Bellevue
When I ride bus 271 from Seattle to Bellevue and read something interesting on the tablet, I’m aware of the Mountain and want to look at it. I raise my head and look, often until the Mountain hides behind Medina. It hides, but I’m still thinking of it, even when we’re off the bridge and on Evergreen Point Road, sometimes.
The bridge is of hollow concrete blocks floating on water like ships. The longest such on the globe. Medina is also global, Gates and Bezos live here. Gates I did when I got to Seattle in 1998. It is 2014 now, and I says why don’t check on Amazon and Bezos. And so on this brisky Seattle morning we’re going to be sweating in the world’s foremoset shopkeeper’s SEA6. Ready?
SEA6 is a fulfillment barn not far from Bezos’s first house, when in 1994 he rode into Seattle with the wife and a quarter million from the family. In fact, that house and its start-up garage sit less than a mile northwest from SEA6. Although it is 20 years on now and Bezos has digs all over America, and the globe, I thought something might happen here, so I applied. And something did happen, I met Bezos on the second day on the job.
I was put to packing singles. Simple, stupid, I like stupid. You grab a cart with picked items, take one, scan it, get the right box, stick the item and the bubbles in, tape the box, slap a spoo (barcode label), and toss the box down the conveyor. On my second day, I do it for most of the morning, then the computer acts up and a tech guy works on it for 20 minutes. By noon we go to lunch.
I’m walking back from lunch and Petra, the facility manager, an open laptop on her arm, waves me aside. She says my morning packing rate is bad, the tone of her voice weaponized and configured in such a way that it hits me in the spot I hadn’t been aware even existed in me. I have no shield against such a vibe of malicious demeaning, as I’m feeling searing heat in the center of my chest. I’m a road seasoned buckaroo, mind you, thought had hide ‘n calluses all over my frame – and look.
“Listen,” I go strongly because I was hit where “our culture” or better yet “our Western civ” doesn’t prepare you to be slashed so nakedly. It was a 100% sucker punch in terms of a historically matured White man’s conduct code. “Listen,” I go, “I’ve been around, I’ve put in fair work anywhere went, as I’ve done here today.”
True, I didn’t notice my pace was slower than anybody else’s in the shack. Then it came out. It was that 20 minutes of idling when the geek was fixing the comp that dragged my rate down.
That’s how I met the world’s foremost shopkeeper Jeff Bezos nerve to nerve.
In population genetics there’s the term “founder effect,” which is the loss of genetic variation when a new population is established by a very small number of individuals from a larger band. In a way, that’s how Amazon unfolded in its forming years. Jeff Bezos’s is a David Koresh-type, highly strung, penetratingly domineering and objective-possessed personality. Through the top-down process, that personality has been imprinted into the modus operandi of the whole rapidly growing body of Amazon.
Bill Gates, with whom I had a face time when he and Melinda came for a George Carlin show at Seattle Center where I worked, doesn’t have it, he’s more of a John Hagee-type corpo reverend. But Bezos has this unique inner-pitbull clutch on the weaker and the dependent when it comes to fulfilling (fulfillment, huh?) his drive. That’s why you can meet him so strongly even at the employee lowest rung. Especially the lowest, the most terrorized, computer-rate spooked pickers/pacķers/stowers of his cashscraping barns. And the gist of this sport isn’t the canonized “customer obsession,” kiddos, no no. Obsession it is, yes, but subtract “customer” as the prime instigator from it.
Says a former Amazon executive: “If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.” A former senior operations manager: “The key to advancement is great production numbers. It incentivizes you to be a heartless son of a bitch.” In order to please this group (the nebulous, sanctified, deferred-gratification-impotent “customer”), one trashes that group (often college-level educated, hitched up to the monitoring computer whip fulfillment mules), and makes a bundle and an outsized name for himself in the process. Point where the epicenter of obsession is here lodged.
And so the mood in the street does not cease ( 2023, 2024) to be unsympathetic to the GOAT shopkeeper and the king of sweatshop despite years rolling on. You’d think a man of his intellectual prowess would acknowledge the problem at such a level of clarity that it would unyieldingly compel him to correct it; especially that it is the proletariat, the lowest-rung workforce that is consistently ravaged by his “customer” obsession fangs. And yet it has not happened except for his lieutenants’ platitudes in a corpo buzzspeak. The bulk of the employees former and present and the media have been berating him about it on a monthly bases during this time. Yet it is still in place today as it was twenty years ago, with the Amazon workers “seriously injured at more than twice the rate of other warehouses” in the year 2022.
Thus, from where morality and ethics stand today, it can be justly termed: evil. And the fact that the System being what it is lets Jeff Bezos get away nearly worldwide with this, can be only ascribed to Jeff Bezos being its obedient eunuch.
