By now, everyone gets the joke, right? Amazon Prime delivers free shipping insofar as companies that sell stuff through Amazon pay to become eligible for Prime, a key feature of which is — free shipping. Simplified, this means that third-party sellers pay Amazon’s shipping costs, a point that Matt Stoller has made in his excellent article, Amazon Prime is an Economy Distorting Lie. In return, these sellers are advertised over sellers who do not, in fact, pay Amazon’s shipping costs.
Consumers, for their part, experience “free shipping” as a gift of Amazon, not as the gift of the people footing the bill. Companies that cannot foot the bill of free shipping are consigned to the “See More Results” section of Amazon — that dark and rarely-accessed basement. Richer sellers are rewarded for being rich, to the surprise of no one at all. But the real winner is Amazon, who gets third-party sellers to buy up generalized brand-loyalty to Amazon; to pay for the truly priceless product, namely, the feeling of safety and security that wells up in the consumer’s heart when he sees that a product is Eligible for Prime.
Having paid for Prime Eligibility, companies often raise product prices to make up for the payment they’re making to Amazon to give “free shipping.” This leads to the common experience one has in comparing prices on Amazon: the price of the top, non-Prime Product equals the Prime Product plus the 3.99 shipping cost. In the end, one pays the same price, either for a cheaper product with a shipping cost, or for a more expensive product without one, the difference being that the more expensive product without a shipping cost now glows with a mysterious glory of being a Prime Product. More quotidianly, it’s the first product that shows itself to the addled, distracted, product-surfing eye.
That we pay to participate in this shell-game is odd. While our Prime subscription further offsets Amazon’s shipping costs, it seems to serve with as much efficacy in the purchase of further brand commitment. We are, after all, paying for Prime. We bought a golden ticket, even if everyone else has the same one. We would be wasting this ticket, were we not to purchase from Amazon instead of some other company and when we do, to purchase only Prime Eligible items, that is, items which others pay to ship. This, plus the promise of a few crappy TV shows, seals the deal.
A common critique of Jeff is the fact that he has culled more of the world’s wealth to himself than any individual in human history. Through the destruction of smaller and more localized companies who cannot afford to become Prime Eligible, a process which pits them into an international competition for a scarce resource called the “Buy Box,” Amazon has helped to shrink the world into one in which fewer people than ever hold most of the world’s wealth. Perhaps this does not seem egregious to anyone. But it is worth being clear what it means to have a Prime membership: it means to participate in the particular method by which wealth is accrued unto Jeff, in and through a genuinely spiritual shift in the human person, to whom Amazon now appears to magically deliver a good (free shipping), an appearance produced by an interface which masks the payment of shipping by companies forced to either pay for shipping or miss out on a scarce resource which Amazon itself designs.
Because of this, Christians should have a problem with Prime, even if no one else does. Jesus Christ described the basic behavior of worldly power in the following manner: “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors” (Luke 22:25). Jesus condemns lording power over others, but he really gets furious when we do so in a manner that it appears as beneficence — as doing good and giving gifts.
Were Jesus among us today, I doubt he would hesitate to describe Jeff as a king: in a world run by money, what else to call the man who owns the lion’s share of it? Nor would he hesitate to call Amazon’s operations as an exercise of “lordship.” Beginning with a loan from his parents, Jeff has used power, not for the sake of the common good, but only insofar as the attainment of some common goods (like convenience and resource allocation) can be directed to the gain and glory of Amazon.
Jesus speaks from the Old Testament his mother and father taught him, from scriptures stuffed with condemnations of idolatrous kings who make their lordship look like beneficence. In the Book of Samuel, the Israelite people demand a king “like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5) because they believe such kings can provide superhuman goods — they can “go before them” and “fight their battles for them.” God condemns their request as a rejection of the true God for a human idol, and orders his prophet Samuel to show the people the “ways of the king.” The human king appears superhuman through the extraction of the labor and property of the many, which he then operates as if it were his own. The people see his operation, and call it beneficence, the incredible gift of victory, when it is, in fact, lordship — the systematic reduction of a free people into an effective standing army and a totalized renting class, whose wealth is continuously moved into the hands of the king through tax, tithe, and takeover. It is this “hiding of what’s really going on” that seems to raise Jesus’ ire. He defines slavery, not as having one’s freedom confined by a master, not even as a loss of property, rather, “the slave does not know what his master is doing” (John 15:15).
