I am a very loyal Amazon.com customer. I mostly patronize it for the eKindle eReader ecosystem which I find the best, most convenient and one of the greatest boons to my learning and reading ever. I am so enamored of it that it has inspired me to take up the typing cudgel after many years again of pseudo-literary writings, some fiction, and one new genre for me, a review of books which I plan to expand from one useful genre pertinent to Kindle users, and some others on politics, and the history of medicine.

But I was dismayed to read this weekend’s not so flattering article about Amazon’s work conditions and culture as revealed in an article by the New York Times this weekend, entitled: “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big
Ideas in a Bruising Workplace, ” that changed my view of Amazon severely within the time it took to read this lengthy and scathing article.

I fear that this could be the new way as the activists would say, of technologically oppressing the modern worker. One of the first of cours portrayed by Charlie Chaplin a century ago was of pushing the worker to the limits of speed of performing tasks of simply repetitive tasks on the assembly line, speed the line up, force the worker to put together as many widgets as possible, or in his case in the movie, tightening two big lugs on machinery with both arms simultaneously. The funny but starkly satirical lesson-bit was that after work he was still automatically tightening the lugs for hours with no wrenches in his hands without being able to stop after his shift was over.

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