Richard Eoin Nash

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Amazonfail: A straight white male publisher on glitches and ham-fisted errors

I self-identify myself in the title of this post because my personal background likely has more in common with the Amazon employees, however high up, than it does the with authors whose books are affected. As such I’m hereby saying to the ham-fisted error-makers: what happened was really really bad. Here’s why:

Not so long ago, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and queer/questioning individuals had bookstores that functioned effectively as community centers—providing books, videos, bulletin boards, safe spaces, workshops, to the community. However, of the course of the past twenty years “mainstream,” heteronormative capitalism made social contracts with GLBTQ persons. We’ll sell you all that stuff, and we’ll give you discounts, and it’ll be even more convenient, and customer service will be more predictable. We’ll have shelves just for you, we’ll have categories and tags that will allow you to find all the stuff you need. (No, no one signed this contract—like the social contract that made democracy, it’s one you go along with, it’s not handed to you at birth, or on reaching the age of majority.)

Amazon breached that social contract. The breach was no less problematic if it wasn’t entirely intentional, as Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s excellent post makes clear (and boy does he has a great commentariat…). Because in a world where whiteness and straightness are “norms” and males benefit from our patriarchal history, it is always the GLBTQ books, the queer books, the non-normative books that get caught in the glitches, the ham-fisted errors.

The onus is on us, as Tim Wise has taught so well on the topic of white privilege. We cannot be given the benefit of the doubt, because it is always us who get the benefit of the doubt in our society, and if we are to take the pink and lavender dollars, and if we are to say, you don’t need A Different Light, or Oscar Wilde Bookstore, we’ll hook you up just fine, then we can never let this happen. I learned this as a straight white male publisher of queer books, it was why I took care to try to find staff who are gay or trans, to catch my complacency, my temptation to think I deserved the benefit of the doubt.

I didn’t, nor does Amazon. The vigilance and outrage demonstrated on Twitter are necessary, not because the folks at Amazon are bad people, but because the books that were de-ranked were de-ranked because it is always the outsider whose books get de-ranked and “mainstream” society and the capitalist institutions that operate within it, whether my old company or Amazon, must self-police ruthlessly in order to guard against this kind of thing happening.

They didn’t, hence #AmazonFail.

In effect: guilty until proven innocent is the standard to which we must hold ourselves. Because that’s how the other half lives, without any choice in the matter.

Richard Eoin Nash, Apr 13, 2009

Comments

Discuss this article.

Well written. That was powerful stuff. I agree that Amazon has a lot to make up for over this “ham-fisted” error. Unfortunately, I don’t see the company having the cojones to offer a genuine apology. Do you?

– Myra (04/13 11:21 PM)

woohoo for the mention of tim wise!

– kate (04/13 11:21 PM)

I think you have written a cogent analysis of the situation.

If you took out the term “GLBT” and substituted “people with disabilities” it would still read as well.

GLBT themed books received most of the attention, perhaps because GLBT authors were faster to catch on to what was happening than disability authors, or feminist authors. But some disability-themed books were also affected by Amazon’s “error.” And people with disabilities, too, are very much marginalized by society. We are often seen as being inherently incompetent; helpless; dependent; passive recipients of charity and pity—as well as asexual, uninterested in sex, unable to have sex, or as people who should morally not be allowed to have sex. Our views and our issues are not valued. When even some of our most fundamental human rights are violated at the most basic level people label us as merely “anger and bitter” and disregard our complaints. We are not seen as powerful, competent people with the capacity to take the lead; to solve our own problems—and help others solve theirs; to hold opinions, and express them.

Amazon owes a huge apology not only to the GLBT community but also to the disability community. What social contract they have with the disability community, they have violated.

More on the disability angle of this situation at:

http://reunifygally.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/amazonfail-hurts-both-disability-and-glbt-communities/

– Andrea (04/13 11:54 PM)

Isn’t the social contract that Amazon offered more of an illusion? Doesn’t it extend from the same false belief that hiring or embracing those who were outside your perspective granted you an assumptive nexus of checks and balances? Let’s not kid ourselves here. Authors and publishers who do not live up to the constantly shifting folkways and socially acceptable assumptions will always be faced with the risk of being declared lesser. And while I’m with you on the need to call bullshit on those who would oppress the alternative or the dangerous voices, I feel that you’re buying into the same mythical utopia that Amazon has been cramming down our throats since its inception. Today’s non-normative books may be tomorrow’s Queens for a Day. But the privilege you feel that you have right now, whether it’s being able to do this or that, could slip away if you step on a socioeconomic bear trap determined to take you down no matter what the color of your skin. The upshot is that resentment or outrage is just as subject to oppressive vagaries as those who have the keys to the executive washroom. Do not fall prey to the snares of dichotomy.

