Alexa Welch Edlund/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP
At the Amazon fulfillment center in Chester, Virginia
Frontline’s two-hour film Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos, which premiered Tuesday and is now available for streaming, begins with a speech where Bezos is touting his plan for the colonization of space. The audacity of this pronouncement, and the mental and physical transformation of Bezos from a nerdy, balding guy in an ill-fitting workshirt to the equivalent of Iron Man, is palpable as the film flashes back to Amazon’s beginnings in a garage.
The linkage sets the course for the film’s argument: that Bezos always wanted to rule the cosmos, and took a deliberate, relentless path to reach that goal (relentless.com was the original name of Amazon, and it still forwards to the site). Workers, sales partners, and the privacy of the general public were collateral damage in that journey. Even Shel Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee besides Bezos, says in the film that he’s scared about what the company has become.
Filmmakers James Jacoby, Anya Bourg, and Megan Robertson document Amazon’s rise from the world’s largest bookstore to its attempt to be the infrastructure upon which every economic transaction in the world sits (the world and beyond, really). The deep reliance on data and surveillance, the clever skirting of government rules and regulations, the use of economic power to gain political power—it’s all there. The filmmakers got significant access to former, and even current, Amazon executives, and this makes for some of the best moments in the film. Time and again, Jacoby, who conducted most of the interviews, confronts these executives with voluminous reporting on worker accidents, consumer safety, anti-competitive behavior, and panopticon-style spying. And time and again, they deflect in the most revealing ways.
The result is a portrait of either deliberate dissembling or self-delusion. The reality of Amazon’s dominance and ambition, however, comes through fully. I talked to Jacoby just before the film’s premiere on Tuesday about how he approached the subject, what we can learn from Bezos, the fear Amazon engenders in the marketplace, and what he thinks regulators should be looking at with this company. An edited transcript follows.
David Dayen: I did a chapter on Amazon for my next book (Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, releases June 9), and the hardest thing for me was figuring out where to begin. This is a company that wants to be the entire economy. How do you approach that as a storyteller?
James Jacoby: What you just described is the reason I haven’t slept for a year. As a storytelling challenge it’s so vast and reaches in so many directions. We kept coming back to the idea that chronology was our friend, and Bezos was our friend. We could have tackled it topically, about the e-commerce business and its implications. But from the start, we thought the only way to do this coherently would be chronological.
In some ways that posed other problems. We spoke to current-day workers and wanted to highlight issues, but sometimes the consequences came up only recently. A lot of the new problems with the marketplace, where sellers have been squeezed with anti-competitive behavior, we did that in the antitrust section in the Hachette period (Amazon had a protracted struggle with book publisher Hachette, where they blackballed its books from their site to pressure them to accept less favorable payment terms). So we danced around in time, and somehow it works.
The story explodes in around 2013, when it does totally become this everything company. That’s when cloud computing takes off, Alexa comes out in 2014, and then their foray into Hollywood. The second hour is about 2013 and onward. It was tough to tell, because what do all these things have to do with one another? The tie that binds them is Bezos’s vision. His tactics haven’t changed over the years. The key, storytelling-wise, was to suggest from the beginning there would be a relentless pursuit of his vision. Alexa made sense with that. A lot of the things that I thought would be disparate, the threads came together.
Dayen: You appear to focus on Bezos himself. This is the richest man in the world but he has a very threadbare public profile. What were you able to learn and how does it inform his company?
Jacoby: You have to feast on crumbs, unfortunately. Even those who know him don’t want to talk about him personally. There’s 1) a reverence for him, and 2) a fear of him. We had to rely on the people who were there in the early years, these little details of people he hired, how he would do the hiring, wanting to know people’s SAT scores and how they think on their feet. Certainly we know his leadership principles, and the dogmatic adherence to customer obsession and getting big fast. There are things that are known. A person on my team, Megan Robertson, looked at all the footage, every scrap of footage on Bezos. You watch how he repeats himself. It’s a finely tuned message he has not veered from in 25 years. There’s his philosophy of experimentation. Brad Stone uncovered the “Amazon.love” memo for his book. It was 2011 and Bezos was taking stock of the company that it’s becoming. And it’s a revelatory moment. He talks about what’s cool and not cool. It’s not cool to be a conqueror, it’s cool to be an explorer. Even though we’re dealing with an utter conqueror. So we relied on a lot of that stuff. Even with the David Pecker dick pic situation, nobody wanted to go there on camera. But some were willing to say he did a brilliant thing with that Medium post. He turned that into a win for himself, showed how you can’t extort the richest guy in the world.
Dayen: And you really see this physical transformation, this everyman turned into someone with supreme confidence and control?
Jacoby: Yes, you see this transformation. We had details about his Star Trek obsession, stuff from his youth informing where he’s bringing the company. You couldn’t sustain two hours on the man, there’s not enough out there. But it’s reflected in the company. It’s part of this sci-fi future he’s been obsessed with since he was a kid.
Dayen: I was inside an Alexa conference last year where it was described as like the Star Trek computer. It’s truly Amazon’s operating system. What was your takeaway from how Alexa is used?
