Jeff Bezos Talks to God

Roisin Kiberd | Tolka, Issue Two, May 2022

T+1 minute

Static shots of a rocket in a Texan desert. The broadcast is live, backgrounded by the gentle hum of engines. Six bodies are huddled inside the capsule; three men, fifty-seven, fifty-three and eighteen, and an eighty-two-year-old woman. They crossed the bridge, rang a silver bell, strapped in, and endured the countdown. Now they will be blasted into the sky, so far as to glimpse a fleeting oblivion. Regret and possibility collapse as they depart the earth. The flames press down, the rocket jolts, and it feels like they’re soaring out of hell. News journalists and bystanders gather on tarmac some distance away. On YouTube, a commenter types ‘With that ship design, Bezos seems like he is trying to compensate for something.’ Everything here he has paid for; the richest man on earth and, soon, somewhere off-earth, too, on the way to other planets.

He views space as a ‘sacrifice zone’ for industry; we’ll exile our problems and salvage our planet, under his guidance, under his control. The whole world under him, in fact, because what is this if not an expression of the politics of speed, of momentum, of power, and of looking down on things?

T+2 minutes

It’s a beautiful day in the solar system, not that day and night matter up there. Jeff Bezos blasts through the sky with his brother Mark and Oliver Daemon, the teenage son of a millionaire who paid for the ticket – a real-life Wonka child – and Wally Funk, a woman trained for space travel by NASA in the 1960s, only to be denied her chance, and granted it again, by Bezos and the spoils of gothic high tech.

The capsule carries with it talismanic cargo: canvas from the Wright brother’s aircraft, a medallion made from a piece of the first hot-air balloon and a pair of goggles worn by Amelia Earhart, silver tape on the lenses to keep out the blinding light.

One year ago Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon in order to spend more time thinking about ways to colonise space. His voice is nasal and squeaky. His upper arms are disturbingly ripped. He is wearing a cowboy hat and boots, strapped into his seat, and that terrifying thing he committed to doing twenty years ago has finally come to pass. Each spacecraft launch is a precise act of violence; the hand of a god pulling them through the atmosphere. The G-force is battering their bodies now, weighing on their chests, draining blood to their toes. He doesn’t speak because the mic is live, and because he won’t be heard over the wailing of engines. But Bezos opens his eyes wide, now, and wonders if death is something you feel as it happens to you.

T+3 minutes

Elevator pitch: an ‘everything store’. A website that will gradually, systematically, remove the need to leave your house ever again. A website that will replace bookshops, electrical shops, greengrocers, postal services, TV channels, Hollywood studios, logistics networks, recommendations of books, films and music from friends, and the need to think for yourself while using the internet. A Nightmare Network; a corporation so vast and amorphous, so rapidly evolving and ferocious, so hideously precise, that it consumes every other idea in the world for the rest of our human destiny.

Amazon began with a drive to nowhere. Bezos, aged thirty, and his then-wife, MacKenzie, aged twenty-four, were in their second year of marriage. He quit his job at a New York hedge fund and they packed their belongings into vans (the drivers were given no specific location, except to set off across America). On the road Bezos typed up a business plan, bouncing ideas off MacKenzie in the driver’s seat.

Originally the business was called ‘Cadabra’, but they concluded that it sounded too much like ‘Cadaver’ when spoken over the phone. They switched it to Amazon, a river multiple times the size of any other. They moved to Seattle and the company grew to fit its name; multinational, fast-moving, famous for recruiting the best, the most Spartan and fanatical, and refusing to offer them perks. Instead of PowerPoint, employees are made to compose six-page critical essays, narrativising the customer’s journey. New recruits are posed difficult, occasionally unfeasible interview questions; ‘Why are manhole covers round?’, ‘How many fax machines are in America?’, ‘If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?’

Those are for the office workers. At the warehouses, they’re ID-ed and drug-tested and asked if they can lift fifty pounds. Then the real test; the timed bathroom breaks, the hazardous conditions, the body in competition with machines. Occasionally warehouse employees pass out or contract and spread coronavirus, or experience miscarriages, or fall victim to a rate of injury eighty per cent higher than those of Amazon’s competitors. Some employees – quite a few, really – have died, at warehouses in America and Poland.

T+4 minutes

This is when they know they’ve left Earth alive; when they see its surface shimmering beneath them. This is when zero gravity kicks in and the booster – that vast, aluminium phallus – separates and falls to earth, leaving the capsule suspended between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Escalation. The internet is full of Jeff Bezos quotes, misty-eyed memes made by fanboys, pictures of him on stages talking about relentlessness and growth. But he’s also known for what employees call ‘escalations’; emails containing only ‘?’, indicating annoyance, boredom or disgust.

