Humanity can be divided into two groups: those who know about and understand an influential American family known as the Kardashian-Jenner clan and those who may have heard their names mentioned but have no idea why. The author of this column belongs to the second group.
Some followers of technology news may remember the year 2018 when the media occasionally featured embarrassing headlines about Elon Musk, a small-time billionaire at that point of his history, weighing in at around a paltry $20 billion. Musk managed to get himself into trouble on more than one occasion in high-profile cases that smelled of serious scandal.
Everyone knows that Amazon is a successful, profitable, world-conquering and, therefore, obscenely rich company. It has made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. He keeps getting richer by the day. With his fortune, Bezos doesn’t need to be as careful with his cash, in contrast with normal human beings, who know how important is to save up for a rainy day. That may help to explain why Bezos has just stepped away from his post as CEO. Still, the culture Bezos created at Amazon during his reign insists on being extremely careful with its money. We now learn that this is true even when it’s cash that belongs to other people.
As Shoshana Zuboff has warned in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” the great tech giants have built a system people have become dependent on for their social relationships. But this “social” system has been built to serve a fundamentally antisocial purpose. The customer is the product. And, thanks to advances in technology, the product can increasingly be remodeled to maximize its commercial value.