Introduction

What do workers want the future to look like? What do they fear?

This book collects nine speculative short stories written by rank-and-file workers at Amazon. They were the product of a year-long workshop initiated by the Worker as Futurist Project and are now being published in print (at cost) and also online and in audio formats (for free).

This is a project of creative activism aimed at challenging Amazon’s domination over reading, writing, workers, and the future. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is a corporation that has transformed the way the world reads. Since it was founded in 1994, Amazon has controlled the lion’s share of physical book sales in many countries, notably in North America and Europe. It dominates the ebook and audiobook markets, and an estimated 50 percent of the public-facing internet runs on its servers. The corporation’s dedication to customer satisfaction is legendary and its use of powerful computing to get products to consumers seems almost magical. Indeed, a number of leading scholars on the matter have argued that Amazon represents a new phase of capitalist power over workers and the world, one that is less about exploiting the labor of workers or the manufacturing of commodities and more about monopolizing and renting out access to key infrastructure, including the logistics networks that get stuff to people or the networks that interlace our lives (Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese 2020; Varoufakis 2023).

When speaking to the public, to shareholders, to government regulators, and to itself, Amazon frequently draws on themes and tropes from science fiction. This is thanks in part to the example set by its iconic founder and present-day Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos, a self-proclaimed “huge science fiction nerd,” who has in recent years channeled a substantial portion of his fortune into a private space program, Blue Origin, which aims to realize his vision of humanity colonizing space (Davenport 2018).

For some, the dream of “ascending to the stars” has meant meeting the gods or traveling to the afterlife; for others it has meant exploring the firmament, the arch of the sky. It has had a particular meaning for Bezos too, one inspired by the late Gerard O’Neill, a physicist at Princeton University, whom Bezos met as a student. Writing in the 1970s, O’Neill argued that “we can colonize space, and do so without robbing or harming anyone and without polluting anything” and laid out a vision for how “nearly all our industrial activity could be moved away from Earth’s fragile biosphere within less than a century” (quoted in Bender 2021).

But while Amazon frequently presents itself as the champion of a bold, technologically liberated future, the actual conditions under which workers labor in its warehouses paint a dystopian picture. Here, austere and metrics-driven management, tireless robots, and constant surveillance aim to drain every ounce of productivity out of each human body (Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese 2020). From the company’s corporate offices to the shopfloor of its subcontracted fleet of delivery drivers, workers for Amazon endure grueling and exploitative conditions. While Bezos uses the wealth he has accumulated through the labor of these workers to explore the final frontier of space, his workers toil here on Earth in dismal scenes that could be ripped from the pages of a classic science fiction text depicting a nightmare of high tech tyranny.

There is something fundamentally wrong and undemocratic about a global system so vastly unequal that it produces billionaires like Bezos, individuals so powerful they can control humanity’s tomorrows. It might be argued that all capitalist firms inherently aspire to compete by forecasting to seize new markets and mitigate risks. But Amazon goes a step further, actively using its immense wealth and influence to dominate the future. With its corporate slogan (to be found in most of its offices and warehouses) “work hard, have fun, make history,” Amazon celebrates a relentless and progressive mission to change the course of human story (see Stone 2022).

But beyond the optimistic science fiction-style rhetoric of Amazon and many of its tech sector rivals lies a cynical and calculated propaganda. The apocryphal words attributed to Jeff Bezos, “Amazon isn’t happening to booksellers, the future happened to booksellers,” (see Rose 2013) conveniently combines a progressive narrative of technological innovation with the supposedly benevolent force of the market, presenting the corporation as an active, benevolent, if occasionally violent, entity, a kind of angel from “the future.” Like a force of nature, capitalist “progress” is portrayed as ruthless, necessary, and inevitable (see McGurl 2021). Their words may promise to radically disrupt and reshape the future, but the truth is that these utopian visions are built in the present day on the backs of the firm’s workers. These workers have no influence or control over the future they’re creating, and it looks a lot like present-day “capitalist realism” and corporate rule (see Fisher 2009).

Amazon workers aren’t merely submitting to this exploitation. Around the world they are rising up to demand better wages and working conditions in the face of Amazon’s extreme hostility to trade unions and other workers’ organizations (Gindin 2024). But beyond day-to-day workplace issues of wages, working conditions, surveillance and job security, what do workers want for the future?

