Nationalizing Amazon and Future Alternatives

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Great games, but too intense. So my sister pulls out her electronic telephone a device and she shows us Amazon Prime. Okay, My mum, she has not seen Amazon Prime in her life. She doesn't know what it is. my sister shows her Monopoly deal. And when you scroll down a little bit you see the words same day Delvery It' Christmas Eve, remember? same day delivery. And so what do we do? We click by. Anyway, so by six o'clock we hear a knock knock knockly knock knock in the diddly door and we open the door and there's a man there and he goes hi. I'm like sort of drunk and I say, I merry Christmas mate. And he obviously stares me cold in the eye and says Nothing. handands me the card game, take the card game. and I say, thans An. So we play the game. It's great. Jeff Bezos and this poor bastard has saved Christmas. And there's a moment, right? And I know this video is going to be me complaining about Amazon Prime and includluding, we should probably ban some of these online selling problems However, I couldn't help when it was in my hands and I could smell it. I genuinely did think, wow, Amazon Prime is amazing. And it's this, right, this contradiction, which will make someone in the audience pop up and go, Well, Jimmy, you claim you don't like I used to use it. I don't think you don't like it. Because if you didn't like it, you wouldn't use it. Amazon's not to blame, but you are. There is a hypocrisy. We use these things because they're convenient. And I think before I can sort of justify criticizing them, I think we need to start our analysis here by answering the question, does our participation in exploitive businesses and services. Do it morally justify the existence of that thing We should improve society somewhat. Yet you participate in society Serious I'm very intelligent. This is a sneaky argument. You hear it a lot, right? Whenever you criticize anything technological business. Yeah, if you say all, I think that I think guys actually kids mining coalalt so that we can have phones is a bad thing. someomeone else will say, but you use a phone and then I go Yeah, I guess you're right. Back to work, kiddo. This argument poises that actually the market and the businesses, they are Amor They're just the supply. However, it is our choice. We, the demand, are to blame So let's interrogate this a little Is it all our fault? Like what we have to do, we have to look at humans, okay? So here's a human Do you like this one? Well, that one or this s All right, When we study humans and how they behave, we are kind of sort of lazy. We're lazy in that we opt for energy efficient things. I mean, that's why I tell my wife when I don't do the dishes. Darn, I'm just being energy efficient. It's not necessarily that we are fundamentally lazy. It is that we pick if given two options we will pick the option that is the least effort, right? makes sense. and biologically it would be because we would prioritize reserving our energy. know Enerergy is scarce resource and that is why my bedroom is a mess. But on top of that, there's another thing, which is not only do we pick the most efficient thing, but we also pick the thing that is kind of like Good enough. You know, there's a term I learned very recently from a YouTuber onleearning in Economics. We had him on the podcast. We talked about this o check it. What does it Oh satisfying. Satisfying from Herbert Simon. Okay, okay. Yeah, that's kind of good enough. But what it means is generally, if I want a sandwich and I have two options. One is the best sandwich ever on Eth ever made Gordon Ramsay Light approved it, but it's at the top of a mountain. If at the base camp of the mountain there's a pre monra and they do allright cheese toasty. likeikely I'm picking the cheese toasty. Yeah It's good enough. And so it's here where things like fast fashion fast food, TikTok, doom scrolling, all these kind of things. They are sort of a natural extension of that. an charac However, okay? Whilst that's true, what that analysis misses is that it doesn't take into account that different people have different amounts of energy, both physical and mental energy. So to explain my point, what are we going to do? We're gonna to travel to Brighton. okay? We're in Brightons so that's only fucking . We're in Brightons so that's only fucking rightri. Before we go any further this video, I've been using today's sponsor Incognee for a while And I was pretty surprised to find out that my personal data was just sitting there available on the internet. My full name old addresses and even family info. Luckily, thanks to Incogni, I didn't have to spend days and days knocking on doors email in to try and get my data taken down. 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So if you find your data on a random website, you can just copy the link Paste it into Incogni, and Incogni's privacy team will just take care of it for you. Unlimited request, unlimited peace of mind. So if you're ready to take your privacy back and stop dodgy dudes dealing with your data, head over to Incogni dot com forward slash Jimmy the Giant and you can use the code Jimmy the Giant to get sixty percent off their annual plan. That is unlimited data removal requests handled by experts. Take your personal data back with Incogni. Anyway, back' to the video. I think I've become like a bright and propagandist. I don't know. just they should pay me, they're not they should. But like Brighton stands out to me because is it is the opposite of like convenience culture. When you think of towns that are just like fast food, gambling places, vpe places,, you know, the typical stereotype. and then there's like an Amazon warehouse and etcetera Brighton really stands out as like the inversion of convenience culture. And what I mean by that is like if you toddle down the street, it is just small shops that are super nich. You have vinyl shops, you have like there's one shop that sells old vintage film posters, another one that sells like Bonai trees. You know, you could order all this shit online if you wanted to, but Bryrightan somehow