Tim Carmody

A Reading List for the End of the Heroic Phase

Welcome back to the Amazon Chronicles, a newsletter about Amazon and the companies, communities, and technologies in its shadow. First, some housekeeping: I had expected to send this newsletter out more than a week ago, but I managed to contract a non-COVID illness that briefly put me out of commission.

New Year's News Roundup

There has been so much Amazon news piling up over the holiday break that I figured it would be best to take a short break from my essays on Amazon, the tech industry, and late capitalism. So instead we'll focus on… the immediate fallout of late capitalism on the tech

Two ways to think about decline

The end of the heroic age of the tech giants does not imply that tech giants are in decline, but confusing the two is natural. Observers and analysts usually talk that way about companies, especially tech companies and the platforms they enable: they grow, mature, then decline (in relevance if

Amazon's heroic phase is over

What does it mean to say "the heroic phase of the tech giants is over?" The phrase "heroic phase" has some history. It's from Marxist history and cultural theory. The idea was formulated by Marx himself, but popularized (for a certain value of "popular") by the Hungarian thinker Georg (or

Another beginning

Welcome back to Amazon Chronicles, your admittedly irregular blog/newsletter about all things Amazon – plus the users, customers, workers, and industries in its shadow. It's been two weeks since my last newsletter – I took a break for the US's Thanksgiving holiday, and very sadly, our beloved Boston Terrier Beedie passed

News

Coming soon

This is Amazon Chronicles, a brand new site (well, a version of two old sites) by Tim Carmody that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new

Loss Leaders

Why shuttering Amazon's Devices group may be a mistake

Amazon's Digital Returns Problem

Amazon has a viral problem with its e-book return program

Two Ways Amazon Misjudged Its Workforce Pipeline

Amazon has made crucial missteps in understanding its employees' future, from the distribution floor to the C-suite.

The Earnings Were Bad, Sure — But Were They That Bad?

It was an accelerated growth cycle, not an accelerating one

The Earnings Drumbeats Are Calling

It's always foolish to post a newsletter just before a big quarterly earnings statement is coming (tomorrow, if you didn't know). But there is so much going on, I wanted to try to make some sense of it all before it gets drowned out in the post-quarterly tsunami of Amazon news and speculation.

Andy Jassy's First Annual Letter

Plus a quick roundup of the week's Amazon news

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A new Amazon Chronicles post!

A new home for Amazon Chronicles (at Revue!)

Dear readers,When I last wrote in December, I said that I hoped I would have a chance to bring back this newsletter, and behold! Here it is, once again. This is the third extended hiatus this newsletter has taken in the 3+ years since it began, but I can assure you: all three were unavoidable.In thi

Amazon Chronicles on Hiatus

Dear Readers, I wanted to let you know that I’m putting Amazon Chronicles on indefinite hiatus. Paid subscribers should have billing paused as of Wednesday, December 8th. Free readers will have to suffer the charm of even fewer emails about Amazon for awhile. I’ve never had an easy

What Is Amazon Spending Money On?

Amazon’s latest quarterly earnings report was its most dour in some time: the company missed Wall Street expectations and was accordingly conservative in its guidance for the usually blockbuster holiday quarter coming up (“Operating income is expected to be between $0 and $3.0 billion, compared with $6.9

Amazon’s Push and Pull With Its Marketplace

One way to read a good chunk of the last week or so of news stories about Amazon is as a complex push and pull between Amazon and the third-party sellers that make up its marketplace. On the one hand, Amazon wants to present itself as absolutely essential to those

Working Backwards: Dave Limp on Amazon’s Six Page Memo

At The Verge, my old colleague/boss Nilay Patel has a new Decoder interview with Dave Limp, SVP of the devices group at Amazon. It’s available as a podcast or lovingly transcribed, and is well worth listening to / reading — I’ll be referring to the transcript throughout here. As

So Many Cameras, in Search of a Vision

Maybe we’re just fools, but one reason why tech PR events announcing a new set of products and services have caught on as quasi-pop culture is that they offer a chance to see a vision of the future. We’re chasing that feeling we had the first time we

State Lawmakers Want Public and Workers to Know What Amazon’s Up To

A California law signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday aims to regulate and make more transparent warehouses run by Amazon and other employers. Here is Suhauna Hussain’s summary in the Los Angeles Times: The first-of-its-kind legislation, AB 701, gives Amazon and other warehouse workers new power to fight

What Could E-Bookstores Be Like?

A small news story slid in over the weekend, but I think it’s noteworthy enough to take a second look. It’s an interview with Bookshop.org’s Andy Hunter by Techcrunch’s Danny Crichton. There’s a lot of data here. For example: * Bookshop’s sales are in

Alec MacGillis on Amazon and the Evolution of Work, Part 2

(This is the second part of an interview I did with reporter Alec MacGillis, author of the book Fulfillment, in the spring about Amazon and the evolution of mostly blue-collar work across the United States; see here for the first part of the interview.) Tim Carmody: I wanted to ask

Alec MacGillis on Amazon and the Evolution of Work

Back in the spring, I interviewed Alec MacGillis, author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. This was while union elections were taking place at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemmer, Alabama; I was just starting to think about a series on how Amazon was transforming work worldwide, and

A Glimpse of the City

This will be (I hope) a brief coda to my earlier post, “Tolkien and Amazon’s Fight for a Franchise.” In that post, I claim that J.R.R. Tolkien’s First Age stories, collected in The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, Beren and Luthien, and The Fall of Gondolin

Tolkien and Amazon’s Fight for a Franchise

Amazon is spending a huge amount of money on its new multi-season television series set in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy universe: an estimated 250 million USD for the rights and 465 million USD just for the first season, making it quite likely the most expensive television series in