In the early morning hours of January 16, 2023, we gained access to a well-secured area in the Germaniastraße in Berlin-Tempelhof and took 25 Amazon Prime vehicles out of circulation using incendiary devices. A fire of solidarity with the squatters in Lützerath and the prisoners on hunger strike.
The consumer mania on Black Friday and the lucrative Christmas business are over. The pompous charity and the little bit of contemplation give way to the usual routine of everyday life. The elbows are again extended to be able to exist in the competition of the present society. Inflation and the rising cost of living apparently defying the commodity rush and the associated plundering of the planet and its resources continues unperturbed in the new year and fills the coffers of the crisis winners of the online trade. Amazon’s monopoly position and extensive business model have long revealed it to be a dependency factor for many. But the company stands for much more than just flushing products onto the market at rock-bottom prices.
Your thoughts and feelings are worth their weight in gold
The IT giant’s technological developments point to a bleak future of a dystopian surveillance and control society. Amazon, as a driving force in the establishment of digital capitalism, is not only permanently changing the economy, but also everyday life, social behavior and even our ways of thinking. Artificial intelligences and algorithms are able to contr ol and manipulate needs. Calculations that can be derived from this are already shaping today what will be made into money tomorrow. With a wide range of products and technological infrastructure (servers), the company is pushing into more and more areas of life to satisfy its insatiable hunger for data. Be it through the surveillance software Amazon Ring, which acts as an all-seeing eye guarding the properties of the rich and – now also installed in vehicles – subjects the environment to permanent monitoring. By the voice assistance Alexa, which lurks as ears of the AI in the living rooms and bedrooms and attends even the most intimate moments. By means of facial recognition programs and sensors that are supposed to interpret emotions and direct customers through the self-pay stores of Amazon-Go. Or with a variety of developments in the fields of health and biotechnology to capture everything physical and break it down into numbers. Amazon knows that anyone who has large amounts of information and data at their disposal and can translate the present into mathematical dimensions also has the power to influence the future to their own advantage.
From the worldwide web on the Berlin site
Responsibility for maintaining the social order of society is much more diffusely distributed, but the corporation, along with a few other tech giants, has a unique role to play in the reordering of the world through smartification. Access to our lives is already far greater in many places than we think we know. This is not limited to those who have already willingly exchanged their friends for Alexa, serve a highly networked on-demand economy by buying Prime products, or buy themselves silly on the online retailer’s platforms at the expense of workers in precarious employment. On the Internet, there is now hardly any way around Amazon. To ensure that this will soon be the case in physical space as well, Jeff Bezos is planting an all-surpassing tower in the middle of the city. With its 140 meters in height, it is an unmistakable symbol of the white-patriarchal claim to power of an egomaniacal asshole. Moreover, the construction of the tower will have drastic consequences for the neighboring neighborhoods. The influx of thousands of IT employees from Amazon will further increase the price spiral on the housing market and continue and accelerate displacement processes. As always, those who suffer most are the excluded, who already feel the financial pressure most strongly due to rising costs. So it is only a tiny consolation that the tower is so outrageously high that the burning down of the Amazon fleet at the other end of the city could easily have been marveled at from the upper floors.
Amazon walks over corpses
The fact that the Amazon EDGE Tower is being built with supposedly sustainable materials may sound good for marketing, but it doesn’t make the whole thing any better. Rather, it belies the climatic consequences of manufacturing and operating thousands and thousands of servers, and how disastrous the business of online retailing and the adherence to the idea of mass consumption is in the face of the ecological crisis. When a corporation like Amazon advertises sustainability, it is certainly not because of insight into the consequences of its own actions, but out of hard-nosed business calculations. The label of climate protection is now a good way to make a profit. It remains unmentioned that the techno-industrial complex only became big through countless crimes against people and nature, from which today’s crises emerge. Only its complete destruction, by means of the necessary liberating violence, will be able to put an end to it.
Last but not least, the smartification, the control and surveillance also affects the beleaguered workforces of the Amazon distribution centers, who, unlike their well-trained colleagues in information technology, are demanded top performance under lousy working conditions for poor pay. Not even when one falls down dead, this dirty company has the decency to give the employees a breather, to pause for a moment, as it happened recently in Leipzig. This fire is for you too!
For the anarchist Alfredo Cospito, who has been on hunger strike for 89 days in solitary confinement in Italy in the fight against the 41bis regime.
For Thanos Chatziangelou, who is fighting for his dignity in the dungeons of Greece.
For Ivan who is on hunger strike in France and the 11 prisoners from Turkey who are on hunger strike in the Greek jails.
In solidarity with the occupants of Lützerath.
Against the progressive plundering of the planet – Attack the techno-industrial complex.
Freedom for all prisoners!
Some anarchists
Source: Kontrapolis