– ed (04/14 12:02 AM)

“But the privilege you feel that you have right now, whether it’s being able to do this or that, could slip away if you step on a socioeconomic bear trap determined to take you down no matter what the color of your skin.”

a lack of economic privilege doesn’t negate the effects of other systems, or rid one of white male privilege.

– kate (04/14 12:06 AM)

Great comment, Richard. Another point: Amazon’s success has been at the expense of gay book stores; the Oscar Wilde Bookshop and A Different Light in LA had both been around for years and both closed recently.

– John Coulthart (04/14 12:14 AM)

Outstanding post. I think you’re underestimating the importance of queer/LGBT (and feminist) bookstores as “third-places”. They’re not just places to find books of interest to marginalized people; they’re frequently the cornerstones of communities. Also, I’m not sure I follow the “social contract” you speak of. But seriously, you hit the big point that some of us have been trying to make: even if it’s “not Amazon’s fault”, it still *is*. If they want to keep customers (let alone be good citizens), they need to fight their own obliviousness. Being blinded to your bad behavior by privilege is no excuse for bad behavior. At the very least, as you say, the onus was/is on Amazon to quickly realize (and apologize) for the seriousness of the situation.

– eastsidekate (04/14 12:43 AM)

I appreciate the point you are making, but I believe you are wrong. It was wrong to pass judgment on Amazon without giving them a chance to reply and it was wrong to encourage outraged anger rather than simply demanding an investigation and an explanation - and yes, I understand that it is easier to generate outrage than to make milder calls for an investigation and answers, but that is no excuse for jumping to the conclusion that they acted maliciously.

Whether you are an oppressed minority or not, it behooves you, if you can afford the luxury of time - and I think rather obviously that nothing was going to happen if one waited until Monday afternoon for an answer from Amazon before getting angry at them - to wait before passing judgment on another entity, even if that entity is a large corporation, even if you perceive that that organization has harmed your minority group in the past.

(And I think that point is at least debatable. By shipping in Plain Brown Packaging, and by stocking and shipping damn near any book to damn near anyone, Amazon has made LGBT material available to people all over America, in communities where it was never available in bookstores, and that is a genuinely important thing. I am not saying it outweighs the loss of bookstores, but I am saying it is not perfectly cut-and-dried. I personally think Amazon deserves the benefit of the doubt until such a time as they prove that they do not deserve that. (and maybe even then.))

I made this point on ML, so I apologize if you have read it over there and are tired of hearing it from me, but I think it is important to think about this stuff. Outrage is fun, god knows, but it is dangerous stuff, to be treated with respect, and not brought out before it is necessary.

– Jacob Davies (04/14 12:53 AM)

I totally agree with Jacob.

It has come to light that the GLBT-content that was affected was just a small proportion of the 57,310 books that were accidentally marked as ‘adult’ in Amazon’s internal system and thus not included on the site-wide search or sales rankings.

Why did the GLBT community start their hate campaign so quickly? Why didn’t they do their research first? Why did they act just like the kind of people that are likely to have persecuted them in the past, jumping to conclusions without looking below the surface?

– Dave Nattriss (04/14 01:44 AM)

Thanks for these responses! I was aware of the the closing of A Different Light, and of Oscar Wilde, and I did add the phrase about community centers to try to hint at their “third place” role, which I think was critical. And which meant that I didn’t actually think of Amazon as that which killed them—B&N/Borders, Craiglist, cable TV, Netflix, gentrification all played a role. They were multi-faceted operations, and every single last facet took a bullet.

I was aware that disability-related books also took a hit, and as (former) publisher of a poetry volume called The Amputee’s Guide to Sex, I should have checked to see its fate (though I’m optimistic that it avoided de-ranking, since it would only have been listed in poetry…)

Yes, Ed, class/economic status is a real issue too—I’m from Ireland which is the one European country where class get the most smooshed by post-colonial politics. And the US sees class get smooshed by the foundational myths of the nation. But class is just not going to map onto this discussion is any practical sense. In other words, if we’re talking about class, my entire post is kinda beside the point. To my mind, it would be nonsensical to obliterate discussion of this topic, just because there are also other topics?

