The announcement on Thursday that Amazon has canceled its plan to build a headquarters in New York City is no victory. It’s no defeat, either.
What it is, to use a Big Apple term, is meh, yet another indication that the dulcet attractions of tech have lost their charm for many and that the business — which has been this country’s most innovative and promising and often its most inspirational — is just that: a business, like any other, out for itself and itself alone, and most definitely not changing the world for the better.
That was the cry of tech from its start — especially of the internet types like the Amazon head, Jeff Bezos. Bankers never said they were going to make the world a better place. Nor did makers of toilet paper or potato chips. Maybe soda makers like Coca-Cola said it in their ads, but we were all in on the joke when they told us that sugar water would bring the world together.
But Silicon Valley truly believed its own myths — that tech leaders had arrived from the mountaintop to deliver the gleaming devices and magical software that would transform humanity, and that they would never be evil.
Most of all, they really believed they were more than whatever they actually were doing, whether slinging better ads by sucking up our data, or taking a vig for getting us a date or a car, or in Amazon’s case, selling us piles and piles of stuff in really cheap and convenient ways.
That’s why only a few years ago, it would have been easy for Amazon to saunter into a place like Long Island City, Queens. In fact, the online giant’s effort to decide where its “second headquarters” would be was originally greeted with enthusiasm, with multiple municipalities going to comical lengths to bring in the promised 25,000 high-paying jobs.
There is, of course, no such thing as a second headquarters — this was a marketing circus from the start. But everyone bought into the narrative, especially the media, painting it as if it was going to be a much more transformative opportunity than it ever could be. “Saturday Night Live” got at the heart of it with a sketch a year ago, in which the reps from various cities bowed and scraped, offering all manner of delicious foods and financial gimmes to the world’s richest man.
It was satire, but really, was it?
It cut too close to home for many, who wondered why, in an era when all kinds of public services are being cut and the city’s infrastructure is crumbling, a trillion-dollar corporation was getting so much. When it was revealed exactly how much — $3 billion in tax breaks after largely secret negotiations between civil potentates like Gov. Andrew Cuomo and faceless Amazon execs — the situation was ripe for disruption. (Was it curious that Mr. Bezos was never the ringmaster in these negotiations? Not to me. He often stays behind the scenes in these situations.)
Tech people are always bragging about how they “move fast and break things,” as Facebook’s now-unfortunate motto put it, while seeking out new markets. This time, the disruption came from newly emboldened activists, with high-profile figures like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose district is adjacent to the Queens area where the complex was planned) weighing in with some choice words about the deal.
“Can everyday people come together and effectively organize against creeping overreach of one of the world’s biggest corporations?,” she tweeted this month, part of a relentless series of these kinds of challenges.
Amazon, which never seemed to think it needed to do anything but assert that future tax revenues and other theoretical economic benefits would allow the deal to pay for itself, wasn’t prepared for this kind of scrutiny. So it decided to pull out before it got any hotter. With the prospect of drawn-out negotiations — the cost of not bringing everyone onboard at the start — and the glare of attention such a back-and-forth would bring, the always calculating company came to the obvious calculation that it was not worth the trouble.
In other words: “Thank u, next.”
It was a little funny that Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was a big proponent of the deal until he wasn’t on Thursday, tried to slap back at Amazon for not being able to stand the heat of New York’s kitchen. Twitter having become the means of governing now, he tweeted: “You have to be tough to make it in New York City.”
Oh stop. Amazon is plenty tough, but it just decided to fold up its circus tent and move on. It turns out it won’t even take that show anywhere else and instead says it will simply double down on its other second headquarters in the Washington area, which pretty much tells you that this was all a charade from the beginning.
Many New Yorkers had cheered on the opposition, assuming that it might persuade Amazon to strike a better deal with the city. They mostly agreed that more tech jobs would be good for New York (good salaries and more money for retailers, restaurants and the real estate industry) more than bad (gentrification, congestion).
But no one wanted to end up like San Francisco — which has become a modern hellscape even as internet companies build their airy HQs and become ever richer. There, tax giveaways only exacerbated income inequality and offered no solutions.
Amazon certainly could have been more creative in proposing some balms for those ills in New York. For example, could it have entered into a cool public-private partnership to fix the junky subways its employees would have ridden, perhaps in new and innovative ways?
You know, making the world a better place? No, I guess not.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Kara Swisher, editor at large for the technology news website Recode and producer of the Recode Decode podcast and Code Conference, is a contributing opinion writer. @karaswisher • Facebook
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Amazon Isn’t Interested in Making the World a Better Place
Opinion | Amazon Isn’t Interested in Making the World a Better Place
The announcement on Thursday that Amazon has canceled its plan to build a headquarters in New York City is no victory. It’s no defeat, either.
