voluntary prime

the blue pill is Pottersville

Look, I am not good at voluntary poverty. That’s why we practice it—in the interest of perfecting it.

But there are a few small measures that no longer seem radical to me, but are in fact radical beginnings of re-making a social order:

• getting rid of your credit cards

• ask for what you need and give away the excess rather than save for the future

• not ordering food via an app like door dash or Uber eats

• not taking a cab via Uber or Lyft

• deleting your Amazon Prime account

I unsubscribed from Amazon Prime way back in the Dark Ages BC (Before COVID) in 2019. So I’ve been living Amazon-free for a very, very long time. I’ve lived Amazon-free for so long that I think Google Search Engine’s SEO has stopped pushing the website in my face, because I never click on it. Either I have learned to just gloss over its URL in my search results or it has stopped appearing there.

I used to go there, sometimes, for books. But now I don’t even make my way there for thatn, since you can no longer “Look Inside” and read a free preview (how I read the first chapter of Stephanie Foo’s chilling and life-changing memoir What My Bones Know).

I went Amazon-free in part beacuse I had read Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All and I was disgusted with Amazon. Disgust paired with inconvenience is a powerful fuel for moral conviction.

After reading Girirdharadas’ take-down of Silicon-Gilded Robber-Barron Capitalism, I wanted to disinvest from my new iPhone—my first smartphone, and a baptism into the so-called conveniences of App-Life.

Shortly after, I moved into an apartment on Amsterdam Avenue whose buzzer did not work, and so therefore, the Amazon package couriers could not enter the building and leave packages. This mean that the majority of our packages were delivered to the post office down the street. And that’s all well and good, but the reason I was ordering packages on Amazon to begin with is because I was a Busy Working Girl who did not Have the Time to Go to the Store.

Well, guess which public entity has even more restrictive opening times than The Store?

You guessed it.

Each walk down to that post office was another leg on the pilgrimage of conversion and redemption. With each step, the slow dawn of wisdom broke upon me: this isn’t worth it.

So after several months of that nonsense, I canceled Amazon Prime—because its promise of delivering whateverly desired product almost-immediately to my door was rendered moot: the friction-free experience that the digital world promises was revealed as a lie. I knew it was better to support my local economy, and so was spending a dollar or two more on something from a local retailer rather than the lipstick-on-a-sweatshop-pig system of Amazon Prime really so inconvenient?

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In the wake of the Washington Post’s many trials and tribulations and bleeding six figures of subscribers this fall, Laura Miller wrote a recommendation in Slate: don’t cancel your Washington Post subscription (it makes Bezos no money anyhow and merely creates job instability for journalists). Instead, she said, cancel Amazon Prime:

Canceling Amazon Prime, and communicating your reasons for doing so, is a step you can take that directly rebukes Jeff Bezos. There are plenty of good reasons not to patronize Amazon. And although Bezos no longer wholly owns the company, it remains the source of his fortune and therefore his power. (The Post, on the other hand, seems to be little more than his hobby.) Two hundred thousand people canceling Prime wouldn’t be catastrophic for a company that made over $40 billion on subscriptions last year. But given that Prime is the engine that runs the whole retail arm of the company, no dent in its subscriber base will go unnoticed. If the argument is that rich people care more about safeguarding their money than they do about higher principles, then if you want to hit them, show them you’re willing to hit them where they make that money, even if that means inconveniencing yourself.

Read her whole piece here.

It is astonishing how Amazon Prime has somehow bamboozled more than half of our country’s population (according to the 2023 numbers) into signing up for an account. It is scary that we are so seduced by the promise of convenience (a faulty promise, that only works in a small set of scenarios and ignores the inconvenience created for our invisible neighbors in the supply chain before it reaches our door) that we can overlook the destruction on our communities, environment, or labor force for the sake of two-hour delivery.

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In December, Amazon Prime was once again in the news, this time for antics so predictable they might as well be cartoonish.

Inexplicably, Amazon Prime cut out the final act of It’s a Wonderful Life where George Bailey experiences a world in which he has never been born…and that world of Pottersville looks a lot like Bezosville.

Why would you murder a classic by removing the pivotal scene that is the entire point of the film?

Well, stabbing in the dark, here’s a guess: James and I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas this year, and I don’t know when the last time you watched it was, but I never quite fully grasped its radical economic message. (It has probably only grown more and more radical with time.) It is crazy to me that Americans can watch the scene of Pottersvile and not realize:

I think Amazon Prime has a very high estimation of Americans’ IQ, and so clearly they also did not think that Americans could possibly watch George Bailey waltz through Pottersville and not realize that Amazon—and American capitalism writ large—is clearly Pottersville. Small neighborhood, personalist, relationship-based businesses have been put out of business by one, all-encompassing, profit-hungry behemoth. Morality, goodness, relationship, care for one another and the earth all decay under the gaping appetite of one man’s quest for nothing more noble than simply: more money pwease.

Anyhow, I am not very good at voluntary poverty: you may not be any good either. And that’s okay. One day at a time, rich young men. Let us not walk away sad. So if we all take one small step from divesting from the Amazon monopoly and reinvesting in the small bodegas, beauty shops, and hardware stores around us, we may be one step closer to the sort of economy we want to live in: one step closer toward Bedford Falls, and one step back from the Pottersville in which we live.