April 06, 2023

How Amazon Reshapes Small Business to Serve Itself w/ Moira Weigel

1 hour 8 minutes

Paris Marx is joined by Moira Weigel to discuss the third-party sellers who supply many of the goods sold through Amazon, how the company’s policy decisions reshape small businesses to act like mini-Amazons, and what that means for regulatory responses.

Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School, and a founding editor of Logic Magazine. Her most recent book is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk about What They Do--And How They Do It, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff. Follow Moira on Twitter at @moiragweigel.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Moira recently wrote a report for Data & Society looking into Amazon’s “trickle-down monopoly,” and previously worked with Ava Kofman and Francis Tseng on research into white nationalist publishing on Amazon.

Aiha Nguyen and Eve Zelickson wrote a report on how Ring doorbells are used to surveil delivery workers.

Logic Magazine published an interview with an anonymous AWS engineer.

In March 2020, an Amazon seller bought 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer and tried to price gouge.

Marketplace Pulse found that Amazon fees for sellers now account for 51.8% of an average sale, rising from 35.2% in 2016.

Amazon is now the third-largest digital advertising company after Google and Facebook.

In January, John Herman wrote about the state of Amazon that touched on some of the Chinese brands.

Amazon has been scaling back its private label business, in part due to regulatory fears.

Books mentioned: Work and Alienation in the Platform Economy: Amazon and the Power of Organization by Sarrah Kassem, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang, and The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy by Lin Zhang.

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