The Worker as Futurist project, which produced this book, emerged in solidarity with these movements led by workers and communities affected by Amazon. It aims to contribute to these struggles by holding space for some profound questions. Workers today are compelled to build a future that will exclude and marginalize them, designed by and for the benefit of their bosses. What futures do these workers envision, fear, or hope for? What do workers, who toil with their bodies and minds everyday inside Amazon’s wealth-generating empire, know about it, in their minds, in their bones, in their dreams? If so, can this profound knowledge somehow be accessed when workers write, in particular when they write science and speculative fiction (SF), a genre that is at the very center of that corporation’s essence? If so, how can we create spaces and times for such writing? And how can that writing be part of a struggle to retake the future and create world where all workers are valued and where the imagination of all people can thrive?

Speculative Fiction and 21st Century Capitalism

The Worker as Futurist project sits against the backdrop of Amazon’s ongoing adoption of the language of optimistic SF. The goals of Amazon and its founder are famously closely intertwined with SF (Davenport 2018). Bezos has frequently cited Star Trek as his primary inspiration, to the extent that he contemplated naming Amazon makeitso.com after the iconic catchphrase of his peronsal hero, Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Bezos even models his appearance after Picard actor Patrick Stewart and openly embraces the vibrant nerd culture surrounding the franchise. According to testimonies from Bezos and other executives, Star Trek episodes have routinely been referenced in Amazon’s corporate strategy and product development meetings, shaping the internal culture of the company (see Stone 2022).

In post-war American capitalism, SF has been seen as a niche and somewhat distasteful commercial genre, rarely taken seriously as a form of literature and marginal to the operations of power. Today, it has moved to the center of capitalist storytelling (see Cohn 2024). Since the late 1990s, advances in computer animation have allowed SF films and tropes—particularly in superhero films—to dominate box office and streaming rankings. Franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, the Marvel Universe, and Dune have become major sources of income across various sectors.

Raised on this storytelling, a new generation of capitalist leaders who have found success at the intersection of high finance and Big Tech have a great love of SF narratives in books and film (see Davenport 2018). This passion continues to profoundly shape their worldview, ambitions, and self-presentation. Like Bezos, figures such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel are candid about their debt to SF. The private aerospace race between Musk and Bezos has seen them cast themselves as conquering SF heroes, enlightened billionaires competing for glory and helping humanity transcend its “blue origins” on Earth to reach the stars.

This shouldn’t be surprising. SF is a genre that celebrates technology and the people who use their brains to invent it. But the centrality of SF is also linked to our increasingly financialized moment of capitalism, which is fundamentally built on speculation about the future. As Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams (2022) demonstrate, the sometimes fraught relationship between Wall Street and Silicon Valley defines capitalist power today, a power that in many ways is greater and more pervasive than any humanity has ever known. Today, the direction of space exploration, the lengthening of lifespans, and the birth of artificial intelligence are set by corporate and financial magnates that are able to act with near impunity. Indeed, their massive and unanswerable power appears to rival or exceed the greatest fears expressed by SF authors of the past.

In this sense, SF is not only important to Amazon because the genre entertains its executives or generates considerable revenue from media and merchandise. SF has also become a key means by which this and perhaps other companies imagine themsleves and communicate their vision internally and externally. Such corporate storytelling depicts the firm as a conquering and benevolent SF empire. It dignifies the loyal officers at its corporate headquarters and many of the warehouse workers and delivery drivers we spoke to in the course of our project reported that they, too, were excited to work for a firm that presented itself as at the vanguard of the technological revolution (not without reason). Amazon’s SF narrative has also been key to winning massive investment from shareholders who are eager to place bets on the company’s future profits. Amazon’s legions of lobbyists echo the SF narrative when they meet with governments and policymakers, presenting the firm as a partner in progress, growth, prosperity, and a bright future.

The Worker as Futurist project asks another question: if SF is so important to the operations of capitalism in the twenty-first century, does it also have a radical potential that might lend itself to the struggles of workers and other oppressed people within, against and beyond that system? (see Jameson 2005; Roke 2020).

We have opted to name this genre SF with a nod to Donna Haraway’s expansive approach to “a practice and process” including but exceeding literature and film. Such a process can weave together “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact [and the] so far.” For Haraway, SF, in its many manifestations, is “a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice” in the name of “becoming-with each other in surprising relays.” In other words, SF is radical in part because it invites our imagination to cross boundaries and borders. It prompts us to reconsider our kinships to the world including questions of “who lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one? What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines connect and disconnect, and so what? What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance?” (Haraway 2016, 2-3; see also Truman 2018).