Evil, the domain incessantly reviewed and cleansed from the human genome through cultural advancement and population narrows aka bottlenecks. My relaxed hunch is that Bezos’s uncommonly fierce evil streak derives from a character trait in his biological father. Character traits as building blocks of a personality can be inherited. The behavioral genetics clues us in today:
During the past four decades, scientists have used special relatives, like twins and adoptees, to test the effects of genes and environment. This research has built a mountain of evidence showing that genetics contributes importantly to all the psychological differences between us. Inherited DNA differences account for about half of the differences for all psychological traits – personality, mental health and illness, and cognitive abilities and disabilities. (nature.com)
Someway through such genomic transmissions, through gene expressions turned on and off, Jeff Bezos’s malice dressed up as “customer obsession” has been procured on its way from his male progenitor.
Ted Jorgensen was eighteen-years-old and a top monocyclist in Albuquerque, NM, when he got a sixteen-year-old schoolmate pregnant. He married her in Mexico as she was underage, and soon went on to neglect the young family, dropping jobs, drinking, spending nights out, causing the teen mother to move back to her parents with the child. When the baby was 17 months old she filed for a divorce. The court ordered the father to pay $40 a month in child support, but he missed many payments. When the boy was four, the mother remarried, released the natural father of child support and requested that he move out of their lives, including signing off on the boy’s name-change to that of the adoptive father, Miguel Bezos.
Ted Jorgensen complied and soon forgot his boy’s new surname. When in 2012, 44 years later, a reporter found him in Glendale, AZ, he wouldn’t connect the Amazon founder with his natural child. He had been married for 25 years to a woman with four kids by another man. He never had another child of his own. The youngest of his step-children, who grew up with the step-father, watched video clips of Jeff Bezos online after the family belatedly learned the fact. He immediately reacted to Amazon CEO’s trademark laugh, often described as “bray.” He said that he listened to it while growing up. It was Ted Jorgensen’s household sound.
Such have been my meditations while contemplating the Mount on crossing the bridge from Seattle to Bellevue for a morning shift at SEA6.
On my ride today, I’m glancing also at Medina. Because I read that Bezos is building this timepiece on his ranch in Texas. A couple stories tall, drilled into a mountain, entirely mechanical and power independent, it is to strike every day, year, age and millennium, until the end of 10,000 years. The Clock of the Long Now. He’s building it because, he says, “it will change the way people think about time, motivating our descendants to work long distances.”
I can understand that. If some folks had built something specifically for us, say 5,000 years back, then time flashed and we received it today as a greeting artifact, it would be sort of cool, right? A fresh kick. The pyramids, for instance, are old but they weren’t sent via time to anybody specifically.
But even if they were, it wouldn’t knock off my socks. Vape fantasies. Kids tossing bottles with corked messages down the neighborhood creek. Been there, done that. Man’s imagination can’t sensibly reach 10,000 or even 5,000 years forth. Bezos himself realizes that: “Over the lifetime of this clock the United States won’t exist, whole civilizations will rise and fall, new systems of government will be invented, you can’t imagine the world – no one can – that we’re trying to get this clock to pass through.”
Right, we can’t. But we can imagine that which has panned out for me on my romp. That the mankind can sensibly engage with the moving world up to 1,000 years. Remember when the ancients began coalescing into greater intellectual entities and super religions burst out of such compounding of minds? In those super numinous times a prophet would often employ the time frame of 1,000 years. It wouldn’t be “10,000” years or about, see? Neither would it be 100. Almost invariably it was a millennium.
Now, what was such a prophet, or a tradition into which the prophets had already dissolved, conveying on the deep-down level, beyond even their own lights, what do you think? Because I think they were setting the optimal time frame in their charges’ minds for their instruction to become flesh. I mean, would anyone sensible by today’s standards expect the whole thing to be done to those concrete sheep whom, at the time, the prophets were pushing or cheering on for certain kinds of behavior, so it would “save” their “souls”? Of course not. It’s not how genetics works. But if you keep pervading your charges’ minds with a millennial time frame, they’d set their innermost clock for achieving the goal to a continuous cross-generational one, to the graspable 40 parent-to-child leaps down the evolutionary drive. “We all fall short of the grace but we don't fall out of the grace.” Or, above all, the Savior trick, the Lamb washing off the “sins.” Those subliminally kept us within evolutionary bounds when religious idiom was doing its best work.
If we could only get back – since Christianity is leaving us Westerners as an effective evolutionary stylist of morals – if we could only find the cultural algorithm getting us back to evolutionarily shaping and straightening our innermost longings for a lifelong monogamous and fertile union of a man and a woman, for monotheism/monism/singularity as an altar and mirror of the powers beyond, that would be “the clock of the long now” for a serious folk. Not adolescent metaphysicing about tripping to the Planets, the Galactics, much less a mountain-top timepiece toy.
So we met Jeff Bezos in his SEA6 barn in Bellevue, WA in 2014. See you on the next leg.