manages to exist where this is like the makeup of the area. Whilst obviously it is more convenient and efficient to order a six pack of socks from Azos that arrives at your door the next day. In Brighton, people like literally they opt to go to a place called Soctopus I' spent like forty five minutes picking out like a cute little pet. My first idea is a shop that only sells socks. I don't think that's been done in Brighton yet. I'm thinking about calling it sock apocalypse or maybe soctopus or something like that. I think that's been done Oh Of course it's been done, It's Brighton. It obviously flies in the face of the idea that humans only opt for convenience. becausecause what Brighton and places like it, what they're doing, what they offer, is something more a value that is above convenience, which is you know, atmosphere, environment, sociability. I walk into the coffee shop and I talk to the guy about what new beans he's got and he goes, o, this one's kind of got like a hint of cherry. And we go, We chuckle and then I wobble on down to like a board game shop and buy a board game that I could buy on Amazon but I like the guy I like him, the atmosphere, right? Vibes I'm a vibe turkey, And it's this, right? It's the vibes, it's the atmosphere. It's also the knowledge, the expert knowledge of shopkeepers These are values that Amazon just it just can't offer you. And so with that in mind, these places that exist, places like Briam. If we contrast Bryon with a dead high street, Do Brian just exist because, you know, us Bryitonians are superior sophisticated individuals O is it because there's like M money in Brian. I'm gonna give you a hint the second one. A lot of the money just comes from Fucking people get burnt out in London. They've worked in the city, they're tired, they did all the you know climbing the career ladder and then they go, fuck this, I'm mo to Brighton and I'm going open an Atisan fish and chip cat cafe that sells sea shanty vinyls. Okay? This sort of influx of Londoners move into Brighton and also tourists, right? It's one hour train from London. So all these rich Londoners come to Brighton They spend their money here. It has earned itself the nickname Little London as well. There's a university, there's a lot of young blood, a lot of culture. Bright and really exist as this kind of exception to the rule as it is a bubble of young middle class money. So what is happening here is really important in this conversation, we have to kind of zoom in a little bit, right And that is, there is a contradiction to this claim. You know when I said that little thing I said about humans being energy efficient? Well. There is a phenomena whereby when people have more money and they're wealthier, they're middle class, they start to actually opt for the opposite of convenience. It's like an anti convenience culture trend that happens when you get a bit of money, right? Who's doing the sour breread dough classes, who's going to artisan farm shops making a little garden in their house. Who's raising like chickens in the garden? they're growing their own veg? Right? who is it? Let's be honest, it's middle class wankers I'm sorry you're not Wankers. you're fine. It's middle class Michael and Susan. You know it is, right? And the reason being there is a reason, isn't because they're superior. It's because With a little bit more money and they like immediate needs met, like not constantly living in survival mode, that money buys them this additional energy, this mental energy, this physical energy, that money buys them that. They're not coming in from an eight hour shift and then going into another job whilst they have to somehow raise a kid. They're not doing that. Their lives are a bit calmer. in that is a space, right? There's a bit more energy. They're a bit more relaxed Having that, middle class people tend to opt four less convenient Things. Join us as we catch up with those who bought their dream home. Wow, That's why we're left the liive valley. Yeah to find out how the move changed their lives when they escaped to the country. Like if you think about the old retired pensioners, the common stereotype is that they move to some rural idyllic place and try and raise a farm. There's an old TV show on it It happens so often. they don't relocate to be next to McDonald's. and actually culturally, there starts to become this sort of classist attitude where some will actually start to look down on you know, convenience culture and they consider it low taste. And this is all because having wealth buys you an element of stability in your life. There's a famous chart where you look at how much money someone has and how happy they claim to be. And it is around about the six figure salary mark they are at their happiest. And it's all because they are living not in survival mode. they have an extra resource of energy and effort that is not afforded to people who are living on the breadline. And so when you have more of these people consolidated in an area like Brighton, where more of these people exist in a space, then the market adapts to it. The lived environment shapes around that culture. And so not everyone in Brighton obviously is wealthy, but if there's enough of them here, then the culture adapts to it and the lived environment shapes around that So if that's what happens when you have a load of middle class people in a place, then the flip side, if you have lots of people who do not have money, but not only do I have money but also don't have time and energy, then the lived environment shapes around that, the market shapes around that The highigh street becomes ad There's not many independent local businesses and artisans. it's more likely just going to be chains suupermarkets fast food, gambling shops, etceter. And it's not just about being poor, it's about being time poor. and that's the really important point. Is that the time poverty and the mental exhaustion of living in an insecure life whereere you're worried bills, worried about if you're going to get fired from your job. If you're in that feeling all the time, you are going to be drawn more towards convenience culture because it saves