Drones don’t smile, they only follow orders, relentlessly
July 2021, “Drones don’t smile, they only follow orders, relentlessly”
(Why do we keep killing ourselves to support businesses that kill us?)
One evening some years ago, at the beginning of a late supper, in the middle of a long, hot summer I was spending in the Dominican Republic, Felicia, my comadre, dear friend, and companion in mission for two decades now, told me that the beans we were eating that night and had eaten at midday with close to twenty people, had come from her field.
This was the early 2000s, and we’d been talking on and off for weeks about how the global coffee crisis was beginning to asphyxiate her community and others, family by family, as each suddenly saw, in a matter of months, the price of their crop drop through the floor. So upon hearing about the beans, I put down my spoon, stunned. (Yes, it’s more common to eat with a spoon, and only a spoon, in poor families there.)
Before I could even finish my sentence— expressing my shock and concern at this extraordinary sacrifice, reminding her that the program we were running that summer was supposed to cover all food costs, to avoid this very eventuality in which poor farmers would impoverish themselves even more— Felicia cut me off, wagging her finger.
“No, Juan, no es un sacrificio,” she said. “It’s not a sacrifice. I give it with love.”
“But, you can’t!” I said, stupidly.
“Is that an order?”
She had me on that one. “Well, no, of course not—”
“Ah, good,” she said, then smiled slyly. “Even if it was, you know I can sometimes be a little disobedient.”
Her son, Cristian, and I both got a good laugh from that one, knowing the power of this woman’s will. Then he spoke too, which was rare for him at the table. “I picked these myself, Juan. For you and all of us. It’s a way I can help. We can all give something.”
That night, Felicia, a widow herself, taught me once again how to understand the Gospel story of the widow’s mite. Time after time over the years, I’ve been taught (sometimes against my will) by her and others in similarly precarious states, what it truly means to give, what constitutes true generosity in God’s eyes.
* * *
The coincidence could not be ignored. On the very same day last month that The New York Times ran its latest exposé (a brilliant, devastating piece by Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and Grace Ashford) about the abusive business practices of the e-retail behemoth that co-opts its name from the world’s most voluminous river— this time focusing on operations during the first months of the pandemic within JFK8, a 15 million square foot warehouse on Staten Island, NY— yet another intelligent, good-hearted, value-centered and well-meaning friend whom I greatly respect asked if my organization was registered to receive donations from that corporation’s “smile” program. I responded as I always have, politely and neutrally: the program fails our test of return on investment, and presents ethical difficulties. But I feel compelled to finally dig into this decision (or at least some of it) on the page, add my tidbit to the growing and groaning shelf of books, reporting, and scholarship about the mother of all e-tailers, and quit my awkward tip-toeing around.
Nonprofits, charities, NGOs, for-purpose orgs… whatever your term of choice, we are a delicate balance of mission and business, of pragmatism and idealism, trying to survive and even thrive within a system we seek wholeheartedly to change. You could call it crazy-making, or living with paradox, or Cross-bearing, or a holding of creative tension. Let’s face it, like life in general for most humans, it’s a challenge, and a tough one at that.
So let’s look at the pragmatic side first, just for the heck of it, lest someone’s neck hairs pre-emptively shoot up at the prospect that I might drown the page in socialist or even communist invective. Or that, as another good-hearted person claimed, I’ve taken this stance because I “don’t like amazon.” It’s not at all a question of liking or not liking; this is about what best serves the mission of justice, and the interests of the poor and vulnerable. Let me show you.
To begin: The math, my friends, for the organization I lead and I daresay for many others, just does not work. When you strip away the warm and sticky stuff that am-a-drone’s ads bathe you in, you realize that, for every dollar you spend with them, they will donate the magnanimous sum of one half cent to the charity of your choice. Yes, they’ll split a whole penny right down the middle, and toss it in the make-a-wish fountain, just for you. Because you know, all those pennies— excuse me, halfpennies— do add up. Every little bit helps, right? I mean, if I drop two grand on some sweet Bluetooth speakers and new jogging tights and a flat screen and whatever the heck else I “need,” and then some wonderful charity gets ten bucks—hey, that’s better than nothing, right?!
Am I dating myself here if I ask who remembers the Muppets singing “The Christmas Song” with John Denver? “If you haven’t got a penny, then a ha-penny will do. If you haven’t got a ha-penny, then God bless you!”
Actually, it’s not “better than nothing.” But God bless you anyway.