Amazon’s stock fell by ninety per cent at the turn of the millennium, and rose by sixty per cent in 2012, the year of the Mayan apocalypse. The pandemic brought about its golden age; profits tripled and Bezos added $70 billion to his wealth. Amazon developed its own brand of ambient disaster capitalism, one where it is part of the disaster itself, selling overpriced masks and hand sanitiser, working to make sure you’ll stay at home, streaming TV shows and ordering deliveries on Prime.

Over twenty-seven years, Amazon preceded, then exceeded Google, eBay, Facebook and Alibaba. Its symbol is an arrow shaped like a smile, pointing off-screen, into the unknown – towards something only Jeff Bezos himself can see, a joke only he is laughing at.

T+5 minutes

$15 dollars per hour paid to warehouse workers, walking 15 miles a day and working 10.5 hours on the graveyard shift ‘Megacycle’. 1.3 million employees worldwide, 89 per cent of whom admit to feeling ‘exploited’. 100,000 warehouse robots. 6,000 dogs brought to work at the Seattle office. 275,000 office employees worldwide, with roughly 5,000 in Dublin and Cork

4,000 items sold per minute in the US. 49 cents of the US e-commerce dollar. $300 million users over five continents, delivering everywhere excluding Cuba, Sudan, Iran, Syria and North Korea. $5 million in lost sales, during a 45-minute blackout in 2013. 75,138,297 products for sale across the site (things you can’t buy: full-size homes, cars, cigarettes, live animals, prescription glasses, lottery tickets, guns, gasoline, facial recognition software).

4.2 million books. 29 ratings of my own. #201 in the Media Studies chart. #280 in Engineer Biographies.

40% of the websites on the internet, currently being hosted on Amazon Web Services. 2,000 data points collected per order. 43 seconds of audio recorded each time an Alexa accidentally turns on. 200 million Ring doorbells sold in 2020, with 22,000 police requests made to access their recorded content the same year.

25 years of marriage, and a $38.3 billion divorce settlement, making MacKenzie the third-richest woman on Earth. $5.8 billion donated by MacKenzie, so far, to 670 charities.

$500 million spent on a new superyacht, plus $41 million on a private jet, and $100 million on a car collection.

A 60-foot-tall rocket, reaching 2,200 miles per hour and 351,210 feet (higher than that pretender, Richard Branson, who flew nine days earlier).

$1.7 trillion market value.

4 minutes of weightlessness, in which Bezos floats and tries to forget.

T+6 minutes

At times, over the years, Bezos’s ambitions for Amazon became unsound and unintentionally Borgesian. One abandoned plan, titled ‘the Alexandria Project’, involved stocking two of every book ever printed, and storing them in a special distribution centre. Another, titled Project Fargo, involved obtaining one of every product ever manufactured, and storing those too (both ideas were quickly pushed back against by Amazon employees).

Apparently Steve Jobs loved music, especially Bob Dylan’s – this is rumoured to have been a reason behind his relationship with Joan Baez in the early 1980s. Jobs’ love of music pushed him to launch the iPod and iTunes, and Bezos’s love of reading did the same for Amazon and Kindle. Each figure was apparently driven to kill the thing he loved, or at least make life a lot more difficult for the people who create it.

In its early days Amazon held meetings in a local branch of Barnes and Noble, something Bezos has joked about in public speeches. He worked out early on that bookshops couldn’t stock all the books in circulation, but that an online retailer could. He once told his senior vice president, Steve Kessel, ‘Your job is to kill your own business . . . I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of the job.’

T+7 minutes

As a writer, how can I tolerate Amazon and the existence of Jeff Bezos? How can I write about, and humanise, the man who has held my industry to ransom? Why do I sometimes use his website to buy ebooks and electric toothbrushes, notebooks and Bluetooth speakers, like so many of the other Bezos-hating writers I know?

I think Bezos understood, very quickly, that as humans we can tolerate an ambient sense of guilt – that it, in fact, plays upon our grievances and confusion, our way of understanding the world – and that this can be drowned out, temporarily, at least, through the instant gratification of online retail.

What Amazon gave us was convenience, and a bewildering range of ways to spend money, ordered and recommended to us by algorithms. What it gave us was the ability to rank and review, to make judgements, and to see ourselves rated in turn. Amazon played on our fear of becoming invisible. Like any all-conquering regime, or dictator, it promised us status in return for capitulation. At first it allowed us to review authors. Then it allowed us to review everything.