you on that effort. It saves you a little bit of time. You don't have the time to go to a farm shop to pick out your fruit walk on over to a bakery to get some fresh bread, the market sells you consumer quick and convenient culture. And so this over time over generations, if you grow into this culture, then that becomes all you know, it's all you understand. And it's what you will typically then opt for But what's really interesting is there's like a built in contradiction because whilst on the surface, things like Amazon, Timu, Shane, they might seem convenient. The idea you click a button, buy something' super cheap, it comes to your door very quickly. that seems convenient. But it's only convenient if doesn't have Because moving to Brian from Milton Keyes, which was a city that was very much built on like efficiency, supermarkets, change, all this kind of stuff, I actually find that living here where I live where it's a walk to a lot of independence, like a five, ten minute walk, I actually find I don't use online shopping Nearly as much as I used to, right? When I was back in Mount Kes, I would always order stuff because I didn't really like going to the center. The center being built around efficiency, but having none of that vibe and culture and the feeling that you get in brighton. You find that here because the high street is so enjoyable. I use it more. And it actually becomes more convenient because when I'm ordering clothes online, the amount of times it comes and the material is crap or I have to return it And I lose money because I forget to return it. Here I can just go to a cloes shop that I know is going to be good. I know they do my style and I can just try it on. I don't have to faff around. And it's the same for like food products. I can go to butchers and stuff very close to me. I can just walk there and it's more convenient than doing online order. Instead of using online services like Vistarint when I want to print something out for my wife's business, we just go to like the local guy who ten minutes away and they can sometimes do it on the same day. It's actually quicker. It's more convenient. When you have a market bace that can support this local independent scene of businesses and services, they're actually often much more convenient than online shopping. The difference here And this is the point I want to land on in this bit is that Online shopping isn't necessarily more convenient. I would argue it's only more convenient if you live in a place in which real competition to online shopping been robbed from you by killing a high functioning, high quality high stream. And it's this, right? This is what people like Jeff Bezos, this is what they understood For all of us when we were getting swept up ordering our next day same day deliveries we were doing that Jeff Bezos understood that if he could kill off the competition, then So this is the second argument that people tend to make, right? They go, okay I get that. But still at the end of the day, like Amazon just won because it's better. and that's how it works, right? You know, if they offer a better product, then it's going to win. Okaykay? And again, like the last argument, it's more complicated than that. Okay. So Amazon didn't just win because it was better. Amazon was it came along in a very specific context, a very important period of history and has sort of been enabled where Really it shouldn't So Amazon spawns out, you know, it's been around two thousands, probably late nineties, I think. But really it was like post financial crisis where they could really expand. They went insane because after the financial crisis, the central banks offered zero percent, basically zero percent interest rates on these massive loans. okay? The idea was you know the whole economies collapse. So if we make it really incentivizing for starb companies, big capitalists to borrow money, then what they'll do They'll take that money and just make us really great stuff. Okay so in this era, you get Amazon, you get Uar, you get Facebook, you get all these platforms come out of this environment where they can borrow money for cheap. and very importantly they don't have to make profit because borrowing was so cheap. It incentivized this new kind of era of business, which was basically have a top knot and like a long beard glasses, go to some fucking rich bro and sort of go, Hey guys. Tool millennial here Am I right? Listen here, Bomer I've got an epic win for you. Invest into my online digital algorithmatized smmart intellectual product, but I'll make you a Bch load of money and all these big fat rich men go, okay T my money. So with a boatload of basically free money, all these platforms did was look at the current landscape, their competition and go wow We could just fucking destroyer. So if I'm Amazon, I can sell products way below the market rate, impossibly cheap to a price that you know, shops can't afford to do and will offer next day delivery. Uber does the same way it looks at taxis and it goes, Ah, this is cute. Ah, look at the black cab with the yellow thing nice. Fuck you. Fuck everything. It's my time daddy. And so they price like taxi trips way below the market rate. puts the competition in a bind where they go, either we just die because everyone's going to opt for the competitor or We join them. The taxi drivers are incentivized to jump onto Uber and then you know warehouses and cellars are incentivized to jump onto effectively killing the genuine competition. And what this does, right and is very important is you know what I was saying that stuff about like people opt for energy efficient things. This is true. But there is like another caveat to that where like, okay, so you know your dad, right? You know you know him or you don't I'm sor But say you know your dad and your dad's doing like long drives. And for a period of time I know that your dads, instead of using Google maps, he would rely either on his knowledge of the roads or a map. And you would go dad It's obviously insane. Like why don't you just use Google Maps you just type in the postcode and it tells you where to go. You don't have to worry,. Why are we stopping