We have been deeply inspired by an emerging method developed by Black and racialized activists, including adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha and their pathbreaking 2015 book Octavia’s Brood and, more recently, the work of Lola Olufemi (2021). These authors have hosted SF writing workshops for grassroots activists and community organizers because they have come to understand them as spaces to encourage and cultivate the radical imagination: the collective power to envision other futures that might inspire and guide action and activism for social justice in the present (see Haiven 2014a). As brown and Imarisha note, this is especially important for groups that have, historically and today, been denied influence over the direction of humanity’s future. Black and racialized have been maligned by and excluded from the SF genre, which grew alongside and often in support of colonialism and imperialism and has often drawn on racist ideologies and tropes (see Rieder 2008). Inspired by the idea of hosting SF writing workshops as a supplement to activism, our project supported workers at Amazon. To be clear, the oppression faced by these workers is not the same as that faced by Black and racialized people. However, many workers at Amazon are, not coincidentally, also Black or racialized, and so experience oppression and exploitation at the intersection of their race and their status as workers.

We were also roused by the long tradition of social and socially-conscious SF including those that focus on workers and the working class (Vint 2021). Mary Shelley’s (1818) foundational Frankenstein is widely acknowledged to have been influenced by both the Luddite worker rebellions in her native England as well as the controversial ways ruling-class scientists would experiment on the corpses of poor and working-class people. Fritz Lang’s pivotal silent 1927 film Metropolis centers around a workers’ revolt in a futuristic city. In the twentieth century, SF novels and short stories were largely marketed as “light” or low-brow working-class entertainment and often included working-class characters and situations, a tendency that would be politicized in the early work of Ursula K. Le Guin (1974) in novels like The Dispossessed. More recently, many popular SF filsm and series have highlight ed class struggle, including Snowpiercer (2013), Elysium (2013), and The Expanse (2016-2022 – ironically, this latter series is said to have been saved from cancellation by Jeff Bezos himself).

But while many SF texts of the past and present focus on class struggle and the condition of workers, we are not aware of any other project that aims to support workers themselves to write SF. Here, we drew inspiration from New York’s Worker Writers School, which, since 2011, has partnered with orgaizations like PEN to create spaces and times for working people to come together to write and share poetry, notably haiku (Hsu 2017). This project and others recognize that finding one’s unique writerly voice and sharing one’s perspective with others is a key part of the dignity of labor that is the basis of solidarity and struggle. Workers at companies like Amazon are told, implicitly, that their imaginations are irrelevant. They are there to work in order to materialize the imagination of others. When workers reclaim the power of the imagination it enriches not only their lives and their communities, but the wider ecosystem of workers’ struggles and solidarity.

What Do Workers Know?

One significant influence on the Worker as Futurist project was a set of methods and approaches collectively known as Workers’ Inquiry (WI). WI first emerged in Italy in the 1970s, with scholar-activists’ set up reading groups with workers to discover the changing nature of capitalism from the perspective of the proverbial “shop floor” rather than the ivory tower (Haidar and Mohandesi 2013). This approach, which continues to be used widely today, is based not only on the democratic principle that everyone can gain the tools to theorize their conditions and possibilities if given the opportunity and support, but also the faith that workers themselves are perhaps best equipped to theorize on capitalism because it affects them so directly and materially. This theorization must move beyond dogma to grasp how, at every moment, capitalism is transforming people into its workers, and how, equally, at every moment, people are resisting in ways large and small. Capitalism is a system and corporations like Amazon are not, as we are often led to imagine, perfectly engineered machines. Rather, they are always in crisis—a crisis caused by the refusal, resistance, and rebellion of working people.

This approach has become increasingly important as capitalism has developed ever more sophisticated tools to surveil and control workers, techniques that Amazon has pioneered. WI asks us to consider the questions: How have workers’ struggles in the past forced capitalism to “recompose” the working class, creating new conditions that require new forms of solidarity? How are workers today responding to these pressures in a digital age? And how can we respond more effectively by creating conditions where workers can study capitalism from within?