At least for my organization— I can’t speak for others. I’ve had first-hand experience setting up and maintaining more than a dozen versions of these “we’ll donate a percentage of sales” programs, and am-a-drone’s “smile” is, by far, the worst I’ve seen. Here’s how these things really work— the short version— from inside an NGO: First, you spend time setting up an account, which often involves collecting and submitting various financial and legal documents, and the submission and approval process can often experience technical glitches and be rather drawn out. Then, there is the on-going maintenance: chiefly, promoting it to supporters (which involves strategizing about how to most effectively and efficiently do that, and then actually creating and publicizing those promotions), and trying to keep them engaged in it; if folks actual participate, there’s the inevitable responding to emails and phone calls about “did you get my donation yet,” or “why didn’t they consider my purchase a qualifying one,” and many others. Then, there’s the labor of trying to actually collect and deposit those donations, which often take weeks and months to arrive, and lack clarity about which supporters’ contributions they correspond to. It goes on from there, but the general rule of thumb is: The better the company’s customer service, the less maintenance the account needs, and vice-versa. I don’t have to tell you how wretched the big-a’s customer service is, especially when it comes to third parties, since you’ve probably experienced it for yourself.
The benefits am-a-drone has and will derive from all of the advertising that charities do on their behalf far outstrip the minimal sums they have smilingly re-directed to those organizations. Not only do the charities motivate customers to purchase there, they do so by pairing the purchasing experience with the strong emotional connection the organization has built with that individual, sometimes over decades. If you’re getting back 10 or 20 percent, and the company’s values align with yours, then it can be worthwhile to invest some time and moral equity into such a program; SERRV and Bookshop.org are the best ones I’ve seen out there, and my organization partners with them. But to get tossed a ha’penny? No, thank you. At that rate of return, this is nothing more than an ethical photo-bombing operation: am-a-drone jumps into the picture your school, church, or organization has been arranging, with its big bald head all polished and shining, and walks away laughing. (Like its execs were surely laughing when they saw city after city publically prostrating itself back in 2017 and 2018, with op-eds and ad campaigns, for the chance to give away tax incentives the company could easily afford, impoverishing and imperiling their populaces, just so big-a’s HQ2 could plop down on their turf and start taking over.) As of this writing, according to their website, “amazon has donated more than $215 million globally to charitable organizations through the AmazonSmile program since its launch in 2013.” On another page of the site, they claim it’s $283 million; I’m not sure what accounts for the discrepancy. For perspective, consider that the company’s profits (net income) for the 12-month period ending March 31, 2021 came to $26.9 billion. So yes, over nine years, am-a-drone has donated the equivalent of .79% (hey, that’s more than a ha-penny!)… of what it profited (not grossed) in the first twelve months of the pandemic. Yes, the world’s most vulnerable people were being crucified by the hour, the corpses piling up, and am-a-drone was tossing ha’pennies in the ocean, forcing ground-level employees to work in hazardous conditions and firing them via robot (as Spencer Soper reported recently for Bloomberg), and Bezos was building both his $500 million yacht and his precious rocket ship.
* * *
Now let’s treat the cultural question— again, only in brief, since others have written much more in-depth about this alone (most recently, Danny Caine, owner of The Raven Book Store, in Lawrence, KS, and author of How to Resist amazon and Why). As a writer and the director of an organization whose first name is Education, this comes up quite a bit.