at pedro station to ask this Paul Bastard where Figglesme fishing Fory is? Just type into Google. And here's the,' an irony is that even though you might be presented with two options, which is an efficient version of the thing you're doing, AK Google Maps. versus an inefficient thing, which is physical maps. If your whole life has been spent on the physical map, There becomes a sort of switch overver process, which also requires energy A humans are really fucking lazy I'll honest. It's why they say like you can't teach an old dog new tricks. It's like it costs energy and effort for someone to change their habits and behaviors. So what Amazon and you know, these platforms do by undercutting the competition and undercutting them on price is what it does, it resets our consumer behavior and our expectations. Soilst the highigh Street was already struggling after the financial crisis, the secondary big impact was the pandemic because what it did, it took a lot of older people who P previously never really did much online shopping, They mainly shopped in high street still. and because they couldn't go to the high street, it forced them to learn how to shop online. It like forced a change in consumer habits towards online shopping. Okay us young Lot, we grew up on these platforms, so it wasn't that hard for us to get ono them to buy things. For us, the allure was convenience ' we already use these platforms and price. And like there's a double edged sword to the price thing because what Amazon did, like us growing up using Amazon, conditioned us to perceive products as a certain value. And for us right growing into this environment, it changed our expectations on price to a level that I would argue like wasn't a good thing. If you take something like a pair of shoes, realistically speaking, a pair of shoes shouldn't It probably cost you forty fifty quid. There's so much labor that goes into making a good quality pair of shoes.'s more like one hundred to two hundred plus. But when I was young, my cap on shoes was probably somewhere between forty and fifty sixty kid. And so you spread this across the board, right? If you get used to a certain price point that Amazon offers you and then you go to a high street and you see that the prices are actually higher, then this reconditions our minds on how we perceive values of things. And so the high street just't keep up with that because Amazon is able because of these zero percent interest rates able to force down the price below really the market should be pricing it out. And eventually this kills the high street. It kills a realistic competition. Americans love to buy. But getting shoppers into traditional malls and stores is becoming a hard sell shopping centers turning into ghost towns as consumers shift to online shopping. I think the discounts that online is offering beat the store and therefore, again, consumers aren't shopping at the mall anymore And so it's in that moment, right? where Jeff Bezos looks at, you know, the dead bodies of BHS and Top shop and whatever else where he looks around and he goes, And he goes to his big control board and he looks at the the knob that says prices on it and it goes It's time and you twist that baby up twist it giving you a nile cripple because he turns that baby up Now at this point Amazon, once it's controlled the market, once it's killed the competition, Amazon can do something very evil, which is jack the fucking prices up back to if not higher than the prices were in the high street. This is what you can do when you are a giant monopoly. You can do things like this, anti competitive things. they have a policy on Amazon, which is called ironically The fair pricing policy, which means that when you sell a product on Amazon, you have to like by contract give Amazon your cheapest price. So if I'm selling mugs with a giant picture of my face on it, I can't sell that like by law in a corner shop for cheaper. I can't do that. I have to give Amazon the cheapest price. would sound okay. Okaykay, that means Amazon always gets the cheapest price. But what if Jeff Bezos starts being a nasty prick. What if he starts saying, you know, you know, we charge you like a selling fee. What if Jeff Bezos goes back to the control board? and then he turns the selling fees button up Right, so When you sell a product on Amazon now you have to actually pay a larger percentage to Amazon than you did in the past. That means that everywhere else you sell the product also has to raise its price Amazon is directly contributing to inflation across the board every time it raises its fees on its sellers. So all of that is to say no. Amazon didn't just win because it is simply better. They won because they're cheeky bricks. They used anti competitive business practices, they undercut their competition, killed off the competition, shifted consumer behaviour and expectations of price, and then once they had captured all of the customers, once they got them all on their platform and once they got all the sellers on their platform, it just started raising the prices on them because you ain't go anywhere else to fucking go. And I say all this, right? And I'm sat here going that is awful and evil, but I cannot help but think Lking hell they' small I couldn't come up with that genenius to do all of that, right? I'm just a little fucking mouse an Amazon is the cheese on the mouse trap. You know, it was really nice. Oh, there's bit of cheese bang Your neck Oliterated by the weight of Amazon ba Whilst I can say all this. whilst I can say all of this. The thing about online shopping is that it is a double edged sword, right? So we have to really separate Online shopping from online selling platforms. They're two different distinct things, right? My wife is an online seller and I'm very proud of her, right? She made this whole business where she sells ceramic goods that are made in Ukraine, delivered by Ukrainians and sold here in the UK. She does that. and she puts so much work into it, bless her. If you wantna make your partner really happy, buy something It would also make my wife really happy. And I love that. I love that the internet in some