Black (Cyber) Monday: How the Sausage is Made in an Instantaneous, Digital World

Welcome to this bonus episode of the soon to be renamed Global Warming Is Real podcast.

As we embark on another consumerist holiday feeding frenzy, I'm revisiting an article I wrote for medium back in 2018.

With all the convenience of online shopping, especially with Cypra Monday again upon us, I explore the hidden cost of all this convenience.

Often for things we don't need or even want that much, enjoy this retelling of Black how the Sausage is Made in an Instantaneous Digital World One of the benefits I once enjoyed when I had an Amazon prime membership was speedy delivery.

Pretty much anything I wanted I could find online and have it delivered the next morning.

Sometimes the same day.

Though I can't remember what it was I thought I needed so urgently, I do remember ordering something for same day delivery.

It arrived at 9:30pm that evening by a bedraggled man looking as if he'd been delivering crap to people's houses since the night before.

Whatever it is I ordered, it sat in my office until the next day.

I am as accustomed as the next person living in urban America to the disruption in retail wrought by Amazon.

I can intellectualize the process, but it is too easy to leave it there, just an abstraction.

Only that one time, ordering same day delivery for whatever, that I get a real sense of the true cost of the business model.

Seeing the guy that night delivering something I didn't eat all that much, certainly not that night pulled it out of my head and into my gut just a little bit.

In the Human Toll of Instant Delivery, the New York Times highlights the reporting of NYT business journalist Jessica Silver Greenberg on the explosive growth of retail shopping logistics services.

Companies like XPO Logistics are both the result and facilitator of the new retail Amazon has primed the pump of consumer expectation, forcing others to compete in an unfamiliar landscape or fold up their tent and go home.

Even if that tent has been around for decades.

From a consumer perspective, it just kind of happened.

Like iPhones or Uber or Facebook or the waste heap called X.

And now AI.

It all happened so fast.

Of course, it didn't just happen.

With varying degrees of specificity and motivation, smart people laid out brilliant plans to achieve their vision.

In this context, vision implies seeing what others don't see, an expanded view of what can be.

Indeed, few fully anticipated the hyperconnected, instantaneous, nonstop AI driven world we inhabit today.

Visionary minds have carried us here, but as the New York Times reports, at what cost?

One of the great human foibles among many is our ability to constantly outwit ourselves.

The spark of human imagination, curiosity and creativity can soar to great heights, but often too high, too fast, and for the wrong reasons.

Even the visionaries among us can't see far enough.

In a sense, it did all just happen.

Vision does not necessarily imply wisdom.

We have yet to master fully the ability to understand the consequences of what is unleashed from the human mind.

And what of the the Working Conditions for XPO Logistics Employees Tasha Murrell, a former employee at an XBO warehouse in Memphis, tells Michael Barbaro of the New York Times about being forced to take off abroad to get through security, only then to be constantly ogled and harassed by her male co workers working in extreme temperatures for long hours and not knowing when the shift will end.

She speaks of supervisors ignoring her doctor's instructions after she became pregnant, of being told to have a fucking abortion after asking to go home one day because she wasn't feeling well that night.

She miscarried her child, one of five women who suffered miscarriages in as many months they all worked in the same XPO warehouse in Memphis.

She talks of the day a co worker collapsed and died of a heart attack on the production floor after complaining for hours that she didn't feel well of being told to continue working around the woman's dead body, which lay there for hours.

Even if we are eager or forced participants of Amazon style e commerce, as I surely have been and still am, this isn't the way we want it to be, is it?

We click on whatever we want, expecting a clean cut young man or woman in a crisp uniform to deliver it to our door.

Package delivery is not inherently bad, but there is more to the picture than meets the eye.

A dark underbelly.

It's where the sausage is made.

We best know about it no matter how or if it changes our behavior.

In a consumerist society with nearly every detail of our individual lives mapped, analyzed, demographied and delivered to any paying customer, consumption is where much, most or all of our power lies.

If a woman can lie dead on a production floor for hours while her distraught co workers are forced to work around her in order to satisfy consumer expectations, then consumers need to take control of what those expectations are.

Anyway.

It's something to think about.

Thanks for joining me on this lightly edited narration of Black how the Sausage is Made in an instantaneous digital world.

The takeaway for me is that with awareness and reflection we can make more informed decisions about what, how and where we buy.

When you can think small.

Check the show notes for more information on working conditions at Amazon Fulfillment Centers.

There's a link to listen to the New York Times podcast referenced in the article or read the original piece published in Medium.

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Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on the soon to be renamed Global Warming Is Real.

And that's not to say that global warming is not real.

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Take care.

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To learn more and do more, visit globalwarmingisreal.com thanks for listening.

I'm your host, Tom Schueneman.

We'll see you next time on Global Warming Is Real.