In every possible way, the on-demand video service offered by Amazon is infinitely worse than Netflix; and not just because of the corporate hellscape they want us all to live in.
Rushing to sort Christmas presents out, I clicked and clicked until I somehow ended up on a trial month of Amazon Prime. It boasts free and speedier deliveries. The downside? You end up with their answer to Netflix. A clunky, monstrous child that could have only been born from the most depraved mind.
Everything about Amazon Video feels like one of the cheap knockoffs of major brands you can also find on Amazon; it is annoying at best, you constantly wonder how you allow yourself to be so degraded, and there is the ever persistent feeling a sick thing is taking place. Slightly move the mouse? You get this all this annoying shit on the screen. It’s not like watching TV on the internet involves extensive amounts of flicking between tabs to check your twitter or whatever. No, this is the cinema please keep your phone on silent and your hands off the mouse.
This is the engineering marvel that comes from the same people who’ve spawned a mesmerizingly disciplined robot army that works tirelessly in an intricate global network of warehouses, distribution centres and lockers.
This is fine. This is all I want. This is exactly how God intended on-demand video to be when he invented Netflix.
Perhaps it is early days yet, you might say. Think of Amazon Video like their first unpaid internship in the busy, competitive world of on-demand streaming, you might argue. But they don’t even have a dedicated website for this, it is simply tucked away in one of hundreds of other tabs. They even have another, nicer more wholesome website to herd you back into their outstretched and hungry arms. This sickness is intentional.
This is the most twisted, horrid secret of it all; this is exactly how they want it. This is exactly how they want entertainment, work, transport and the rest of society to be – all one simply click, one slight utterance away from shopping on Amazon. It’s not even about the money; Amazon Video is a huge loss leader. They want you, they want it all.
You think I’m joking, right? Have you ever heard of the Amazon Dash Button? You buy this button, and place it somewhere in your house. One for laundry detergent beside the washing machine, another one for beer in your man cave – you get the idea. It’s hooked up to your Amazon account and the algorithm sorts you out. Easy.
This is the utopia Silicon Valley offers; the best minds of a generation are innovating new and daring ways to lock you in as a customer. Alexa, Eco and the Dash Button make shopping as easy as uttering a word or flicking a conveniently located button. I can’t wait until the Amazon Toilet monitors bowel movements to automatically correct your drone delivered grocery list.
Amazon wants to be everywhere you are, because it wants shopping to be possible at all moments. Amazon Video is one small part of this step into a glaringly new future, which is simply an intensified scream from the worst corporate strategies of the past. You will at all times be within a click or a howl from securing your favourite brands.
Sure, you say. If I opt into Prime I’ll be further entrenched as a customer of theirs. Damn, if I’m enough of an idiot to get Alexa, or Eco or even the Dash Button I deserve it – but it is my choice, I can choose to not take part. Capitalists always have weird and dastardly ways to entrench themselves into the market. This is just the latest, shiny version of deals, branding and convenience. I am still free.
But this about more than an online retailer, or the gadgets of your home – they’ve turned their attention to you because they’ve already conquered society; the Guardian reported that Amazon paid just €16.5m (£15m) in tax on European revenues of €21.6bn (£19.5bn) reported through Luxembourg in 2016. As Ana Arendar, Oxfam’s head of inequality, said: “Despite some action by ministers and companies, widespread corporate tax avoidance continues to cost both rich and poor countries billions every year that could pay for schools and lifesaving healthcare.” They don’t want to pay into the welfare state because they’re fighting to transcend the state itself.
One of the few watchable things on offer is The Man in the High Castle. Average acting and poor writing in the familiar genre of What If History. The big What if is about the Nazi’s winning WW2 and taking over the United States of America. In the first 30 seconds we’re treated to a sieg heil. Gripping drama, that. This is cartoon Nazism; no serious allegories are made about the modern day rise of the far-right or the deep, historic links between Fascism and capitalism. It’s sort of perfect that the best Amazon can muster is a limp attempt at dystopian fiction – you’d think as the real builders of a totalising, corporate hellscape they’d know a thing or two about dystopia? Maybe it’s difficult to fictionalise a dark future when you’re already working at building it, but you’re also convinced this will be really, really good.
Amazon Video could be improved, sure. But its rotten core would still remain – it is part of the larger, wild appetite to be ever-present and slowly secede corporate power from that of society. Limited selection, poor user interface and a clear lack of self-awareness. Amazon Video is not good.
Chris Hayes normally writes about art in London,
he is actually most proud of his tweets,
and trying to get better at Instagram.
Chris Hayes 