ways has allowed people to take their hobbies, their passions and their craft and able to reach massive audiences that in the past they might not have been able to do. That is amazing thing. However my wife is able to do that without using selling platforms like Amazon and Etsy because she has her own audience on Instagram. When it comes to more people like her who do a similar thing, who don't have audiences, they have to use things like Etsy, TikTok shop and maybe Amazon, but really Etsy is quite an important one because Etsy, it prided itself in the beginning, it came out and it was like, hey guys, we know Amazon sucks. all this shit quality. We are here for the artisans. All right, the quality premium selling platform. That was what Etsy was meant to be. One Jeff should not rule commerce There are over five thousand Jeffs on Etsy Re people making real things Jeff. I'm Jeff. I'm Jeff too. Shop non billionaire Jeffs. So what does it do It gets all the hobbyists, all of the creators to come on its platform. makes it really good in the beginning go, Hey, come in. We got fucking lemonade, right Low fees, it's where all the customers are. and then it slams the door and goes, right right, get the fucking. getet in the fucking cage. You go,, Etsy, I thought we were chill. Etsy be like, no, we ain't chill hy. As time went passast, Etsy started to become more algorithmatized, you know? So you start competing on the position on how high you are on the search and you could if you wanted to to be at the top of the search. So instead of just, you know if I type in, o I want I don't know a chair that looks like a can of Coke. in the past where it might have just given you the best option for that. now it gives you all the ones that are paying to be at the top. And as well, obviously they too increase the fees on their sellers. And what that means is the margin for the sellers goes down. in the past they used to make a lot of money now they have to on getting the price really low It's exactly what Amazon done. So yeah, this platform that originally pred itself on being like yeah, annti Amazon is now flooded with drops shippers, AI design products, resellers, print on demand, and mass produed stuff that pretends to be artisan. Competing with people who are generenating art yet Artificial intelligence now. I can't compete. It's just junk. a lot of it. You're just gonna be a slightly more expensive Amazon that seems like a terrible business plan. And like Timu and She, I mean, holy fuck, man, these are like this is just the whole thing on steroids. they turn the damn thingig into a casino. You go on Timu and it's like you think you're gonna fucking you like you got these wheels spinning around, win big. They made it. So you go in, you come out fucking sweatating with a high pressure, spinning wheels, countdown timers. The whole thing is literally just gambling mechanics on a shot to make you feel like that you're winning some secret prize that no one else can get. And this is the f man. this is the whole thing. It's like, whil in the early days, Amazon really felt Amazing. It really did feel good. It was like, wow, they're offering good products at a cheap price And I think the mistake we made as civilization was thinking that the convenience and those low prices were just coming from nowhere They just they were just feeling friendly. It was just a really good deal. But the thing is what Amazon saved us in time and price. It took from somewhere It took No high street took from the workers. their salary. it took from the delivery drivers. You've heard the story of them pissing in bottles, right? That guy delivered me my cards on Christmas Eve. He probably had like a four liter bottle of piss in the truck. poor bugger. We all hear about the warehouse workers and their insane strict time schedules. They're not allowed to talk to each other, look each other in the eye in case it costs one nanosecond of efficiency. And we've heard about the union busting. The way that cheap platforms are able to be cheap is by squeezing more out of its workers It sellers And out of you. here's a thing that people don't know is that actually these platforms when you zoom out a bit, they actually take from you Really? So if you look at like lifespan of products, everyone knows the story. It's like your dad goes, Oh I've had my washing machine since the sixties and it still works. and yours just died after four years There's a reason for that. and it's well documented. You know, lifespans of products are on the way down. There's a study that shows that washing machines and ovens, the lifetime on those products are down. Whing machines down by forty five percent since the nineties to two thousands. and ovens are down thirty nine percent The lifetime of these products are shrinking What does that mean? That means You have to replace them Bying Another one smartphones, TV's, washing machines, and vacuum cleaners, on average survive about two point three years less than either their designed or desired lifetimes. Fragile components that break down too quickly. An inconvenient leak about the limited lifetime of a computer, a lack of reliable statistical data. Obsolescence, more or less subtly programmed, comes in many forms In recent years, a new trend is emerging, making repairs of a product impossible or very difficult And the point I'm really trying to land on is what this environment, these business practices do to our psychology? us as I don't want to refer to myself as this but Consumer. Jeff Bayz also would be very happy I refer to myself as that. I'm a human, goddamnit, lower value human capital. These platforms have changed our expectations on price The truth is and this doesn't this isn't something we want to hear, but the reality is some things just not meant to be cheap. Some things Like fast fashion is where we see this a lot. Whby although clothes may have got cheaper, what's really happened is we just buy more clothes because of it because the quality has got shit up. