Amazon hates.

I have watched in amazement over the years as federal agencies, tasked with prevented corporate abuse of power, have done nothing about Amazon. I have been amazed as Amazon, the largest book retailer, was able to buy Audible, the top audiobook retailer, The Book Depository (once a key competitor in international sales), as well begin print and ebook publishing affiliates that benefit from their Amazon connection.

My explanation for that the Beltway federal government is so obsessed with control and dominance that it finds Amazon’s similar attitude appealing. Big bullies like other big bullies. The latter live quite well in eight of the country’s ten wealthiest countries—those surrounding DC. And yes, in that context it does matter than Jeff Bezos does own the Washington Post, which might be considered their newspaper.

Indeed the loudest sound in our political life comes from all the money being sucked out of middle America and settling in the vicinity of our our capital—much like in The Hunger Games. And what does America get in return—thousands of niggling regulations.

We see that in politics too, as politicians sneer at the nation’s ‘bitter clingers’ and ‘deplorables’ and feel that they deserve to be stomped on or put out of work. Sitting at the top of the economic pile, they want most jobs to move to wherever in the world that labor is cheapest (iPhones in China) and for those that can’t be exported, say housekeepers, they want that cheap labor imported by the millions. That explains their fury at Trump, who intends to fix both problems.

Economic abuse like Amazon’s was once not prosecuted. Long ago, John Rockefeller got stomped on because his Standard Oil dominated the oil industry, crushing competition. The parallel to Amazon would have him dominated not just oil but the manufacture of cars and any other product that used oil products, as well as owning a growing number of auto retailers.

John Rockeller’s misbehavior eventually led him to become the ‘most hated man in America.’ Jeff Bezos could suffer a similar fate, particularly as his company creates a great wasteland across the nation where few retail jobs exist. Their replacement is the modern equivalent of the industrial revolution’s ‘dark satanic mills—grim warehouses, perhaps one per state, where workers slave away, driven by brutal tracking devices. And like Rockefeller before him, Bezos has begun playing the ‘charitable giving’ ploy.

At present, the only real restraint on Amazon’s obsession with control is customer dissatisfaction that would lead to reduced sales. Unfortunately, that’s countered by all the Amazon fanbots who’re almost as mindless in their corporate following as Apple’s own variety. I do not think I will ever understand the cult mind.

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