Let Amazon sell you some books about wealth inequality and climate change
Prime Day, the day Amazon is set to make $2 billion as we shoppers seize deals on electronics filled with mined minerals or accessories formed through melted down plastic, is upon us.
To glom on, succubus like, to the frenzy of Prime Day — but with a subversive twist! — I thought it would be cute to suggest you read some books about the way money, power, shortsightedness, and greed fueled the success of companies like Amazon and their billionaire bosses, at the expense of our wallets, planet, and collective future.
Alas, forgive me.
Searching for books about the topics of waste reduction, climate change, and income inequality, and being immediately served links to buy from the very company that is perpetuating waste production, climate change, and income inequality, invited a certain amount of reflection, and a shameful feeling of hypocrisy.
These books — filled with wisdom as they are — will be served to you with Amazon purchase links, from which Amazon, Mashable, and, indirectly, I, will profit, if you choose to take any of my reading list suggestions. So really, I've realized, my list —capitalizing on SEO and de rigueur anti-capitalist, anti-big tech sentiment — is not much more than a depressingly lame exercise of performative wokeness, feeding the system it lamely seeks to criticize.
Anyway, here are some books.
If any of these descriptions interest you, perhaps consider purchasing the books at your local bookstore, instead?
1. Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash
Before you click "add to cart" on that great new Amazon deal, consider: What are you going to have to get rid of to make space for the shiny and new?
Get new stuff, throw the old stuff (and all the new stuff's packaging) away. Garbology, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edwared Humes, explores how this cycle, in which we participate every time we take down the bins, got cemented in stone. It examines the industrialization of waste, and the people trying to make things better.
2. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
Before Marie Kondo became a Netflix sensation, she was inspiring clutter-keepers everywhere with this book. If you're looking to really drill down on the Kon-Mari method, go back to the source material.
But really, you know the best way to avoid going around your house, and clutching inanimate objects to see how you feel about them? Not buying all that crap in the first place.
3. The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
Shopping on Amazon this Prime Day might just ring some bells about what your favorite presidential hopeful politicians have been saying. Anti-trust? Monopoly? Break up big tech?
There is a renewed push to scrutinize companies like Amazon for how they may have become gargantuan monopolies while we were all busy celebrating how innovative they were and how convenient they made our lives. But, from telecoms to the airline industry to big tech, monopolies have been growing under the noses of the American public and government for a while now. Read how this happened, and what the consolidation of power and money into mega-corporations has done to our nation from this New York Times bestselling author.
4. Winners Take All
Take a deeper dive into the people behind the tech monopolies with Winners Take All. This book examines how the tech leaders who are claiming to want to make the world a better place — both through their work, and ultimately, their philanthropy — manage to justify their extremely privileged position in the world.
Or, as author Anand Giridharadas put it in an interview with TechCrunch, how people like Jeff Bezos "sought to pass themselves off as change agents who can fix the problem that they are complicit in causing, and who can fight the fire that they helped set." Amazon Books, you up?
5. The Uninhabitable Earth
Extreme wealth inequality and uber-conspicuous consumption have far reaching consequences that will manifest — sooner than we think — in the effects of climate change. This singular piece of journalism details how climate change's causes and effects are an interconnected phenomenon poised to touch many aspects of our lives.
And with that, happy shopping!
Topics Books