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that in just fifteen years clothing production roughly doubled, while the amount of time clothes were actually worn fell by forty percent. So we make twice as much, but we almost wear them half as long found the average UK adult owns around one hundred and eighteen its of clothing and thirty one of them have not been worn in the past year. Much of what we interpret as savings on prices has really just actually been a result of shifting the labor ono you What I mean by that is right. if you go to a normal shop, you walk into the high street shop and it's like a hardware shop and you look around and they've only got an amount of shelves. you know, there's a certain amount of shelves for the space they're in and there a c amount of products. When you go on Amazon, it's endless, right? The shelf is as long as the internet is. It's infinite. Okaykay? And there might be a feeling and you might think in your head, well, that's great because Amazon offers more variety The difference is in the high street shop, someone to choose the items on the shelf. and it took them time to do that. And when they chose which products to go on the shelf, they would select things that had good quality so that you don't return it. Much of what we believe we are saving on price and on time is actually just a result of the labor being shifted onto us. So let's think about it, right? You want to order a super duper air fryer that also makes you an espresso and massages your feet. So you go on to Amazon, you type it in and you say air fryer, massage fe, espresso Okay, now you got a list of results. So you don't know which one to pick. So you look at the top one which has been paid to be there, it's actually probably not the best one. I think the best one is meant to be about seventeen lines down or something. You click on it and then you now read the reviews. you read the rating. Most of which are fake by the way, so you're actually just reading what ChatGBT has been told to tell you about the product, and then you have to work out is the seller legit? you know Is this a scam product or is it real? And then you order Right, you happy. Oh, yeay. Delivery is coming next day, you go to bed, you wake up and you get the text. you say, Oder arrived. So you go to try and find it fuck is my delivery? It says it's arrived. You knock on theighby. you say, Hey, have you seen my it's thing? Don't worry about what it is. I said, No, I haven't seen it Oh, we had the same problem the other day And so you close the door and you go back on the thing and you go right, well, the delivery is not here. It says it's here, it's not here. You message there and you say, Hi there, I hope you're doing well, sorry to disturb you, but actually my thing has not arrived. Chatbot replies to you, It says Ah, we're experiencing a high volume of messages right now. Please don't be frustrated. And you reply I am frustrated. I really want this product and they say, excuse me, sir, please calm down You say let me talk to an agentents, you get on the call and it's been three, four five days. maybe after they ask you, have you checked your front door? Have you asked your neighbor? Maybe if you could be bothered to continue chasing this up, they might send you a replacement. replacement gets sent. It finally arrives. it's here. I'm holding it, I plug it in and it doesn't fucking work. The now The return is to return it Aain a QR code, I have the same packet, I have to go down to Royal Mail, stand in a line on my break. I return it, then I have to wait seven days for the refund. I have to check if the refund come. Oh great, it hasn't come, so now I have to message it All of is to say, you have just been given the job that the shopkeeper on a high street does, right? The high street shop, they do the quality check for you. They check that the products are good before they put it on the shelves because Unlike Amazon, they don't have unlimited shelf space and they have to rely on return customers. In the UK, online returns were forecast to hit twenty seven billion in twenty twenty four. Around thirty six percent of online UK shoppers have had delivery problems in a single month. Citizens' advice found that consumers spend two billion pounds and six million hours fixing consumer problems since october twenty twenty three. And get this one, online shoppers were seven times more likely to have a problem than buying in store. It is seven times shitter buying online than buying a shop. And that's not all, my friends, that is not all. twenty one percent of online shoppers say that they've reluctantly kept item that they were unhappy with because it was too much effort to return it. I know I literally I'm that guy. I have a dress I bought my wife, not myself I would look cute in it though. It sat there and I really need to return it I'm here shouting about the returns process to you. And so that's the cost that is on you, but that's not even to mention like environmental cost of online shopping. How much more returns add to carbon, the extra packaging, etcetera. than go into the high street using a reusable tote bag. So in short What these platforms do is basically human bology by understanding our general gravitational pull towards convenience. They offer us short term savings, things that look cheaper when we see the price tag, but then they just stack those costs up somewhere else. The cost is our communities, our high street, our culture, our free time, our mental energy. The whole thing is kind of like a mirage, It's a smoes screen. It's not really that much better. If you had a real genuine alternative to it and importantly had time and effort to go to the alternative You would use it. But in a world where people are you know, increasingly time poor and low energy P often will opt for short term convenience. It's like the perfect example is the poverty trap around washer machines. I mean you might have heard this, but like people who are in poverty, they often don't own washer machines. so they go to a landerette to do their washing. And the thing is they actually spend more money overall going to a landerette because they have to pay each time Because they don't have the money to buy a washing machine one time, they can never afford that big purchase. They're in a