– Richard Eoin Nash (04/14 01:46 AM)

Rather than admit that you, along with the rest of the twitosphere, took a glitch and ran it into absurdity, you’re actually blaming amazon for not understanding that in the new,new media world everyone is guilty until proven innocent?

I think you’ll get along quite well in the new tyranny. You’ve already figured out the tools, you social media expert you!

– Jack (04/14 01:58 AM)

I spent yesterday “doing research” including two phone calls to ask amazon what was going on in person. I am still outraged with their lack of apparent care how their “mistake” has affected their customer base. They are obviously still holding onto the culture of irresponsibility that the US is having a difficult time shedding.

If I had a business and an employee of mine made a mistake that caused any percentage of my customer-base distress the very FIRST thing I would do would be to apologize.

I received amazon’s emailed ‘explanation’ of their error and my personal experience with databases makes their explanation pretty weak and not very believable. I’m sorry for everyone who jumps straight to believing the first plausible story that amazon has come up with. Obviously they would have to say it was an ‘error’ with the amount of uproar it got—what else could they have possibly said? It’s harder to say you’re sorry if you don’t believe you have done anything wrong which Amazon clearly believes.

They fail even harder today than they did yesterday.

– ambeaux (04/14 02:50 AM)

I don’t get it: people hold amazon responsible for something that goes wrong with their systems and this is a campaign of hate? Since when?! Besides, the conclusion that was jumped to was that a whole lot of GLBT books had been deranked. This is true. Not even amazon (even in their complete inability, apparently, to communicate with their public) has denied this. I suspect, in fact, that it’s precisely the ‘non-normative’ marking of particular texts that has meant they’ve been disappeared. It would seem to me that those with keywords ‘sexuality’, which would include academic texts, self-help sex books like ‘Joy of Sex’, and texts about non-normative sexuality (which get tagged as ‘sexuality’, in contrast to, say, straight romance or porn) as well as ‘gay’, ‘lesbian,’ ‘erotica’ etc were de-ranked. When Amazon claim that texts from a whole range of different categories were involved, that’s true, but most books have multiple keywords (check the ISBN info in any book), and so have multiple categories. That’s why something that could be ‘health’ could still be listed as ‘sexuality’ as well, and thus fall prey to this ‘adult-ification’.

In other words, the very way that we categorise things has led to this vulnerability in the system, and thus to this outcome. And I’m okay with holding Amazon responsible for a homophobic outcome, whatever the intention, particularly given that they know the system backwards, and ought to be able to prevent these kinds of problems. Quite aside from which, does anyone seriously believe that Amazon *could* have come out after all of this and said ‘yes, we are homophobic and deliberately censored search results’? I sincerely doubt it.

– WildlyParenthetical (04/14 02:51 AM)

How exactly could Amazon prevented this problem from happening, if a human made a mistake? The technology isn’t rocket science - if you accidentally tag a load of products as being adult, the system will treat them differently. It’s pretty simple. Someone else then made a mistake of saying “it’s because the content is marked as adult”, without checking whether the product was correctly marked as adult.

They’ve now been alerted to the problem. They’re fixing it. Get over it!

– Dave Nattriss (04/14 03:00 AM)

Perhaps they couldn’t have ‘prevented’ it (although I’m intrigued that there are so few safeguards in place), but that doesn’t mean that they’re not responsible for it. They’re a corporation, and a corporation is responsible for the errors of their employees, as well as the achievements. As for being alerted to it, well, there were questions about similar issues as far back as February, so it’s just as well there were people interested and concerned about it at this point in time! Yes, they’re fixing it; that’s not to say there’s nothing left to talk about here (and why the fierce requirement that I forget about it, exactly? Is there a problem with me remaining interested?). I personally think that we need to stop thinking about the categorisation of data as neutral and apolitical; that’s a conversation we need to keep having.

– WildlyParenthetical (04/14 03:25 AM)

Sure, they’re responsible, which is why they’re rectifying it. It was an error, it was accidental, and they’ve said they’ll try to put something in place to stop it happening again.

