Amazon (AMZN): Digital Feudalism as Convenience

How the world's largest marketplace transformed modern capitalism into digital serfdom

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Dear Fellow Expat:

I struck a nerve Friday.

I mentioned the Wall Street Journal was promoting tech feudalism…

And I upset a handful of people who think Jeff Bezos is the living embodiment of The Wealth of Nations…

I’ll gladly concede he is an incredible businessman…

He created a great company that provides massive convenience for the American consumer.

But critics went wild.

They told me that I should post my Amazon shopping history…

Or said, “Jeff Bezos made a lot of people rich along the way.”

[Editor’s Note - Lights cigarette, takes drag, sneers, “So did Gaddafi and Bernanke.”]

Some even said that I needed to read Bezos’ shareholder letters.

Let me keep this simple.

I’ve investigated Amazon more than any other business in my career…

Amazon.com is a modern form of neo-feudalism, disguised as convenience.

Full stop.

Of course, Bezos’ letters sound visionary.

Every feudal lord had beautiful proclamations about duty and service while extracting wealth from below. This is no different.

And as you’ll see, public relations doesn't change the 150% annual turnover rate or workers urinating in bottles.

Welcome to my TED Talk.

You Only See a Package on Your Doorstep

For most people, Amazon is the definition of convenience.

How could it not be?

One-click purchases… same-day delivery… Alexa turns off the lights while you unwrap your next dopamine rush from whatever you bought and forgot about...

The company’s Prime Day is now a national holiday.

The smile logo promises happiness delivered to your door.

But behind that frictionless experience lies something much older…

Something far more powerful than a retail platform…

Strip the algorithms, the drones, and the two-day shipping, and what you’ll see is a structure that would be quickly recognizable to a medieval peasant.

Amazon is a vast hierarchical system of control, extraction, and dependency.

I'm about to hurt your feelings if you’re an Amazon or Jeff Bezos fan.

But please do me a favor…

Don’t attack the messenger.

Jeff Bezos isn’t hiring you or inviting you to his next wedding.

Amazon isn't just a monopoly...

It's a modern neo-feudal empire.

This is a vertically integrated, digitally governed domain where the lord's whims decide who gains access, survival, and prosperity.

Not a king. Not a president.

A platform.

And before we begin, please understand…

When a company controls 40% of e-commerce and 33% of cloud computing and has integrated itself into critical infrastructure, you can’t tell a critic, "well, don't use it."

That’s like saying, "Don't use roads."

That's the whole point of feudalism - you can't opt out.

The Platform Owns the Land

In classical feudalism, the king owned all the land.

You didn't grow crops, raise animals, or build homes without permission.

You were granted these opportunities through a vassal contract.

Your survival and existence depended on maintaining good standing with the lord who controlled your plot of earth.

In Amazon's world, the "land" is the platform itself.

Amazon is a digital territory more valuable than any medieval fiefdom.

The new feudal estates are the marketplace, supply chains, fulfillment network, cloud infrastructure, and delivery routes.

If you're a third-party seller, a warehouse worker, or a global brand, your existence is tied to Amazon's digital soil.

Again, the company controls almost 40% of all U.S. e-commerce. And growing…

For many businesses, that's not market share.

It's oxygen. Imagine you needed a blood transfusion and were denied because you had not followed the terms of service with the local hospital for failing to buy enough advertising space from the medical system.

It’s shockingly similar.

You don't just choose to sell on Amazon; you're compelled to it by the gravitational pull of 300 million active customers.

(Oh, it’s not like Walmart doesn’t do the same shit.)

But entry to this kingdom comes at a price.

If you want access to customers?

Pay the toll.

Follow the rules.

Obey the algorithm.

Never question the lord.

Lords, Vassals, and Serfs

Amazon's hierarchy maps medieval power structures.

The King is Amazon itself.

It owns the infrastructure and sets the rules.

Amazon’s word is law, encoded in Terms of Service, which can change anytime.

You can't challenge it in court.

There are mandatory arbitration clauses to prevent this...

The power dynamic is the size of an ocean from the start.

I don’t know how this is so hard for people to understand.

Across the board, no one can appeal to a higher power.

Antitrust enforcement has been weakening for decades.

You click "accept" and hope for the best.

The Lords are regional executives and system architects.

At Amazon…

Warehouse general managers oversee thousands of workers.

AWS division heads control the internet's backbone.

Marketplace executives decide which categories get promoted and which get eliminated.

They manage the digital estates and enforce the quotas that keep the system running.

They also take all the data from their sellers and introduce competing products…

Ask Duracell and Diapers.com how their relationship with Amazon went.

But you don’t need to. You already know who won.

The Vassals are third-party sellers and contractors.

These are the merchants who stock Amazon's infinite shelves, the delivery partners who wear the smile logo, and the small businesses dependent on Amazon traffic.

They enjoy certain privileges.

