Unpacking Amazon through meatpacking, Adam Smith, and digital colonialism

Abstract

In 2021, The New York Times reported that Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, believed that workers were inherently lazy. Also, Amazon’s strict policies and heavy-handed surveillance contributed to a culture of fear. Bezos’ ideas of lazy employees can also be captured as early as 1776 in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but unlike Bezos, Smith believed that employees’ motivation could be mitigated through compensation and companies giving back to their employees. Though Smith believed that workers should be compensated, he embodied questionable beliefs, such as racism and labor exploitation. These ideas of racism and exploitation were also practiced during colonialism with the likes of Cecil Rhodes. Despite colonialism appearing to be a distasteful vestige of the past, the reality is that these same beliefs and exploitative systems exist today. To understand the transcendence of labor exploitation, which has not been stagnant since colonialism, but rather continual, the meatpacking industry is introduced. From a personal narrative, providing a more intimate portrait of labor exploitation, this paper will weave the daunting similarities of the Meat Industry with Amazon. Finally, this paper introduces digital colonialism and how modern colonialism is being used by tech companies. Essentially, many modern practices used by tech companies can be traced to the historical foundations of racism and colonialism and governments’ propensity to favor their accumulation function over their own legitimization.