Similar issues in February, but not the same one. This was just a casual mistake.

OK, it raises issues, like how Twitter users, bloggers and ‘net users in usual are always quick to jump on a bandwagon without doing any research or waiting for facts to emerge. Hopefully those who started all this will have learnt their lesson - people only paid attention to this because it was misreported about the type of books that had been affected. If the story had been ‘Amazon have accidently tagged a wide variety of books as being ‘adult’, which has affected their promotion on the site, but are probably going to fix it soon’, nobody would have cared.

– Dave Nattriss (04/14 03:32 AM)

I still don’t follow this: when I heard about this, I did what probably everyone did: went to amazon and searched for a few things (mostly academic texts I knew for certain were in print). When they were difficult to get hold of, and many lacked sales ranks, yes, it seemed that there was a problem. This ‘bandwagon’ simply seems to be a shared observation of the issue having occurred. I’m not aware that anyone has claimed anything more, apart from a few avowedly speculative pieces offering thoughts. And it’s not as though it takes long to get together a press release. Amazon could have headed people off at the pass, Easter or not. That’s part of what people are irritated about.

As for the ‘type of books’ affected, well, it wasn’t strictly ‘misreported’. The Amazon quote said “57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica” has been affected. Now on Amazon, as I’m sure you know, and as the meta-data over at Dear Author (http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2009/04/12/amazon-possibly-using-category-metadata-to-filter-rankings/#more-11485) demonstrates, most books are classed in more than a single category. So yes, whilst books may have fallen into those ‘broad’ and ‘non-GLBT-specific’ categories, “Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica,” there’s little evidence (but you seem keen to assume that there is) to suggest that it was on the basis of those categories that they were deranked. In other words, I suspect that they’re using that careful turn of phrase to try to defuse the idea that there was any focus on GLBT material. The data that we have so far, which, yes, is limited, does suggest that a good portion of GLBT texts were de-ranked, and some at least simply on the basis of being marked ‘gay and lesbian’ (like “Heather has two mommies’. In addition, like I said above, I suspect that ‘sex’ or ‘sexuality’ were used as keywords, and knocked a whole bunch of stuff out, het and otherwise; but that terms like ‘sexuality’ already biases the whole process towards a higher proportion of non-het texts being de-ranked, precisely because GLBT stuff is considered non-normative, and thus as requiring the ‘sexuality’ tag (so a piece of gay fiction might be classed as about ‘sexuality’, but het romance certainly wouldn’t). I personally think this is an interesting display of the ways that categories like these can and do work, and that those ways are political. And I for one am glad that Amazon has been caught at this. I’m far from convinced that without the outrage expressed on the internet, the issue would be being addressed…

– WildlyParenthetical (04/14 04:33 AM)

Great post, with an important message. I’ve included a link to it in a small round-up I did on the Magellan site.

– Brian F OLeary (04/14 09:53 AM)

Dave, Wildly Parenthetical is right. There was nothing random in practice about what happened, it was an accident that could never have happened to other books. It completely defies all mathematical belief to suggest randomness could produce an outcome where most books remaining on the topic of homosexuality after the de-ranking were explicitly anti-gay. Again, I’m not saying it is a conspiracy, it is simply the enacting of very deeply rooted social psychological biases and when glitches occur, some fairly deep uglinesses about humanity are revealed. Society has rules designed to circumscribe deep ugliness in the human condition (a very Burkian notion I’m using here, Dave!)—some operate at the level of laws, which would be entirely inappropriate in this case, and some at the level of competing speech. Amazon has its powers of speech, customers have theirs. The Twitter response is a superb example of effective political speech used to countervail a large bureaucratic institution, effective both on the institution itself and in communicating to other institutions the need to be vigilant, not, might I add Jack, that one is guilty until proven innocent in the world of social media, but that large corporations who base their business on service (both for customers and vendors) are going to be held accountable for their failures, especially when their failures affect specific classes of customers.

– Richard Nash (04/14 10:44 AM)

I never for one moment thought it was deliberate on Amazon’s part. I thought it was an accident.

But not a random accident.

An accident fueled by unthinking assumptions.
Offensive ones. It’s also offensive to call this kind of accident a “glitch”.

As soon as the issue of filtering adult content comes up, this is exactly the sort of accident I immediately anticipate and would work to prevent.