trap. They spend more money in the long run. Fs to me very similar to what's going on with online shopping. It's fake convenience. So all of this, right? I think I've laid out my argument. I don't know if I address am I hypocrite thing? Yeah, I guess This is my argument. And I think, you know, I've made the case that it's inevitable, you know, if the market if we have a market that preys on our human behaviour of opting for efficiency, opting for things that take less energy from us. And if we build a very high pressure world around it that robs us of energy and time and money, then we're going to opt for these things generally. So the question is and the whole point of the video, should we ban online selling platforms. In the nineteen thirties, right? John Maynard Keyes, economics bra, post war Census enthusiast. He once said. In a hundred years time, he said. Western societies would be producing four or five times as much wealth per head as they were then and needing to work only fifteen hours a week. produce it Yeah, John was wrong because John he didn't understand was Pitical Right His belief was at the rate that technology was progressing. That will create so much surplus, it creatate so much wealth that people won't have to work as much. And there was an element where this was kind of true because you know throughout the nineteen hundreds, as we produce more technology, working hours came down. However, since the financial crisis, this trend has started to slowly stagnate even reverse. So in the exact same period of time, if you think, yeah, two thousand eight, Amazon pops off after that, right? A lot of new technology, all this amazing technology, AI has come since this point. But as this technological boom has exploded that should buy us so much more free time because it's making our lives more efficient, somehow we're starting to work more at the same time. How does that make any sense? The Resolution Foundation found that the average working week has got forty minutes longer after two thousand nine. Women and eighteen to twenty four year olds Paid working week rose by sixty minutes, excluding unpaid household work and travel time. Sage's twenty twenty four UK survey claimed that forty seven percent of Brits a side hustle or secondary income stream On top of their jobs, sixty eight percent of sixteen toty four year olds were running multiple side hustles on top of their day jobs. The trends revers it in this boom of technology the younger generation are starting to work The thing is and why John Maynard Keyes, his prediction didn't come true was because that period of technological progress was also combined with political power which enforce an expansion of worker protection. So as technology progressed in that time and bought us a surplus, the political system redistributed the profits into people's lives by affording us, you know weekends, by affording us healthcare, by affording social housing so people didn't have to worry about rent and all this sort of stuff, right? The surplus that society was creating was distributed. And so it meant we didn't have to fight so hard to get the bare minimum. If your housing is subsidized by the state, maybe don't do the overtime because you're kind of all right And it's this which is missing in the modern day. Our political system isn't the same as what it was back in that post war period. The profits in the surplus go to shareholders and the wealth emails It didn't make it so that we could end office hours early. It made it so that you could always work, right? You can answer your emails late at night. The phone meant that we can take calls when we're driving to places. Be they didn't result in us traveling less to work. It meant often that we could travel more for work, spend more time commuting. Whilst technology can reduce the time taken to do a task. capitalism does is raise the expectations of volume, speed, standard or availability until any of the time that could have been saved and given to you so you could you know chill out a bit more until most of that's disappeared. Unless you legislate and regulate and force these surpluses to be redistributed into the population. instead of to shareholders and billionaires, then all technological progress is going to do is force you to work harder and harder because the standard and the competition just keeps raising All that's really happened in this sort of last fifteen, twenty years is technological boom. All it's felt like to me, like things like Amazon coming along, whatever efficiency they might offer us has just felt like it's resulted in a more competitive, demanding world. with less time and we're more on the tread. That's all it's felt like. So look, I am going to say I'm going to put my head on the chopping block here. I know people will think I'm nuts for saying this. but I think we should nationalize Amazon. I really do. What is it? It's a website and some factories, some warehouses. I mean, we used to have Royal mail, which take it, which rename it. I would just quit I would like to quit Royal mail again, but can't do that because we sold Royal mail to private companies. But I do think We should just nationalize it. And I'll give you, you know, I explain why. It's not because I'm like actually an insane radical is that I don't consider Amazon and these platforms to be really like companies or businesses so much. They are their platforms, their infrastructure where other people do things within. Okay so the people who provide the real value, and not say that Amazon doesn't provide any value obviously, the transport, etc is the infrastructure is important, but there would be no use for their infrastructure if there weren't businesses and there weren't consumers on their platform using it. And that's how I see the economy is that we want to incentivize the people doing the selling and the buying, right? That's what we should be incentivizing. They should get rewarded the most, but they're the ones getting squeezed the most. For me to see Amazon as infrastructure, it's the same way you see roads. L roads exist and businesses and workers use the roads. And we have them as public because well