Amazon Prime Day Is Dystopian - The Atlantic
Today is Prime Day. Imagine trying to explain that to an alien or to a time traveler from the 20th century. “Amazon turned 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduced Prime Day, a global shopping event,” reads Amazon’s formal telling of the ritual’s 2015 origins. “Our only goal? Offer a volume of deals greater than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.” The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself. It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions people worldwide. I hope you are spending it with your loved ones.
Prime Day is a singular and strange artifact, but then again, so is Prime, Amazon's $119-a-year membership service, which buys subscribers free one-day shipping, plus access to streaming media, discounts at the Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods, and a host of other perks. Prime is Amazon’s greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products. With 200 million subscribers worldwide, it is the second-most-popular subscription service on Earth, poised to overtake Netflix in the not-so-distant future.
This popularity is both extremely logical and a little perplexing. When you subscribe to Prime, you’re paying to pledge your fealty to a single company’s ecosystem—something that consumers once wanted to avoid. You’re paying to have your every purchase cataloged—also something consumers aren’t wild about, at least in theory—so that Amazon can use that information to sell you, and people like you, more goods. You’re paying to become part of a system that is purpose-built to keep you paying, forever, and to keep Amazon growing, forever, like a katamari ball or an avalanche or, in Amazon’s corporate argot, a “flywheel.”