Some folks, once again all well intentioned, are puzzled by my big-a abstinence, given my love of literature. “But amazon has every book under the sun! What’s not to like?” My friends, let’s get something straight, please. As George Packer illuminated in The New Yorker years ago, Bezos founded his company—which he nearly named “Relentless,” no joke— because when he looked at a book, he saw not a sacred, potentially horizon-opening and life-changing jewel containing an artist’s blood, sweat, tears, and don’t forget money (and often those of their closest relations too, carrying the Cross of living with a writer); no, he saw a commercial good whose rectangular shape and light weight per volume would make its shipping cost relatively low when sold within a country that had a well-functioning, government-subsidized postal service and a strong infrastructure of roads. He set up shop in Seattle not because of an affinity for its literary culture or natural beauty, but because of Washington State’s regressive, pro-rich and pro-business tax policies (especially in the mid-1990s). And he chose the internet because he had a couple of really, really good hunches: first, that because it was a totally uncharted commercial frontier at the time, he’d be able to juke and dodge sales tax liabilities for a long while, until Congress got its crusty-eyed, bed-headed, rotary-phone-and-abacus-using body up to speed on this whole new-fangled “world wide web” thing (and even longer, actually, as evidenced by the company’s entrenched, fight-to-the-last-man legal crusade to avoid taxes by any means necessary); and second, that the sexiness of internet commerce would intoxicate Wall Street to such a degree that he could get deep pockets to subsidize— oh, excuse me, invest in— his business far beyond the edge of the cliff, tolerating year after year of net losses while gobbling up more and more market share (by under-selling competitors), which would in turn swell stock value (since “the market” is ultimately about the hunches, fears, and proclivities of its “insiders”), all of which would eventually make him king of a scorched-earth, devastated economic sector. It was a purely calculated, hedged-bet move, and only his ruthless—Relentless— pursuit of its success, and his investors’ knowing or unknowing greed, made it successful. Because of its success, yes it’s true, you can buy almost any book you like and have it delivered quickly. But in doing that, you also have supported, directly and indirectly: the closing of scores of independent bookstores and all the jobs and interactions they created, the proliferation of counterfeit books that undermine the genuine author’s original work and livelihood, the squeezing of public library budgets, and the narrowing focus of the literary market toward best-sellers and books that the publishers (unwillingly locked in am-a-drone’s death grip) believe would most likely become best-sellers on the web.
So please, let’s put that nice little story, about am-a-drone being a boon and a beacon for literature, education, and the public good, to rest forever. It’s a big fat lie. (Don’t believe me? Then try a little experiment: Try to engage the owners of some independent bookstores— the ones that have not already been devoured by am-a-drone, that is, since it’s established fact that that has happened en masse— in a real conversation about the big-a, face to face if you can. First, when you’re there, just breathe in the scene, and notice how having an actual physical space to browse, read, talk about, and buy books makes you feel. Second, find five of these owners who will give am-a-drone two thumbs up, and see how long that takes you. You may need to be Relentless.)
* * *
If “smiles” seems pretty frowny as either a pragmatic or a cultural question, it makes even less sense as a question of the heart.
Organizations can’t only define themselves in terms of what they are not, or what they stand against. In this light, the prevalence of the term “nonprofit” is quite sad, and I’d say far too unexamined. You have to represent who you are, what you are, and with whom you stand. “For-purpose” has not really caught on, and it might never; “charity” is acceptable, but problematic for certain missions, especially those concerned with systemic justice, which charity too often has no patience with or vision for. “Mission” works for me, but I recognize that it may connote religious affiliation or belief for some, and thus also be problematic. Whatever your preferred term, it comes to this: people over profit, with your values both grounding it all and coming before all, even when times get very tough.
The corporate world has made a business in recent decades of appropriating some religious, spiritual, and other moral language to its own self-interested capitalistic purposes, to the point where “values,” and even to some extent “mission,” have been squeezed— at least in highly capitalistic cultures— of all their ethical juice, and draped as pretty window dressing for any goal or objective, no matter how base. You can say that maximizing profitability is a core “value,” that you have a “mission” for machine-like efficiency, and not cause an eyebrow to rise. Hell, you could say you really value a bacon-cheeseburger at the end of a long week. As if the point were to simply have things you call values, to simply proclaim your mission, as opposed to reflecting deeply and self-critically, regularly and over time, on how your values, mission, and everyday actions will affect the people you work with and the world you live in, far beyond your self-interests and your little moment on the earth. To be taken seriously, “values” and “mission,” when it comes to the work of an NGO or a profit-based company, must be ethical, morally sound, and contribute to the long-term, common good.
In the NY Times exposé, the reporters captured the dark heart of Bezos’ deeply cynical vision of humanity. A former H.R. vice-president who’d been with the Relentless big-a for 17 years agreed to be interviewed for the story, and it’s worth quoting the piece at length here. The big-bad-B
“didn’t want hourly workers to stick around for long, viewing a ‘large, disgruntled workforce’ as a threat…Company data revealed that most employees became less eager over time, he said, and Mr. Bezos believed that people were inherently lazy. ‘What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need.” That conviction was embedded throughout the business, from the ease of instant ordering to the pervasive use of data to get the most out of employees.
“So guaranteed wage increases stopped after three years, and Amazon provided incentives for low-skilled employees to leave. Every year, Mr. Palmer [an hourly worker at the JFK8 operation in Staten Island, focus of the investigation] saw signs go up offering associates thousands of dollars to resign, and as he entered JFK8 each morning, he passed a classroom for free courses to train them in other fields.”