What it is, to use a Big Apple term, is meh, yet another indication that the dulcet attractions of tech have lost their charm for many and that the business — which has been this country’s most innovative and promising and often its most inspirational — is just that: a business, like any other, out for itself and itself alone, and most definitely not changing the world for the better.
That was the cry of tech from its start — especially of the internet types like the Amazon head, Jeff Bezos. Bankers never said they were going to make the world a better place. Nor did makers of toilet paper or potato chips. Maybe soda makers like Coca-Cola said it in their ads, but we were all in on the joke when they told us that sugar water would bring the world together.
But Silicon Valley truly believed its own myths — that tech leaders had arrived from the mountaintop to deliver the gleaming devices and magical software that would transform humanity, and that they would never be evil.
Most of all, they really believed they were more than whatever they actually were doing, whether slinging better ads by sucking up our data, or taking a vig for getting us a date or a car, or in Amazon’s case, selling us piles and piles of stuff in really cheap and convenient ways.
That’s why only a few years ago, it would have been easy for Amazon to saunter into a place like Long Island City, Queens. In fact, the online giant’s effort to decide where its “second headquarters” would be was originally greeted with enthusiasm, with multiple municipalities going to comical lengths to bring in the promised 25,000 high-paying jobs.
There is, of course, no such thing as a second headquarters — this was a marketing circus from the start. But everyone bought into the narrative, especially the media, painting it as if it was going to be a much more transformative opportunity than it ever could be. “Saturday Night Live” got at the heart of it with a sketch a year ago, in which the reps from various cities bowed and scraped, offering all manner of delicious foods and financial gimmes to the world’s richest man.
It was satire, but really, was it?
It cut too close to home for many, who wondered why, in an era when all kinds of public services are being cut and the city’s infrastructure is crumbling, a trillion-dollar corporation was getting so much. When it was revealed exactly how much — $3 billion in tax breaks after largely secret negotiations between civil potentates like Gov. Andrew Cuomo and faceless Amazon execs — the situation was ripe for disruption. (Was it curious that Mr. Bezos was never the ringmaster in these negotiations? Not to me. He often stays behind the scenes in these situations.)
Tech people are always bragging about how they “move fast and break things,” as Facebook’s now-unfortunate motto put it, while seeking out new markets. This time, the disruption came from newly emboldened activists, with high-profile figures like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose district is adjacent to the Queens area where the complex was planned) weighing in with some choice words about the deal.
“Can everyday people come together and effectively organize against creeping overreach of one of the world’s biggest corporations?,” she tweeted this month, part of a relentless series of these kinds of challenges.
Amazon, which never seemed to think it needed to do anything but assert that future tax revenues and other theoretical economic benefits would allow the deal to pay for itself, wasn’t prepared for this kind of scrutiny. So it decided to pull out before it got any hotter. With the prospect of drawn-out negotiations — the cost of not bringing everyone onboard at the start — and the glare of attention such a back-and-forth would bring, the always calculating company came to the obvious calculation that it was not worth the trouble.
In other words: “Thank u, next.”
It was a little funny that Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was a big proponent of the deal until he wasn’t on Thursday, tried to slap back at Amazon for not being able to stand the heat of New York’s kitchen. Twitter having become the means of governing now, he tweeted: “You have to be tough to make it in New York City.”
Oh stop. Amazon is plenty tough, but it just decided to fold up its circus tent and move on. It turns out it won’t even take that show anywhere else and instead says it will simply double down on its other second headquarters in the Washington area, which pretty much tells you that this was all a charade from the beginning.
Many New Yorkers had cheered on the opposition, assuming that it might persuade Amazon to strike a better deal with the city. They mostly agreed that more tech jobs would be good for New York (good salaries and more money for retailers, restaurants and the real estate industry) more than bad (gentrification, congestion).
But no one wanted to end up like San Francisco — which has become a modern hellscape even as internet companies build their airy HQs and become ever richer. There, tax giveaways only exacerbated income inequality and offered no solutions.
Amazon certainly could have been more creative in proposing some balms for those ills in New York. For example, could it have entered into a cool public-private partnership to fix the junky subways its employees would have ridden, perhaps in new and innovative ways?
You know, making the world a better place? No, I guess not.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Kara Swisher, editor at large for the technology news website Recode and producer of the Recode Decode podcast and Code Conference, is a contributing opinion writer. @karaswisher • Facebook
Source: Read Full Article