We at the Worker as Futurist project believe that workers can fruitfully understand, theorize, and plot forms of resistance to capitalism through creative expression, especially through the process of writing, particularly within the genre of SF. If, as we have argued, SF is now active in important ways at the very heart of capitalism, maybe that genre is also somehow the system’s achilles’ heel?

We have gained confidence in this theory from the genre itself. In 1997, just two years after Amazon began selling books online and was publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Star Trek: Voyager introduced the character Seven of Nine during its fourth season. Seven was a cyborg rescued by the ship’s crew from the Borg, a hive-minded collective alien species that had, since their on-screen debut in 1989, terrorized the Federation to which the franchise’s heroes belong. The Borg’s chilling mantra, “resistance is futile,” has ingrained itself deeply into popular culture. Before being assimilated by the Borg as a child, Seven was a sentient, independent human. Transformed into a powerful robotic drone, her existence became dedicated to the collective’s mission of assimilating all intelligent life forms across the universe. Separated from the Borg collective, Seven gradually regains her individuality and morality, eventually joining Voyager’s diverse crew. Her humanity restored, she becomes a crucial strategic asset to the starship and the Federation not only for her enhanced physical and intellectual capabilities but also for her unique insight into and residual connection with the Borg collective. Now standing with the resistance against the Borg’s relentless expansion, her intimate knowledge and embodied experience offer a beacon of hope.

Inspired by Seven of Nine, we speculate that perhaps Amazon workers possess a unique intuition and insight into how to resist and rebel against the corporate structures that govern their lives—insights that are not only intellectual but also encoded within their very bodies. If so, rank-and-file Amazon workers could hold the most crucial insights into challenging the company’s goals. Our project speculates that, by fostering welcoming, convivial, and creative spaces, we can collaborate with these workers to awaken their understanding of the terrible future-shaping power wielded by their employer.

In our individualist, capitalist society, where the author and the artist are held up (deceptively) as the icons of unalienated labor and imaginative freedom, we should not underestimate how much dignity workers reclaim when they recognize themselves as creative writers. Dignity here stems from the idea that a worker deserves to imagine the future and have that vision matter, not simply be a pawn or a drone in someone else’s future-making. None of the writers we worked with are under any illusion that their writing will change the world or that their stories can rival the story Amazon is telling about itself. But they take courage and inspiration from the fact that their imaginations matter. This sense of mattering to one another and to the world cannot help but contradict the everyday experience of the vast majority of workers at Amazon and other similar companies. Dignity here is vital to the infrastructure of resistance.

Our Method

This project originated in 2019, when project-lead Max Haiven was commissioned to co-create a participatory art project with so-called “ghost workers” on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (or M-Turk) platform. This project inspired Max to engage further with Amazon workers, and, in 2021, he started the Worker as Futurist project. But a project of this size can’t be undertaken alone, so Max recruited a few collaborators. First, he brought on curator and writer Xenia Benivolski and educator and researcher Graeme Webb. Together, this small team ran a pilot project that paid rank-and-file Amazon workers to watch and discuss SF media, including films, TV series, and video games.

For this pilot project, we successfully recruited about twenty-five current and former Amazon workers into an online film club, where we viewed and collectively discussed SF media. The film club took place over five weeks and coincided with the exploding popularity of Netflix’s South Korean battle-royale drama series Squid Game (2021), which we watched and discussed. In subsequent weeks, participants watched and discussed the 2013 film adaptation of Snowpiercer, selected episodes of Black Mirror, and classic Star Trek episodes that explore issues of labor exploitation. We also played and discussed the 2014 online game To Build a Better Mousetrap by radical game designer Paolo Pedercini, which critiques the oppression and automation of factory work.

The team learned a lot, and we share some of what we learned below.

Building on the success of this pilot project, as well as reflections from organizers and feedback from participants in exit interviews, we launched the next phase of the Worker as Futurist project in early 2023. As the project evolved from a SF film club into writing workshops, Max knew we would need more support, so he invited author and professor of writing Sarah Olutola and graduate research assistant Stella Lawson to join the team. Over the course of eight months, we focused on supporting thirteen rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short SF stories in response to the prompt “the world after Amazon.” The nine short stories that appear in this book are the end result of this project.