Don’t we all, guiltily, enjoy this process? We all want answers. We all want proof that we are going somewhere, that it’s for something, in this lonely, precarious life. We are all on our private journeys to the edge of the atmosphere, and we are all spinning out. Some of us will break through and reach other planets. Some of us will fall, in flames, into the sea.

T+8 minutes

He used to have problems with ‘women flow’. In a 1999 interview with Wired, he explained his exacting, oddly revealing criteria for dates: ‘I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison.’ It never came to that; he and MacKenzie had twenty-four years of apparently harmonious marriage, then divorced in a frenzy of tabloid stories about dick pics sent to another woman, and a rumoured phone hack by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

One year later, he watched as she gave away settlement money and married a school teacher.

He never knew his father. He tries not to permit himself regret.

Now Wally is shouting, ‘I love it! I love it!’ They’re weightless, which means they’ve stopped moving, and are falling. He watches his brother turn upside down, throwing Skittles across the cabin, and floating them into the teenage boy’s mouth.

T+9 minutes

Here on Earth, we are entering the Twilight of the Dads; the Dadderdammerung; the years in which the most powerful, most visible, most wealthy men on Earth devote their time to defying time itself. The period in which a kind of prosthetic machismo, attained with testosterone injections and personal trainers and meat diets and, some believe, adrenochrome, becomes the primary engine behind historical events. We have entered the era of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, of glaring monopolies, of AI, the most invasive, self-fulfilling form of capitalism, and of technological life-extension.

He is its keeper, its exemplar, and yet he can barely understand it himself. He’s tried; in 1999, using a short-lived Amazon Auctions site, he bought the skeleton of an Ice Age cave bear for $40,000 (a species known among palaeontologists for frequently breaking its penis bone in fights with other male bears). It didn’t really deliver any sense of historical profundity. Then he bought the Clock of the Long Now, built to tick once annually, for 10,000 years. Its goal is to conjure a sense of deep time – perhaps it does, but Bezos remains a creature of the present.

This is what happens when infinity is your business plan. Every book, every object, every server hissing in a darkened room. Every minute – no downtime, ever. Forever in ‘growth mode’, a warehouse on every planet.

Now he confronts Earth’s surface and wonders who is looking up at him, and who among them cares, and who among them is wondering and waiting for him to die. It occurs to Jeff Bezos, now, that this might be a good time to talk to god.

T+10 minutes

‘Hello?’

‘. . .’

‘Are you there? I don’t know if I believe in you.’

Silence. Then he notices that the others in the capsule are frozen in mid-air. Wally is smiling. His brother is floating, eyes wide, at the window. A red Skittle hovers near the Dutch boy’s mouth (What is he doing here? Will this experience change him?). Through the windows the view is split fifty-fifty, between opaque white clouds and the darkness of space.

‘God, speak to me. What is this?’

A thundering sound in his skull. A voice answers.

‘Why are manhole covers round?’

‘So that they won’t fall into the hole!’

The voice grows louder, deafening, like a hundred drone metal guitars. ‘How many fax machines are in America?

The others still haven’t moved.

‘I . . .’

He has to admit that he doesn’t know. Then he remembers that nobody knows – only god, really – and that the purpose of this question is to demonstrate the candidate’s thought processes.

‘Why are you asking me these things?’

‘We have five more rounds to go, you know. This is only the screening call.’

‘You think this is a joke? I funded a space programme to get here.’

‘It’s not really space, though,’ says god. ‘You’re only just past the Kármán line.’

‘That’s technically space.’

‘Sure, whatever. If you had 7.9 billion participants on a planet, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?’

‘I don’t really know what you’re looking for here.’

‘?’

‘Please.’

‘?’

Then an explosion between his ears. Something shifts, and he allows himself to feel everything he has not felt for a very long time: confusion, loneliness, loss. Loss above all, because he has lost the world. Then they’re moving again, falling, strapped in for landing. The parachutes are out, and it’s over.

T+11 minutes

They exit the capsule, meeting cameras and family members. At the press conference, Bezos stresses that the flight was not meant as an escape: ‘The whole point is that this is the only good planet in the solar system.’ He thanks every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, perhaps sincerely, perhaps as an act of implication.

Then he carries on as before. He tries not to think about the darkness he saw. He tries not to think, ever again, about the possibility of another Earth.

‘Jeff Bezos Talks to God’ was first published in Issue Two of Tolka (Dec 2021). Issue Two is available to purchase here.

Roisin Kiberd has written essays and features for the New York Times, the Stinging Fly, the Dublin Review, Winter Papers, the White Review, the Guardian and Vice, among others. Her first book, The Disconnect, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2021