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A review of Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos, Frontline, PBS, February 19, 2020.

William Lee, an English clergyman of Calverton, may have started the industrial revolution when he invented a stocking frame in 1589. Its basic principle is still used in manufacturing textiles. But when Lee first applied for a patent, Queen Elizabeth I refused: Her Majesty thought it would end hand-knitting and destroy jobs.

By the late 19th century, the United States surpassed Great Britain as the world’s largest economy, fueled in part by John D. Rockefeller’s innovations in energy production. But despite cost benefits to consumers, the Justice Department brought an anti-trust suit against Standard Oil and splintered the company in 1911.

Meanwhile, catastrophic train wrecks crippled the movement of goods and people: there was no safe way to stop bigger and faster locomotives. Not until the son of a New York machine shop owner, George Westinghouse Jr, came up with the airbrake. Predictably, the freight lines balked: at $1.50 a day, it was cheaper to employ Irish immigrants—“brakemen” who ran from car to car and manually applied the brakes directly to the wheels. They rode on top of trains in all hours, in all weather conditions. Next to coal mining, it was the most dangerous job. The government would eventually step in: the Westinghouse airbrake became the standard—but only after 5,000 brakemen were killed or maimed in a single year.

In the century to come, from A&P to Microsoft to Walmart, the arc of bold commercial innovation, resistance to innovation and its eventual acceptance, at various human costs, traces the narrative of our present sanctum sanctorum of global commerce. Is Amazon a “huge and unstoppable force,” as its first employee Shel Kaphan claims? Is Jeff Bezos, now the richest man in the world, a modern day robber baron? Or is it merely progress rebranded, a new expression of capitalism in the hyper-digital age?

As it braids the stories of the man and his company into a riveting two-hour blitz of exclusive interviews, Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos, a new PBS Frontline film, strains for moral clarity in an age-old conflict between fairness and free trade.

Amazon’s influence and Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth have triggered investigative reports, harrowing delivery driver accounts and condemnations by Democratic lawmakers and presidential candidates who often call out Bezos by name. But no speeches or ink marks can match the stark intimacy of a stylized audio-visual showcase: Amazon Empire forces us to look into the eyes of burnt out warehouse workers as they recount their toils; to experience the hot-seat discomfort of Amazon executives, to ponder their timorous ticks and gestures.

The film reveals that life at Amazon fulfillment centers is a far cry from Westinghouse’s magnanimous offerings of housing and hospitals for his nineteenth century factory laborers. Packaging can be grueling, repetitive work—product flow is relentless, tough quotas are set, then increased. The scale is different as well: Amazon employs 600,000 workers with centers in every state.

“They’re safe; we pay double the minimum wage, the national minimum wage; we have terrific benefits,” said Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s CEO of Worldwide Consumer. “The benefits for the folks that work on the floor are the same benefits that my family has access to. Our family leave is like 20 weeks.”

But the film points to a patchy safety record, for products and workers. Shoddy motorcycle helmets sold on Amazon.com caused injuries; a defective dog collar snapped, striking and blinding a woman. And then there are the fulfillment center employees, many of whom have had to work in excessive heat, without proper air conditioning.

“We’re not treated as human beings, we’re not even treated as robots,” one former warehouse employee recounts. “We’re treated as part of the data stream.”

Like all Frontline documentaries, Amazon Empire, a yearlong effort with 57 on-record interviews, is a stellar investigation of labor malpractice, antitrust issues, and the growing privacy and data security concerns over Amazon’s Alexa and Ring products. But it is also a curated experience—a critical exposé of a monopolistic behemoth whose appeals to economic wisdom are treated as the devil’s due.

“We are not the biggest retailer in the United States,” explains former Obama press secretary Jay Carney, now top spokesman for Amazon. “In fact, the biggest retailer is two and a half times our size. Walmart’s much bigger than we are and has been forever… We’re less than one percent of retail globally.”

The problem with this section of Carney’s interview is that it never makes it into the feature film that aired on PBS. Frontline cut it for the online extras.

The film also leaves out geopolitical dynamics with China, the largest exporter of goods sold by Walmart, and now Amazon. In fact, the rise of all modern super-retailers can be traced to a single iconic image: Deng Xiaoping putting on a cowboy hat at a Houston rodeo in 1979. Arguably the most momentous event in post-industrial history, it marked China’s pivot from the Soviet model to the largest economic engine: the U.S. consumer market. But unlike another Frontline film, Is Walmart Good for America?, first aired in 2004, Amazon Empire elides 40 years of globalization and manufacturing transfer to the Chinese factories.