As in the pilot project, we recruited Amazon workers online, largely by posting advertisements and notifications on platforms frequented by Amazon workers (largely but not solely in North America), including Reddit, Facebook, and Craigslist. We were open to applications from current or former workers (including but not limited to delivery drivers, warehouse workers, copywriters, programmers, etc.), not only those employed directly by the firm but any worker whose wages were dependent on it. This included those who worked for “independent” resellers who sold exclusively on Amazon’s platforms, or microtask “freelancers” who used Amazon’s proprietary MTurk platform. Managers and higher-level corporate employees were not allowed to participate (and none applied).

Workers were invited to complete a short application form. We selected applicants based on their enthusiasm for the project, their capacity to participate fully, and to ensure a diversity of backgrounds and working experiences. We promised our participants anonymity if they wanted it, as many were concerned about reprisals from Amazon. All our activities in both the pilot and the writing project took place online, mostly on the Zoom platform. Thanks to a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (the country’s independent academic research funding body), the project team was able to compensate the participants financially both for the time they spent in workshops and for their completed stories.

The group that was selected included a mix of warehouse staff, delivery drivers, content writers, MTurk workers, and data analysts from various backgrounds, who had worked for Amazon in the United States and Canada. The participants’ diverse cultural, linguistic, educational, and economic backgrounds sometimes made dialogue challenging. While some were avid fans of SF with deep knowledge of the genre, others were more casual consumers. Their political views on capitalism varied and discussions were generally nonpartisan and centered on a shared aspiration for a better future for everyone.

What the workers did all share, though, was an interest in SF and a passionate desire to be writers. We quickly learned that their writing abilities varied greatly. Some were first time authors while others had been writing and even publishing for years. Even though all had worked for Amazon or in its orbit, their knowledge about the firm and its unique practices as a flagship of twenty-first century tech capitalism was mixed.

And so, the first part of the writing project took the form of six weekly two-hour workshop sessions meant to inspire and equip the writers to respond to the prompt. The first hour was dedicated to learning about Amazon, about writing, and about the publishing industry. We were joined by guests, including: literary critic Marc McGurl, who has studied Amazon’s influence on how and what we read today; American labor historian Robin D. G. Kelley; political theorist and independent Amazon union organizer Charmaine Chua; literary agent Leonica Valcius; and noted Indigenous writer David Robertson. Our interviews did the double duty of contextualizing our project for the participants and providing a space for them to engage with thinkers, activists, and academics, to whom they likely wouldn’t have a connection otherwise (and vice versa). These resulting interviews and others can be heard as part of The Workers’ Speculative Society (2023) podcast we produced alongside the project and accessed at http://afteramazon.world.

In the second hour of the workshop, participants took part in a series of skill-building sessions to help develop their writing capacities for world-building, character and plot development, and descriptive writing. In one exercise, participants read Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous and provocative 1973 story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (about a utopian city that required the pain and suffering of a single child) and then met in breakout rooms to discuss how the author uses imagery and the way the narrator invites the reader to co-create the utopia. Participants were also given out-of-session “homework” to create a response to Le Guin’s “Omelas” through writing, drawing, video, audio, or collage. These responses were then uploaded online to our group’s private Discord server, where all participants could take in and comment on their peers’ submissions.

Following the six workshops, our team led the participating writers through the process of drafting and revising their short stories. This involved three iterations of each story: a first draft to elaborate an idea, a second draft to refine it and develop voice, and a final draft to hone and focus the storytelling. At each stage, our team offered the participants extensive feedback, aimed at helping them tell their unique story. This included sometimes meeting writers one-on-one, and we also hosted bi-monthly “community of practice” drop-ins, where participants could workshop their stories and get feedback and encouragement from the team and their peers. In 2024, the final drafts of the stories were sent to a professional editor for a tune-up, and workers were given the opportunity to revise their stories for a final time before copy editing and proofing.

The result is this book, which is being published simultaneously in print, online, and as a printable PDF. It is also being produced in audio format, with each story read by a professional narrator, and will be released individually as podcast episodes and together as a free audiobook.

Observations

As a whole, the project team was deeply inspired and impressed by the imagination, dedication, ingenuity, and perseverance of the worker-writers with whom we worked. We kept extensive notes about our observations, which have already and will in the future feature in academic and public writing about the project. However, the paramount purpose of the Worker as Futurist project has been simply to support the worker-writers and to undertake a collective writing experiment in solidarity with workers’ struggle. Sharing our observations and theories as researchers is far down on our list of priorities. However, we did want to share some insights in hopes that they would help the reader frame the stories in this collection.