* * *
It’s not hard to see how this kind of “mission,” this set of “values,” would lead company executives to carpet-bomb the first sproutings of labor unions. Workers at an Alabama operation came the closest any facility ever has to forming a union, but ultimately could not win against am-a-drone’s vast resources and power. It’s also not hard to see, when you read that a current H.R. executive claimed the big-a was “proud to provide people short-term employment for the ‘seasons and periods of time’ they need,” how we’ve arrived at an economic landscape where companies like Uber can become fabulously rich by manipulating the stated needs of a very few employees who in fact do need only a part-time, stop-gap job, and claiming that all their employees actually need that (even when they scream and march and organize that they don’t), and therefore they are conveniently not employees—who’d be entitled to benefits like sick and vacation pay— but rather “independent proprietors,” or some nonsense like that. Yup, it’s all about freedom, right? The freedom to exploit whomever the hell you want, and call it good because you’ve created a job, and heck, we all value jobs. Right?
And finally, it’s not hard to see, when you dig into the data as Kantor, Weise, and Ashford have so admirably done, how am-a-drone’s vision for hourly workers perpetuates and deepens the systemic racism this country and our whole world struggles with— and which so many organizations fight heroically to heal and transform. The bottom-rung workers within big-a’s US operations are 68% people of color (specifically 33% Black, 32% Hispanic, 8% Asian, 5% others), and 32% White; at the executive level, it’s 74% White, 2% Black, 3% Hispanic, 19% Asian. In Relentless am-a-drone’s vision and practice, Black and Hispanic folks are essential cogs in the machine which should be used as relentlessly as possible, and when they break down (or when, by your calculations, they are statistically due to break down, or start losing efficiency) should be replaced with another, cheaper cog, so that the machine can keep producing, keep competing, keep amassing more profits for the folks at the top to enjoy. (Or some of them, anyway; the managerial and executive level workers at am-a-drone are also pushed relentlessly, as has also been well-documented.) And hell, you can even program computers to do that messy business of firing those depleted and broken-down workers, so they absolutely cannot appeal to you on an emotional level. Even better, you can practically prevent them from appealing on a legal, logical, or factual basis too, as long as you construct the appeal process to be so labyrthine that they eventually just say the hell with it, despite the injustice, because they’ve calculated that their chances of survival are actually better if they just move on than if they dig in and fight. If planned obsolescence can work for electronics, automobiles, mobile phones, and software, why not for your company’s employees! Right?
Of course not. And of course, many of those same hourly workers feel absolutely compelled to take the job they can get, like it or not; many customers, especially with unemployment having exploded as it did early in the pandemic, feel similarly compelled to buy whatever’s cheapest, lacking the luxury to look beyond the price tag. But we know there are plenty of consumers— I count myself among them— who are not as pressed, who do have a choice, and can buy something from a different, less destructive business even if it is more costly or less convenient in the short term to do so, or can simply do without it, in reality. But in US consumer culture we have made idols of ease, low prices, and “convenience,” and we make excuses and spin false stories in order to serve them: about how busy we are, how we “need” that convenience, “need” the low price, then shake our head oh-so-compassionately while reading a story like the Times’ (again, there are tall stacks of these by now, awaiting your attention), or worse, ignore it altogether, and go on click-consuming at great long-term cost to our planet, our humanity, and yes, our values.
I know so many very good, ethical people who would never deliberately buy clothing from exploitative sweatshops, or pour toxins into their garden, or treat people who earn less than them as a lesser human being. Yet somehow, am-a-drone, which does the equivalent of all this and far more, gets a pass, because the addictive convenience of click-shopping and quick delivery either outweighs their qualms about Relentless, or blinds them to them altogether. Even though it’s been well-documented that, in addition to treating hourly workers like disposable diapers, this company’s predatory, deceptive, and myopic business practices, its steadfast avoidance of tax responsibility, and its indifference toward civic engagement and philanthropic duty has wreaked havoc for: independent bookstores, their owners and employees, and literary culture generally; the affordable housing market, here in Seattle especially but also elsewhere; countless vendors and creators, whose products have been counterfeited; and independent businesses of all kinds and sizes (but especially small businesses) crushed in the tidal-wave of big-a’s artificially low prices (which they later raise, once the earth is sufficiently scorched)… none of this seems to trump the “need” to consume as quickly, frequently, and conveniently as you want.