They get access to customers, logistics support, and payment processing.

However, these come with steep obligations.

They pay tribute through referral fees, fulfillment fees (storage, picking, packing), advertising fees (now mandatory for visibility), account maintenance, long-term storage, and return processing fees.

Like medieval vassals, they're technically independent.

But we know that they’re completely reliant on the system itself.

The FTC recently stated in a complaint:

“Amazon recognizes that sellers find ‘that it has become more difficult over time to be profitable on Amazon’ due to Amazon’s ‘increasing fees and costs.’ But as one seller explains, ‘we have nowhere else to go and Amazon knows it.’”

Their independence is an illusion.

They will be made to remain useful and compliant.

Then there are the Serfs.

They are warehouse workers and gig drivers.

These are the physical bodies fueling the machine.

They work under constant surveillance, tracked by productivity-per-minute metrics.

Bathroom breaks are timed.

Wait… YOU DIDN’T KNOW THAT?

Their steps are counted.

Efficiency scores determine whether you keep your job tomorrow.

The parallels to serfdom are incredible.

This is tied to their economic lord through debt and limited options, monitored constantly, producing value they'll never share in, and replaced the moment they slow down, whether by injury, age, or algorithm.

But “Go get another job,” yells the guy in New York City...

There aren’t a lot of jobs near many of these warehouses.

Why do you think they put them there?

A lot of these places are economically disadvantaged. Amazon gets massive tax breaks for putting these warehouses in “Opportunity Zones,” but there’s really not a lot of opportunity for some people.

Have you ever read the court reports from former employee Jennifer Bateman in Alabama?

These are real quotes before the U.S. Senate.

“Within three days of starting my new job I was in physical pain and my sister, who also worked there, warned it was going to worsen, and compared it to exercising for nine hours a day.”

Then, on break times and surveillance:

“Breaks are irregular, determined by algorithms that monitor the workers by the second… I overheard a worker being told by a supervisor, ‘If you don’t go when I asked you to go, you won’t get a break at all.’”

But do go on lecturing her about her job choices…

Or calling what I’m saying “socialist drivel.”

I’m a libertarian who believes in free market capitalism.

Monopolistic rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and systematic market manipulation aren't free market capitalism.

When you can't sell your product cheaper anywhere else or face digital death, that's not competition.

It's control.

And when Amazon takes all of your data, creates and sells the same product, and then runs you off the platform…

You get the point…

Not capitalism.

The Rule of Algorithmic Law

In feudal Europe, local lords handed down justice.

It was arbitrary, personal, and cruel.

A serf could be punished for gathering firewood from the wrong forest…

There was no written law, no consistent application of rules, and no higher court of appeal.

Today, Amazon's law is algorithmic, which somehow manages to be even more opaque and arbitrary than medieval justice.

If your seller rating drops below a threshold, your listings vanish from search results.

This is a digital death sentence.

If a warehouse worker's scan rate falls below the target, their shifts dry up.

If your product gets flagged by the algorithm, even incorrectly, you're suspended without warning, often without explanation.

The appeals process is Kafkaesque.

Sellers describe sending dozens of emails into the void, receiving only automated responses.

They hire consultants who specialize in "Amazon jail" cases.

This cottage industry exists solely to navigate the platform's byzantine system.

A few years ago, I interviewed Lara Hodgson, who ran a baby products company.

They keep extending payment times, making it harder and harder to raise capital for new production.

Her situation was so bad that she shut her company down and entered invoice financing so that other people wouldn’t have to wait months for payments from Amazon.

Amazon doesn’t pay its suppliers for 45 days.

That’s a 45-day, interest-free loan that they get on the backs of their suppliers.

They can then invest in T Bills as they want. They turn their customers into banks.

While you can say, "Well, those companies signed up for that," you have to understand that before 2008, the average invoice time was under 15 days.

If Amazon had to pay its suppliers within 15 days… it’d probably collapse.

They had $96 billion in capital locked up in accounts payable at the end of 2024.

That’s more money than Costa Rica's GDP sitting around collecting interest… not shared with the suppliers.

Loyalty Over Law

What kept the feudal system alive wasn't just land ownership but the loyalty system.

Vassals swore fealty to lords, and then the lords to the king.

That loyalty ensured protection in return for obedience.

Step out of line, and you weren't just breaking a rule…

You were betraying a sacred bond.

Amazon's empire operates on the same principle, but calls it "customer obsession."

Want visibility in search results?

Prove your loyalty.

Sellers have to optimize their listings according to Amazon's ever-changing preferences. They have to buy more sponsored ads. They have to hit delivery targets that grow stricter each quarter.

They must accept returns without question, even obvious fraud.

They then sacrifice margin to match Amazon's pricing (you can’t sell anything cheaper on the internet elsewhere than what you sell it for on Amazon)… they can’t sell cheaper elsewhere (enforced by bots that scan the internet)

Meanwhile, worker loyalty is measured by the way their relationship works.

