and you have exited capitalism. Despite all the buying and the selling that goes on there, you have entered a realm that can’t be thought of as a market, not even a digital one.” When I say this to people, which I frequently do in lectures and debates, they look at me as they would a madman. But once I start explaining what I mean, their fear for my sanity soon turns into fear for us all.
If that were all, the scene would evoke an old western in which a lonesome cowboy rides into town to discover that a podgy strongman is in charge of the saloon bar, the grocery store, the post office, the railway, the bank and, naturally, the sheriff. Except that isn’t all. Jeff owns more than the shops and the public buildings. He also owns the dirt you walk on, the bench you sit on, even the air you breathe.
Such concentrated power should scare the living daylights out of the liberally minded. Anyone committed to the idea of the market should recognise that what we’re witnessing is its death knell. It should also shake market sceptics, socialists in particular, out of the complacent assumption that Amazon is bad because it is a capitalist market gone berserk. Actually, it’s something worse than that.
Under feudalism, the overlord would grant so-called fiefs to subordinates called vassals. These fiefs gave the vassals the formal right to exploit economically a part of the overlord’s realm – to plant crops on it, for example, or graze cattle – in exchange for a portion of the produce. The overlord would then unleash his sheriff to police the fief’s operation and collect what he was owed. Jeff’s relationship with the vendors on Amazon is not too dissimilar.
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