Instead, the film fixes on Jeff Bezos himself. The Amazon founder did not grant Frontline an interview. But the filmmakers did stitch a generation worth of images and footage, including, oddly enough, a montage of what James Marcus, ex-Amazon editor, described as Bezos’s “large eruptive laugh.”

“Jeff was not a figure out of folklore,” Marcus said about Bezos’s goofy awkwardness at the time when Amazon became the Internet’s first book shop.

“I picked books as the first best product to sell online,” Bezos, still sandy-haired and doughy, explains in a shaky piece of ’90s footage. “Because books are incredibly unusual in one respect. And that is that there are more items in a book category than there are items in any other category by far. You could build a store online that couldn’t exist in any other way.”

From then on, the film charts his promethean transformation—from a happy-go-lucky tech nerd, cranium wobbling over a jolly torso, to a Lex Luthor-like titan, muscle-clad and severe, with $110.5 billion net worth and galactic ambitions.

The first online bookshop he and his former wife, novelist MacKenzie Bezos, started in a small Seattle house would come to dominate the print and eBook market, bullying publishers into aggressive bottom-dollar pricing. One anecdotal account by a former product manager Randy Miller referred to a “cheetahs and gazelles” strategy: going after the smaller, weaker publishers so as to intimidate the larger ones.

Amazon Vice President Jennifer Cast, the company’s 25^th employee who helped build its book business, denied any knowledge of the cheetah-gazelle ploy. Asked why most book publishers would not speak on camera, Cast said: “I don’t know why they wouldn’t speak their minds. We certainly value speaking our minds.”

Browsing the Tate Bookshop

The Tate Britain shop is large and there are multiple, unimpeachable shelves of books grouped into themes such as technique, art history.

QuilletteMichael Clegg

One publisher who did speak his mind was Denis Johnson, a poet-turned-publisher of the left-leaning Melville House Books. When Amazon removed “buy” buttons from his titles, Johnson made national news for refusing to give into the company’s pricing terms.

“That’s an old Walmart trick,” said Randy Miller, referring to Walmart supplier rooms where vendors are pushed to lower prices, often at substantial loss. “It’s not like Amazon created that.”

“We were just this little mom and pop publishing company, publishing poetry books and translated fiction,” said Johnson, exquisitely urbane and measured, comparing his plight with Amazon to that of Jesus in the Gospel of Mathew, Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

“I am not complaining that Amazon is selling our books,” he explained. “I am just complaining of the way their tactics are hurting the industry I love.”

What complicates this David vs Goliath episode is that Johnson is in fact a motivated ideologue—a martyr in the cause of books, but only those that agree with his political sensibilities. In 2018, he took to Twitter to publicly denounce literary agent David Vigilano for representing Donald Trump Jr’s book manuscript. At the time, I asked Mr. Johnson if he considered that a book written by a president’s son might reveal something in the public interest.

“It’s called normalizing a fascist,” Johnson shot back. “You’re with them or against them. Vigilano is clearly with them, and so are you.”

Amazon’s self-publishing option cannot replace traditional presses like Melville House for lesser known or beginning authors who count on cash advances to live on between books. It can, however, provide an alternative platform for writers of controversial works, dropped or cancelled for political reasons, serving as a backstop against losing readers.

War correspondent Hesh Kestin is an American-Israeli David Ignatius of sorts. After decades of reporting on terrorism, arms trade, and intelligence from Europe and the Middle East, he turned to fiction. His latest novel, The Siege of Tel Aviv, a techno-thriller a la Tom Clancy first published by Dzanc Books, imagines Israel losing its first battle when five Arab armies invade it in a joint assault. “Scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote—and then the fun begins, as Israel fights back!” reads the blurb on the front cover written by Stephen King himself.

The Siege of Tel Aviv was not the first Kestin book published by Dzanc. But after a dozen tweets calling his novel Islamophobic, the indie publisher pulled the novel and publicly apologized for it. So Kestin took Dzanc’s ebook to Amazon along with an identical printed version. He also made the first 50 pages of the novel available for free.