Throughout both the 2021 pilot project and the 2023 writing project most participants candidly discussed the hardships of working at Amazon, including the exploitative management tactics and pervasive surveillance. However, many expressed gratitude for the job’s stability or flexibility. Many had worked in other parts of the logistics industry or for rival firms and found work at Amazon to be comparatively better, though often more physically demanding and relentless. Many took pride in their ability to persevere under these harsh and difficult conditions, teasing the academics: “You wouldn’t last a day!” Many others took pride in working for a corporation that they saw as at the cutting edge of technology and providing so much satisfaction to consumers (indeed, almost all workers were also Amazon customers).

Participants were generally frustrated that Amazon’s iconic founder and current Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people, was living large and spending extravagantly, including on his massive yacht and own private space program. But many also respected him for his ability to create such a vast empire. While a few participants were or had been labor organizers or involved in worker-led efforts at Amazon, most had never had any political or worker organizing experience and were skeptical it would succeedat Amazon. They observed the levels of surveillance how easy it is for the company to fire underperforming workers, let alone “troublemakers.”

A recurring topic was the participants’ strong identification with dystopian themes in the SF media we engaged with. Most expressed the belief that the future would be bleak for workers, not limited to those at Amazon. Technological advancements were likely to largely or exclusively benefit the wealthy. Some questioned the relevance of wealth in a deteriorating world, pondering if class distinctions would matter in an ecologically ravaged and war-torn future. Despite this pessimism, others urged proactive measures today to prevent such grim scenarios and ongoing exploitation. But one notable contradiction arose repeatedly: while many foresaw a dystopian future, they maintained an abstract optimism about their own personal chances.

Several emphasized the importance of solidarity and mutual support in confronting not just Amazon but broader systems of inequality. Collaboration and teamwork emerged as central themes in our discussions. Many participants found camaraderie within their teams and coworkers to be the most rewarding aspect of their jobs. However, they were skeptical that Amazon’s management would acknowledge or appreciate their efforts, mocking the company’s systems of rewards and punishments—such as the reintroduction of “employee of the month” incentives—as dystopian gimmicks. They also resented the gamified technological nudges aimed at incentivizing productivity, such as completing surveys during work hours in return for minimal vacation time benefits.

Many participants engaged with SF in their daily lives by watching or reading media, or by playing SF-themed games. For most, this was a means of escaping the demanding realities of their working lives. Consequently, they were often disinclined to take critical stances on the media we consumed together for fear of ruining the fun. Additionally, some participants reacted strongly to the dystopian themes, especially when it related to work and exploitation, with a few expressing difficulty in engaging with the selected content. Despite this, there was a clear attraction to SF, particularly dark and dystopian narratives.

The final stories that the participants produced and that are collected in this book are rarely utopian. In fact, most are deeply pessimistic about “the world after Amazon.” But one senses in all of them glimmers of hope. These are not to be found in any grand vision of a better future but, rather, embedded in the day-to-day relationships between workers, the quotidian forms of solidarity and care that the protagonists and their allies, friends, and families show to one another. We suspect this has something to do with the way Amazon manages the relationships of its workers. The corporation intentionally and cunningly deploys its workforce so as to minimize the times and spaces of solidarity, using its powerful computers and leading “human resource management” protocols to ensure they rarely have time or space to meet and talk, lest they organize. They have profited from moving their operations to exurban areas to take advantage of communities with low levels of worker cohesion, and often hire multiple different groups of migrant or precarious workers so as to increase tensions and minimize the chances of them making common cause (see Chua and Cox 2023). The pace and intensity of the work of frontline Amazon workers is also such that they have little opportunity for conviviality. This is to say nothing of the legions of digital platform workers or nomadic temporary workers that are crucial to the reproduction of the Amazon machine. The dominant idiom is the fragmentation of the workers.

We are now in the midst of a massive surge of struggles against Amazon’s power around the world. Workers in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Poland, and beyond are defying the company’s militant anti-union stance to organize collectively. In India, South Africa, and other places that Amazon considers its frontiers, communities are mobilizing against corporate rule.

We hope this book can be a small contribution to this movement. While all the stories here dwell with the question of “the world after Amazon,” none of them offers us a map to a brighter future. That is not their job. Instead, they are examples of workers reclaiming the power of the imagination and our right to author our own futures. This power and this right animate the dignity of labor that is the basis of all solidarity and struggle.