From Hammer to Infrastructure: Tracing "Breakdown" in Amazon's Vectors of Power

• In Event: Wiring digital justice: Embedding rights in Internet governance "by infrastructure" - II

Abstract

In 1999, Amazon obtained a patent for the “one click” button. The same year, Susan Leigh Star published the foundational article “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” The essay extended science and technology studies into the field of infrastructure studies around the notion that “The normally invisible quality of a working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks.” Though Star did not intend to describe Amazon, the idea that infrastructure is invisible until it breaks is operationalized in Amazon’s obsession with seamless user experience design. What hides behind the modern aphorism that infrastructure is invisible until it breaks, is that Amazon’s infrastructure is broken, even when it works. When we fixate on the invisibility of infrastructure, we forget that brokenness is unevenly experienced. Differences in place, identity, occupation, and class engender different relations to infrastructure’s working. This presentation traces the invisibilized infrastructures that the one-click button obfuscates in order to better understand how Amazon’s platform profits from broken systems. Star’s study makes reference to Heidegger, calling infrastructure “ready-to-hand”—a turn of phrase coined by Heidegger in his philosophical study of hammers. I argue, under platform capitalism, a hammer must conform to the requirements of global logistics chains and the algorithmic rules defined by the platform itself. Before a hammer can be useful, it must be brandable, sampleable, reproducible, shippable, trackable, storable, packageable, reviewable, itemizable etc. A hammer can become a salient symbol the sited conduits, paths and linkages that comprise Amazon’s vectors power.

Author

• Ulysses Pascal, Department of Information Studies, UCLA