The sin of Amazon is not merely in its ill-treatment of workers, the way the website forces competition through the artificially constructed scarcity of the Buy Box, or even the pursuit of profit apart from the common good. These are methods of extracting the wealth of others, but the website is the manner of presenting that wealth as if that wealth comes from Amazon. In some ways, it seems hardly worth the alarm. Through a little cajoling on the merchant-side, a little pressure on the labor-side, some incentivized monthly offerings from the consumer-side, and some decent web-design, a particular king is able to scrape together enough value to appear to do what men, by nature, cannot: offer free shipping. This superhuman power then serves as the basis of others: the more people become members of the Amazonian body, enjoying Jeff’s clever shift of shipping costs onto third-party sellers, the more wealth goes to Amazon, and the more Jeff can operate this wealth as if it proceeds from him, doing things that only gods can do: Jeff, for instance, can fly to Mars.
For the Christian, the problem with flying billionaires is not one of envy, but of idolatry. For, though one can bring to mind the actual method by which wealth is scraped from others in order to provide an apparently superhuman good, very few do. One simply orders from Amazon. One receives free shipping from Amazon. Whatever the critical mind may think, the internet-surfing body is habituated into experiencing Amazon as a store, responding with relief and gratitude to the things it offers as Prime, and unseeing the suppression of rivals, the oppression of workers, and the increasing demand for consumer rents which pay the actual cost of “free” shipping. Through using the website, we operate an image that masks the darker details by which the image is made efficacious: The shopper simply sees the first product as the best product — not as the product which has paid an appropriate tax to Amazon. One clicks “buy” and expects delivery — one does not bring to mind the service-sector class suffering inhuman paces of work in order to attain it. We do not know what the master is doing.
This, quite simply, is what is meant by an idol, which the scriptures unflaggingly attach to the idea of the kingship of the nations. An idol, from eidos, means an “image.” An image represents the real. Because an image can truly represent reality, Christianity has always condemned iconoclasm, the rejection of images as such. But in this case of idolatry, the representation obscures and falsifies the real. The image appears as a genuine, efficacious source of goods, a lie which serves to hide the powerful people who really attain the goods.
The idolatrous society is one that sacrifices their time and wealth, petitioning the idol for effects that are actually achieved by a people’s continued oppression and dispossession under kingly rule: “for money-making and work and success with his hands [the idol-worshipper] asks strength of a thing that has no strength” (Wisdom 13:19). The point is not merely that the idol-worshipper has made a physical mistake, forgetting that a little wooden statue cannot actually aid him. Rather, by asking strength of a thing that has no strength, one’s eyes are diverted from the strength of the thing which really does have strength, and which does, in fact, dole out the money-making, work, and success of the people: the amassed power and wealth of the people culled into the hands of a tyrant. Lordship appears as beneficence in and through the operation of an image which makes the extracted power and wealth of many people appear as one, simple thing, separate from them — as, say, Amazon, the place where we get stuff.
Is Jeff Bezos a god-king? Is Amazon an idol? Is Prime membership a weirdo way of transforming collective wealth into the private power of billionaires, who appear superhuman as a result? Yes, and Christians should delete their accounts, temper their spending, and only use Amazon as a search engine for buying directly from companies. But in doing so, they should not indulge the perverse pride which imagines themselves true believers, everyone else an idol-worshipping drone. It’s not like that. Through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, God-become-man, Christian society has been forever-after and socially saved from the delusion of really, subjectively believing that man can be a god. Christians are not the ones who know that the gods are fake in a society that thinks they are real. Our society is Christian whether it would like it or not, shaped by the corrosive power of the Gospel: we all think the gods are fake. This subjective effect of the gospels does not negate the objective possibility of idolatry, our willful decline into a society of dispossessed renters who habitually offer their power and wealth unto a wealthy class, which returns it, after profit, in the form of services, appearing as benefactors but in fact operating as our masters, without care for our souls. We may even dull ourselves to the reality of this unjust social order through the power of idols: choosing to take the world of screens, ads, buttons, and simplified narratives as the real, or at least functional, world. But, because we belong to Christ, this idolatrous power of the kings of the earth is never complete: We will always hear and nod along to that efficacious word, “these are just men, not gods.” Like the prophet Daniel, we will always presume that, underneath every purportedly efficacious idol, there is hidden trap door. We remain, thanks be to God, capable of conversion into holy social orders, justly distributed wealth, and flourishing human freedom. Even when Prime Days fulfills the prophecies that the idolatrous kings will make holidays for themselves, “oppress his holy people and try to change the set times,” (Daniel 7:25) we will have hope.