Telling Bezos Goodbye, or the Real Revenge of the Nerds

For me, today was the last straw.

It wasn’t enough when Bezos apparently commanded his WaPo editorial staff not to endorse Kamala Harris. (I didn’t think that made much difference to the “low information” Fox fiends who put Trump over the top.) It wasn’t enough that I used to be able to find a precise product on Amazon with a well-thought-out search request but now have to wade through pages of irrelevant “Sponsored” products, as if computers could no longer apply basic logic or handle detail.

But Bezos reportedly telling his editorial staff to focus on free markets and “personal liberties” while our democracy melts down was too much for me. I’m now going to cancel my WaPo subscription, and I’m committed to using my spare time in retirement to avoid shopping on Amazon. Already I’ve discovered that Home Depot has a website for online inventory, product selection and purchase/delivery much like Amazon’s, and I’ve started using it for the hardware and tools that I buy.

Then I started thinking more broadly. Today’s oligarchs are now jumping on the bandwagon of despotism, just as the leaders of I.G. Farben (maker of the Zyklon B Holocaust death gas), Krupp, and Seimens did in Hitler’s time. But there’s a big difference between some of today’s oligarchs and Hitler’s.

Hitler’s goons had established vast industrial empires of steel, aluminum, wheels, big machines, chemicals, and gigantic plants to make them. In contrast, many of today’s oligarchs have built their empires on the shifting sands of software. That means that their empires are much easier to topple and reproduce, especially Bezos’ and Zuckerberg’s.

Take Bezos, for instance. His Amazon sells others’ stuff. Suppose a software startup offered similar website software to every vendor of stuff in our nation. Suppose it put all the local sellers you once used to buy from on line. Suppose you could pick out their products at home, with precise searches that actually work. Suppose you could choose among in-store pickup, delivery by USPS, or more expensive (and faster) delivery by courier, or perhaps even delivery by an Uber of Lyft driver trained and software-programmed for package logistics.

Would you purchase online that way and kiss Bezos and his threatened right-wing monopoly of online retail goodbye? I would.

Funny thing, that. Trump and Musk are in the process of firing tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of federal workers. Surely many of them are software designers or programmers. Many may have accepted Musk’s “resign now, get paid until September” plan. Some may want to use that down time to start a business, especially one that levels the playing field.

They could call their product “Freedom Shopper.” They could make versions that run on Apple, Google, Microsoft, Linux and foreign-made machines. They could make it work on cheap machines within the price range of every local shop now losing market share to Amazon. And so they could help bring back local shops from the ranks of twenty-first-century zombies.

How hard would it be? I think not too hard. It probably takes a lot of non-essential subroutines to display all those “sponsored” products and collect the ad money from their manufacturers or distributors. And take a look at the category line on Amazon’s site: most small shops don’t have a pharmacy, a grocery store, and all the other stuff that Amazon has put together in its quest to become the monster that ate retail.

The legal impediments I know something about. I spent some 32 years consulting and teaching about intellectual property. The most common form of IP protection for software is copyright; but it doesn’t protect ideas, only the precise form in which they are coded and/or displayed. Some software ideas are patented, but it’s not too hard for experienced patent lawyers to check that, and not too hard for clever programmers to work around the patents. And all the providers and users of “Freedom Shopper” software could share the expense of this professional advice.

So here’s my simple dream. Some oligarchs truly believe in democracy, even if it doesn’t line their own pockets. I see them and progressive venture capitalists getting together to finance one or more software startups that can let every local seller become a mini-Amazon.

In so doing, they could not just slow the relentless march of right-wing monopoly far quicker than even valiant public servants like Lina Khan, the doughty head of the FTC now reportedly about to resign. They could also help restore the fabric of local communities, whether in city or country. They could bring small shops back into the mainstream of retail commerce where, until Amazon came along, they’d always been.

Imagine being able to support your local shops in person and—whenever the weather is bad, you are too tired, or the next pandemic rages—on line. And when the “Freedom Shopper” site made a copyrighted change in programming or GUI, as software nerds are wont to do, you would learn that change only once, and it would apply most everywhere you shopped.

Nerds and small retailers arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

If you know any nerds who are out of work, especially any of those now leaving government in droves, please send them a link!

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