a person shouldn't be able to pay for like Rad premium, you know, where you get the fast lane and there's no traffic and then everyone else gets road basic bronze tier where there's artificial traffic just pumped into it to make you slower to incentivise you to get premium. We don't do that because it's just not competitive. It doesn't result in actually a world where we create more things and do more work It becomes very lopsided and it's a winner takes all. if you have all the money, you can afford the premium service. I want people to be able to compete on quality. and this is pretty standard thinking. Infrastructure should be there so that people can use it and create their own businesses within it. And I consider Amazon and these kind of platforms to be infrastructure. Infrastructure, like the roads must be neutral and businesses should compete quality and not how much they can spend to rank themselves higher in the search results. So like, you know, what could a world look like if we did nationalize these kind of platforms? If we just had one Amazon Prime P owned, it was democratically owned, the sayers and the users all had a voice a way of voting. We can choose to do things that you can't do with Amazon. So for instance, like say we had it so that Amazon was used to supplement and add an addition to the high street. So the idea was we use Amazon to expand the selling of local businesses, so Amazon kind of worked more regionally rather than all across the country. So it took its stock from local sellers that have local businesses. So local sellers can sell on Amazon. And if there's products that they don't want to sell online because they want to incentivize footfall in the town, then instead of selling the book on Amazon You order it on Amazon and they reserve it for you in the shop which you can go walk to. And you might be like, well, that's long, it's inefficient. but it's just another way of looking at the economy because it would force you to be on the high street. Once you're in the high street, you might go and shop at a local bakery or a coffee shop. You might do other things there. It's about seeing it that we want to keep money locally to create these thriving high streets where it feels communal and there's life and there's competition and you don't just get gambling shops and vappe shop. You can do that. In France actually they've done something similar where they've disincentivized selling books on Amazon in order to preserve high street bookshops. And say you can't get the product in your shop, mayaybe you can order on Amazon and it would deliver it to that shop. If that becomes the norm in the lifestyle, I think there are second order effects of not always building around convenience that is better for us I do really believe that that having like thriving high streets that feel communal And they feel like they have a soul in a character. I really see it brighten You can'top banging on about it, but you just feel it here. And I really think that has such an inherent value. If people talk about feeling isolated in the world, they feel they don't know each other, their community, I feel like in places like here, you don't really suffer from that problem. And like, look, my ideas might be shit. they might not be good. Maybe they don't work. But the thing is you can try these things, you can work out what does work only if we owned it publicly. If we had some democratic say in these platforms, we could shape it to create the outcomes that we want rather than just a race to the bottom of convenience and just slop culture. that people don't I don't think people like. And it's all about, yeah, just trying to change how people see com Like trying to create a more holistic view, moving away from short term is profit and quarterly shareholder returns and more looking at the broader consequences creating value in people's lives, making more fulfilling lives. If we start looking at the world like that, we can choose where and when we believe convenience applies, where technology applies. Like I'm all for digitizing banks because sitting in a queue to the bank is not an enjoyable value add to my life. I'm happy with digitizing that, Digitizing, paying taxes. All great. but like I don't want my coffee delivered to my door. I don't want that I want to be at a coffee shop. But like do we have to optimize everything with that mentality? You see this a lot around AI. There's like a meme where it shows what we hoped AI would achieve humanity and what it really does. We hope that it would do things I don't know, cleaning out rivers with robots and machines. But for some reason it's takaking creative jobs. Like I'm pretty happy with humans doing creative jobs and robots doing the hard work jobs that people don't really want to do. How How did fucking computers become the thing and machines became the thing that does art and humans are the ones in fucking Amazon warehouses? Shouldn't the robots be working so we could paint the fuck How the fuck are? And then it's like, but some guys putting a sixteen hour shift for no fucking money. Why aret whyy aren't the robots the fucking slaves? How are humans the fucking slaves? And it's that, right? It is philosophical Some people disagree with that. They believe efficiency, convenience is everything. There is a part of me that thinks Maybe, maybe I don't need Monopoly deal at six PM. Christmas Eve. Maybe I don't need that efficiency, Maybe I could just to my family Maybe there are some things, some efficiencies, some conveniences we should sacrifice to ensure that we make Healthy, thriving vibrant Another buzzword. local communities If you enjoyed that video, I did sort of a different style on this one. I tried to like read the script a bit less and riff a bit I'll hone it, but I really want to just switch it up a bit. Like the video, subscribe to the channel. loveove you guys, peace Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why customers have enjoyed prorogressives name your prrice tool for years now. With the name Y your prrice tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget. 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