This session is facilitated by Joana Moll
About this session
“Jeff Bezos: The Life, Lessons & Rules For Success” was purchased at Amazon on June 17th 2019. In order to purchase the book, Amazon forced the customer to go through 12 different interfaces made of large amounts of code. Overall, we could track 1307 different requests to all sort of scripts which equaled to 8724 pages of printed code and 87.33Mb of data.
Amazon’s business model is based on “obsessive customer focus”, which entails the continuous tracking of customer behavior in order to amplify the monetization of the user. Thus, the 87.33Mb of code responsible for tracking user activity that were involuntarily loaded by the customer through the browser, relentlessly put Amazon’s core money-making strategy at work. Moreover, all the energy needed to load all this data was effectively unloaded upon the customer, who ultimately assumed not just part of the economic costs of Amazon’s monetization processes, but also a portion of its environmental footprint.
The Hidden Life of an Amazon User narrates the journey of the customer within the labyrinth of interfaces and code that allowed to buy Jeff Bezos’s book while witnessing the mounting energy costs that were helplessly paid for by the Amazon customer.
This work was realized within the framework of the European Media Art Platforms EMARE program at IMPAKT with the support of the Creative Europe Culture Programme of the European Union.