This morning I woke up to an Amazon box on my doorstep. This was weird. We haven't ordered anything lately from Amazon; we try to avoid it as much as we can (not impossible, but challenging when you live 90 miles from the nearest city). When I opened the box I found a copy of Luke Healy's Americana in it, a book my husband ordered from a used book seller on eBay. After a minute of confusion, the penny dropped.
Amazon Fulfillment must have captured another market. Of course it had. A quick search online confirmed this.
My husband and I traded laments. "This sucks," he said. "It's so fucking dystopian," I said.
"It's omnopolistic."
"Get that in print," he said. He's an economist, so I trust him on these things.
One of the few television series I've watched and rewatched is the fated space western Firefly, doomed to a single season after a few bad decisions by whichever rocket scientists were in charge of Fox in 2002. A ubiquitous and looming presence throughout its fourteen episodes is the logo of Blue Sun, and while the show was never given enough time to develop the story line that involved the corporation, it was clear that it was (a) everywhere and (b) Up To No Good.
Whenever I see those sludgy blue Amazon Prime vans sluicing through my neighborhood I think of Blue Sun. The plump curving arrows on their sides promise easy cheer, but we hear too many stories of the relentless pace demanded of laborers by Amazon's ruthless logistics to believe it.
We have words to describe Amazon and businesses of its ilk. Monopolies. Concerns. Multinationals. Oligopolies. Cartels. I'm sure there are others.
But none of these words seems to capture the sheer dystopian creepiness of entities like Amazon (or Alphabet for that matter). Even megacorporation, which was taken up early on in science fiction, seems incapable of encompassing the unrelenting voracity, the all-consuming extractive will, the omnivorousness that characterizes their activities.
Omnopoly feels closer to conveying the perversions of what is already perverse. From “omni,” the Latin for “all,” It describes a kind of capitalistic agency that exceeds the engine of competition to such a degree that a ravenous all-encompassing dominance drives it in search of ever more markets. Scrambling “monopoly,” “omnopoly” is a deranged force, close enough to monopoly not to deny that it is indeed continuous with the system of capitalism. It is capitalism ad absurdum, what metastasized monopolies become.
Amazon ships what the USPS used to deliver to my door.
Amazon hosts universities' web-based services.
Amazon produces your movies and music now.
Amazon sells you your groceries.
Amazon monitors your home.