Jacoby: The really fun thing we got to do, Amazon gave us great access to its executives. They gave us Dave Limp, their head of devices. I said, “How did you get people to put listening devices in their homes.” He says, “I would question the premise.” And then he literally says it’s a listening device. About Alexa, I read him a quote from 1984, about creating a dystopia. He’s like, I hope I’m not creating that dystopia. And then I asked him about the hack of the Ring cameras. And he said that’s an industry problem, about the Internet of Things. I got to challenge him about the Alexa recorders being annotated and transcribed. He said, “Yeah if I could go back in time to disclose that. But I think it would still be wildly popular.”
They really do believe in the Amazon way. They feel it’s the best way. The sense of confidence is so die-hard, because the company has received such good results. It has engendered such tremendous trust. Even the revelations of human beings listening to Alexa didn’t ding the trust with customers.
Dayen: My reporting shows that the market is just terrified of Amazon and what it’s capable of, and there’s a little of that in the film.
Jacoby: As soon as they get in, it’s a game changer for any industry if Amazon sets its sight on it. They have demonstrated the ability to go into these verticals with no core competency, but with tremendous skill and confidence. It’s this disruption machine. And that’s about their core belief in their way. The Amazon way is code for disruption. It’s interesting you bring up fear. Because it comes through in so many different aspects. It’s fear from different industries. It’s fear on the marketplace, and it’s not just small sellers. We talked off the record to major brands. No one wants to go on the record saying anything bad about Amazon. You don’t poke the king. That was an extraordinarily frustrating thing, especially for TV. When the door is closed and we’re not recording, they tell you how it is dealing with essentially an autocrat.
Dayen: You have this thread throughout the film of Amazon executives talking down their own company, saying they’re not big, not powerful, not a factor globally.
Jacoby: Amazon will constantly frame it that Walmart’s way bigger, they’ll say they’re only 4% of retail. There’s a great scene in the film of James Thomson [a former top Amazon executive] about how people were trained not to use terms like market share, but market segment share. He says, “I don’t know what it means but lawyers told me to say that.” They’re constantly trying to frame themselves as a speck.
Dayen: We’ve been here before with retail; I remember a film about Walmart called The High Cost of Low Price. Saying that convenience and price comes with a cost is a hard sell, because Americans like convenience and low prices. How did you attempt to get that across?
Jacoby: As you can imagine, it’s something we struggled with quite a bit on how to frame all of it. The railroad of online commerce was a helpful frame to me for going about this. It’s really the genius of what Bezos did, the genius of network effects and return on scale. We looked at it through the lens of online commerce, and through the lens of monopoly law and how antitrust has been enforced through the last 30 years. Because there are people like Lina Khan and Barry Lynn who have been screaming about this, hurting competition in service of low prices. Being both the platform and a retailer on the platform, that says everything about Bezos’ genius.
Dayen: Did you come into this film with an impression of Amazon, and now after making the film how did that impression change?
Jacoby: I came at it having not really considered Amazon so deeply. I was a Prime member but not a very active one. We had just finished a two-hour film on Facebook. The stakes seemed really high with Facebook, corrupting the flow of information and turning our politics upside down. My editors said, “Why don’t you look at Amazon?” To me there seemed like no central tension. If the question was are they too powerful, could you make a story about it? I didn’t think much about Bezos, the ultimate capitalist in modern times, someone who puts others to shame. So I came at it with very little knowledge, and had astonishment at everything along the way. This is a story beyond anything I ever thought about Amazon. That’s why the early years were so important to me. And then, for example, I had known about workplace grievances, but as we talked to different workers, the grievances like injuries were very important but it was missing the bigger picture, how they’re changing the blue-collar job workforce in this country. There were things about data and experimentation that were fascinating and very deep. So it was much more systemic. It was surprise after surprise.
Dayen: We are seeing renewed scrutiny into Amazon and other big firms. Do you believe there’s a case to break this company up?
Jacoby: One thing I’ve realized in talking to so many diff antitrust experts, this term “break them up,” we have a precedent with AT&T and the Bells, but it’s probably better to be specific about these things. Congress can say, with Amazon, you cannot be in one business and also another. Not about making a case, much more an act of Congress to say you can’t allow Amazon in X biz or Y biz.
Dayen: Like structural separation.
Jacoby: Yes, structural separation. So it’s better to be more specific than saying the [Elizabeth] Warren and [Bernie] Sanders “break them up” thing. Then there are things like being a common carrier, regulated like the railroads were [a common carrier is required by law to allow equal access to its platform for everyone]. With enforcement, there’s not much of a doubt when you talk to people with any experience that there’s plenty for the FTC to investigate about with Amazon using market dominance for unfair play. There’s so much that the FTC could easily look into. It’s not just about consumer welfare. Then you have Congressman [David] Cicilline’s antitrust committee. And he said in the film, “We’ve found anti-competitive behavior in all the tech giants.” There’s the enforcement aspect, we’ve got robust antitrust laws, the spirit is there. And these interesting ideas getting are batted around.
Dayen: I like to talk about rent control, Amazon imposes these rents on the third-party sellers who sell on the site, and there needs to be some regulation of that. Like rent control.
Jacoby: That’s an interesting way to put it. Another way to talk about rent control is common carriage. That’s one and the same. It’s just a way to regulate Amazon’s marketplace.