They have to work holidays and weekends during peak season. They accept "voluntary" overtime that's anything but, They can’t complain about working conditions. They can’t organize (union-busting is aggressive and sophisticated). They must maintain productivity metrics that increase every year.

And they’ll still have AI take their jobs anyway

But just go get another job, the critic says…

The Surveillance Estate

Medieval lords maintained control through physical surveillance.

Bailiffs, reeves, and stewards watched the serfs, counted the grain, and reported dissent.

But their reach was limited by human eyes and ears.

Amazon's surveillance makes medieval oversight look like child’s play.

In fulfillment centers, workers wear devices that track their location down to the meter. Cameras powered by machine learning watch workers.

AI analyzes worker paths to find inefficiencies measured in seconds.

Drivers have said they were urinating in bottles because bathroom breaks hurt their delivery metrics.

Warehouse workers skip water to avoid bathroom trips.

For sellers, surveillance takes different forms. Every customer interaction is recorded and analyzed. Pricing algorithms monitor competitors and suppliers in real time. Inventory levels are tracked and penalized if they are too high or too low based on changing metrics.

The platform doesn't need to tell you what to do. It just measures everything and lets fear of the metrics drive behavior.

Disguised as Progress

Amazon's genius isn't just scale.

It's camouflage.

Many people view this company as a beacon of innovation and convenience…

That reputation obscures the brutal asymmetry of power.

The sleek interface, the customer reviews, the recommendation engine…

All of this creates an illusion of a democratic marketplace.

We don't see the structure underneath the customer experience.

Most people just see a package on the doorstep.

The language itself is carefully chosen to hide the reality:

"Partners" are really just vassals.

"Associates" are really just the physical workforce laboring under surveillance.

"Fulfillment" is really just a fancy word for warehouses.

"Flex drivers" are really just gig serfs.

"Dynamic pricing" is really just algorithmic taxation and enforcement.

If you're inside the system… as a worker, seller, or supplier…

You feel the feudal grip.

You don't make decisions. You fulfill obligations.

You aren't a stakeholder. You're a tenant on someone else's land.

The numbers tell the story that public relations can't hide:

For Sellers, the account suspension rate, I’ve heard, is about 15% a year… varying.. And the appeal success rate from Amazon Jail is less than 30%.

It’s worse for workers. According to OSHA data, this company's injury rate is about 2x the industry average. A 2022 leaked document showed that the annual turnover rate was 150%.

Neo-feudalism isn't a metaphor.

It's a real economic structure: centralized ownership, decentralized servitude, and total control over the means of survival.

Amazon doesn't conquer nations. Through its policy, platform, and power, it governs millions of economic lives. And like medieval serfs, most of us are grateful.

We celebrate our Prime membership while small businesses are crushed.

We praise the convenience while workers are surveilled.

We marvel at the efficiency while entire industries are vassalized.

Amazon's model is being replicated:

• Uber and Lyft: Digital lords of transportation

• DoorDash and Instacart: Extracting from restaurants

• Apple and Google: App Store fiefdoms

• Facebook and Google: They own the digital public square

The business model that is supposed to be “free market capitalism” is really this:

Rule the infrastructure, rent the access, extract the value.

And it’s taking over everywhere…

Serve the Platform or Starve

Feudalism lasted a thousand years, not because it was efficient, but because it was stable, for those on top. Amazon's model shows similar resilience.

Every disruption becomes an opportunity for further control…

• Pandemic? It received essential service status and resulting record profits

• Labor shortage? They turned to automation and still had higher turnover targets

• Antitrust scrutiny? They have armies of lobbyists that lobby their regulators directly… not just Congress.

• Competition? Buy them or copy them until they die or sell for a lower price (that’s what happened to Diapers.com)

The Renaissance didn't happen because feudal lords decided to share power.

It happened because merchants, artisans, and free cities created alternative power structures.

What could end this fiefdom? We’d need user-owned platforms, Blockchain-based marketplaces, the elimination of rent-seeking, stronger antitrust enforcement, and a consumer consciousness that values independence over convenience.

You can’t just keep extracting forever, and the continued loose monetary policies and Cantillon Effect only further consolidate power. It will get worse before it gets better.

I don’t think centralization is going anywhere.

And that’s a problem, because the Jacobins will appear sooner or later... All in the name of smashing capitalism - which is what so many people think Amazon represents.

The next time Alexa delivers your deodorant and a Kindle ad in the same breath, remember it's not just convenience.

Feudal lords provided convenience, too, in the form of protection.

The question isn't whether there's benefit, but whether the digital feudalism (which people try to call capitalism) that destroyed small businesses, injured workers, and people peeing in bottles is worth two-day shipping.

That’s up to you.

Just remember, the smile on the box isn’t for you...

It's the grin of a lord who knows their serfs have nowhere else to go.

Stay positive,

Garrett Baldwin