Amazon Announces New Division in Enshittification
A parody
By Thomas DeVere Wolsey
Amazon Digital Products announced today the creation of the Division in Enshittification to improve the company’s profits and monopolize customer choices, er help customers know what they like before they do. As a reporter for The Washington Post, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon [disclaimer], I stopped by the first meeting of the Division managers to find out more about what they believe people want the most. Jeff Bezos, himself, introduced the group to me.
JEFF: Welcome to the first meeting of Relentless.com’s Division of…. Sorry, I meant Amazon’s Division in Enshittification. I want to introduce Josh, the team leader. He’ll take it from here.
JOSH: Thanks, Mr. Bezos. We at the Division in Enshittification or DIE, as we like to call it, are here to help our customers understand that we know more about them than they do. Our job is to assist customers to trust the algorithm based on amassed data we have been collecting on our, let’s call them “customers,” since 1994. Our AI expert, Jim, can explain more about that.
ME: [smiles].
JIM: You see, we buy and sell data that our customers volunteer to give us. With that, we remember the day your trackball quit working all those years ago and you spent an hour searching for a new mouse using the arrow keys on your keyboard. You forgot, but our server farms never forget…