* * *
As it does for workers and consumers living on the knife’s edge, my heart aches to see so many excellent organizations, so many deeply moral charity and justice missions, feel forced to align with Relentless. Or with any corporation that undermines their work in some form— but especially am-a-drone. (Hell, when you’re the biggest, you’ve got to expect the scrutiny.)
I get it. Or at least, I’m in a position to get it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve looked at dwindling funding in the face of urgent needs (like right now in 2021), and wondered how the hell my organization would stay alive. I’ve dealt with the apathy and ignorance, the arrogance and condescension, that some middle and upper class folks can hold and even spout (with neither reflection nor compunction) about charities and truly mission-based organizations. I’ve wondered at times how one can possibly turn down any source of revenue, no matter how odious its source.
So about the organizations, I cannot judge. All I can do is issue a plea, to ask you to consider doing the math, reading the stories (slowly, to let them sink in), and going for a long walk with your values and your mission. Maybe that math would really add up— maybe you have a crack squad of volunteers who could do all that promoting and bookkeeping and administration of “smiles” gratis. Maybe the stories would not convince your head, move your heart, or stick in your gut.
But on that long walk, I ask you to consider the possibility that by aligning with “smile” you may be feeding the very wolf that seeks to eat you. In fact, it’s drooling to eat your whole village. As Greg Bensinger, who has covered the big-a for a decade for The New York Times, recently summed up in his recent piece marking Bezos’ transition from CEO to space cadet, “Bezos has made online shopping addictively easy and obscured the very human cost of his rapacious juggernaut.” Despite your best intentions, you may be helping to perpetuate and grow a cynical, amoral, destructive vision of humanity that is antithetical to your very mission, a ravenous corporate machine that churns Relentlessly, 24-7 and around the world, to see its vision realized. Your mission, organization, or charity— your heart’s work— may ultimately, as a consequence, be devoured.
Please consider how much your values and mission are worth. I daresay they are worth more than a pile of ha-pennies. They are your treasure, where your heart resides, and the heart of those you walk the long road with and for. They are your hope, and all of ours.
In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, the notion of hope is always expressed as belief despite, or in the absence of, the evidence. To paraphrase St. Paul, the belief in things not yet seen, and the strength to endure the wait. In that sense, it’s quite different than optimism, which is about analyzing the situation based on its known or knowable elements, and placing a calculated bet. Hope, my friends, is what mission work is all about. It’s what helped Nelson Mandela endure his unjust prison sentence, what marched Martin Luther King, Jr into LBJ’s office to make the “unreasonable” push for voting rights, what fueled Gandhi as he “foolishly” marched to the sea to make salt, and what moved Dorothy Day to pick up both bread and pen every day and offer both in service of the “hopeless and unworthy” poor in her midst.
Hope is what true generosity— the widow’s mite— is all about. The faith that if you sow, sow, sow— that if you work as if it’s all up to you, then pray as if it’s all up to God (and the other hearts God is trying to move into action)— though not every seed will bear abundant fruit, some will. And those fruits will provide a harvest you can eventually bring to the table, perhaps with great sacrifice but also with great love, for all to share and be filled.
* * *
When I reflect upon that night years ago in the Dominican mountains, I realize hope is what made it possible. Once I finally shut up, ate my food, and allowed myself to enjoy it, I was both humbled and proud that Felicia and Cristian had stood their ground. They did not accept the money I tried to offer them for the beans, nor my contention (embarrassingly condescending, in retrospect) that they could not afford to make such a sacrifice. By strict, capitalistic calculations, they could not afford it, it’s true. But they had hope that if they offered their beans in a truly generous way—sincerely, vulnerably, just as the Earth had offered them herself— God’s calculations would come out differently, making a way out of no way, escribiendo derecho en líneas torcidas (writing straight on crooked lines). They had beans, and they had hope. And they were determined to share both, because they knew that true generosity opens the gift of life.
I too have hope, thanks in no small part to my long friendship and partnership with Felicia, Cristian, and many others living on the knife’s edge with what I can only think of as Spirit-fueled resiliency and endurance. I have hope that my organization does not need am-a-drone’s ha-pennies, and now we have some evidence too. (We’re still standing, eighteen months into this pandemic, among other things.) I have hope that, despite this recent union defeat in Alabama, the people power of unions will eventually win the day, there and elsewhere; and in Seattle, where workers are stirring forcibly, some early evidence is starting to emerge.
I invite you to walk with me and many others, as we try to follow the prophets and saints who have led the way, on this pilgrimage of hope.
You know what? I think you’ve already begun. Welcome. I look forward to our journey together.