Corporate Death Machines

Today, Amazon laid off 16,000 human beings from their jobs. I remember looking at the Amazon employee subreddit the night before the layoff; post after post, every employee described being on edge and uneasy. Would they wake up to a job in the morning? Would they have to enter a brutal job market dominated by layoffs for the past three years? Indeed, 16,000 families today found that this nightmare was transfigured into reality. 16,000 families learned that they were never stable to begin with. Any sense of security functionally died in those families today: no longer will they allow themselves to believe that they are safe, that they were anything more than a number to their employer, that they are anything but an economic pawn in the larger chess game of capitalism. Outside of work, they are full humans; inside of work, they are tools. What enables these corporate death machines?

Anonymity is analogous to unadulterated moral freedom. If we were to give an antisemitic man absolute anonymity, as possible through the internet, he would find no hesitation from spreading his disgust of the 'Jewish stain' far and wide. In less than thirty seconds, I could search and find antisemitic content and spaces where he would lurk: this man truly is real, and there are many of him. The antisemitic man may even share a fence, a grocery store, and a bus stop. But the internet collapses this proximity into functional infinity. He posts his hatred not to this Jewish person, whose children he often sees playing from his living room window, but to The Jew: an abstraction that is nowhere and everywhere.

This infinite distance wondrously leads to an even further infinite distance; because he isn't harming an actual person, his evil is functionally virtuous. In those moments of anonymous expression, he can believe himself to be a warrior of truth, a harbinger of light against the common scourge, an obedient soldier to his own imposed role as a witness to the ills of the 'Jewish stain'. Imaginary heroics. When the target is doubly exiled into infinity, there is no subject: the mechanics of uncontrolled evil start turning its gears.

If he saw his Jewish neighbor, sobbing from his wife's death to cancer, could he really find the strength in himself to call the neighbor an abomination?

It was not long ago that some corporate leaders witnessed the humanity of their workers. By 1916, Ford Motor Company accumulated a surplus of $60 million, and Henry Ford thus declared:

My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.

A judge ruled against his ambition to spread the benefit of the consumerist markets to his own workers, and he was thus bound to only act in interest of the company's shareholders. In that moment, no one knew that the disease of infinite distance in the corporate realm was injected into the American capitalist substrate, which paved the way for the influence of neoliberal policies from Reagan and Milton Friedman. If shares must increase in price, and employees reduce profits, how can executive leaders see employees as neighbors?

We like to imagine Amazon's layoffs of 16,000 people in a likened sense to the antisemite. This thing performs perceived evil, so this thing is evil. The distance between us and such scourge is absolute: we never would lower ourselves onto their level. In judging the antisemite's level, he chooses evil. From Amazon's level, they are necessitated into evil. The antisemite might argue that the "Jewish people were chosen for their blindness", chosen specifically for their corruption to execute the passion. The Amazon CEO would simply argue he is doing his lawfully mandated job: he has no choice. If God forced someone to do evil things, are such things truly evil?

The moral distance between a corporate employee and their colleagues is scalar, widening the closer one is to the echoes of the board. "This is a hard decision for everyone"; "I'm just doing my job"; "We are rightsizing for operational efficiency." Each one of those 16,000 employees was distanced from reality through the alchemical reduction of people into line items. The CEO sees line numbers, the direct manager of an individual contributor sees the human who navigated peaks and valleys over years of employment, failing at some things here but wildly succeeding at other things there. The manager functionally sees a neighbor, the executive functionally sees an obstacle to profit.

Perhaps the most disturbing fact about these layoffs is the fact that it was exposed, through an accidental email, to be part of a longer initiative at Amazon called Project Dawn. As if uprooting tens of thousands of families, the destruction of livelihoods, was a new beginning. Such distance must be maintained, often through imaginary heroics. The active campaign of glossing over real suffering with opaque and imaginary narratives. Storytelling under a singular, grand narrative is the fuel of sustained atrocity at scale.

In a sick sense, Amazon's CEO is acutely visible but those 16,000 employees are anonymous. The CEO performs his job obligations, and the side effect may as well be invisible to him as a lightly-held tragedy.

The miracle of corporate death machines is that even the executives who make such decisions are not even human. They simply act as rotating gears to keep the substrate's gears turning. A mutually beneficial relationship: those who benefit from structural evil the most are the most willing to keep the machine running. Every employee today was simply coal in a furnace.

The beauty of this system is its ability to convince, through material abundance, that the people who execute necessary evil are anything except coal. Systematic evil rewards those who can codify imaginary evil into mundane reality through their own blindness against their fellow man.

Under monarchy, we could identify the tyrant and remove him. Under distributed power, there really isn't a singular head to sever, only a network of people performing their mandated roles, each claiming necessity, each absolved by the collective. The structure perpetuates precisely because enough people choose comfort, legality, and career advancement. Supposed virtues.

What hope remains for us…