Why didn’t Amazon’s management anticipate it?

Because they have the luxury of not noticing such possibilities.

It’s sort of like the way I have the luxury of not even noticing that a building I work at lacks wheelchair access. If I don’t question my able-bodied privilege, I will end up accidentally discriminating.

Amazon’s management failed to question their privilege, and ended up implementing an filtering system that lacked defenses against prejudice-enabled accidents.

That’s entirely deserving of outrage.

– allburning (04/14 11:15 AM)

Amazon is Wal-Mart. Once you say that, it all becomes clear.

Too many people have believed for too long that Amazon was something special, their own “community bookstore” on the Web. Now folks have caught just a glimpse of the problem with putting all their eggs into that basket.

– Michael Herrmann (04/14 11:49 AM)

Richard,
You still come off as a smart guy trying to defend his own bad behavior without admiting that he made a mistake. You of all people should know enought about bisac categories to realize that there is a perfectly resonable explantion for why this happened that wasn’t based at all on institutional homophobia.

The real lesson from this is that with twitter, a bunch of normally rational people can turn a bit of bad information into a mob. The people who warn about a million little brothers are right.

– Jack (04/14 12:15 PM)

If the story had been ‘Amazon have accidently tagged a wide variety of books as being ‘adult’, which has affected their promotion on the site, but are probably going to fix it soon’, nobody would have cared.

Amazon could have done that themselves with a public statement Monday morning. They didn’t think it was important enough, or their PR people were too afraid of saying the wrong thing they didn’t say anything at all, or something equally dumb. That they didn’t is on them, not the people writing and commenting about it.

– Persia (04/14 12:46 PM)

Jack, I’ll make one last statement. I’m not defending my behavior, I’m celebrating it. I’m saying what happened was excellent. I’ve been on the receiving end myself, been called out myself in the past, albeit on a much smaller scale—Amazon needed the scale of what happened.

I’m eminently familiar with BISAC, Jack, I’ve coded several hundred books with them, know some of hte folks who wrote them. Know librarians who tussle with them. BISAC codes reflect human society, warts and all. “allburning” describes precisely what happened, and if you can’t see it, if you can’t see that never in a billion years would a bunch of sports book suffer this fate, gardening books, or the Bible.

One must therefore guard affirmatively, not reactively.

I repeat myself not to defend myself, Jack, but to persuade you.

– Richard Nash (04/14 01:04 PM)

I’m with David Nattris on this one. Ham-handed though it was, it didn’t seem to be a deliberate anti-gay hate campaign, or a spasm of Puritanism, as it was portrayed by the meme-cloud on Twitter.

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/04/amazonfail-or-crowdfail.html

But thank you for setting me to thinking about something else:

Over the years, the GLBT movement asked for and got recognition as a kind of sub-genre, a special shelf, separate book stores—separate, but equal.

Then GLBT complains that it is segregated on a book list and maltreated on amazon.

Something wrong with that.

– Prokofy Neva (04/14 01:08 PM)

This sums up my feelings on the matter so much better than I ever could. Thank you.

– Zoe (04/14 06:24 PM)

I think the people like Jacob that don’t see what Amazon did wrong haven’t been following this from the beginning.

The length of time that it took Amazon to reply was just bizarre considering the gravity of the situation. The reply that they did give (albeit through unofficial means rather than on their own website, not even on a news/press page) was also bizarre in its brevity.

If something happened in Times Square where a sign fell off the Reuters building and left a swastika in its place, and after many many hours of outrage (especially from the Jewish community) the only thing we hear from Reuters is “oops, a glitch happened” and, then a day later they send a longer message (again, not posted on their own website) that still doesn’t have an apology in it and the swastika is still not completely covered, the anger towards Reuters would be completely justified even if what happened was completely accidental.

As Richard pointed out so eloquently, the onus is completely on Amazon to make the situation right. Anything less is a slap on the face to the LGBT community.

– Bart (04/14 07:06 PM)

It comes down to this: in life, there is an ongoing decision that cannot be bridged or finessed: you can choose Truth. Or you can choose Self-Serving Deception. You cannot serve both masters.

Now, if you truly think you are serving Truth by rationalizing away what I believe to be your foolish, premature, unfair outrage on this subject, then so be it. I think you are wrong, and I hope you change your mind, but I can’t force you to do so. And it is possible that I am wrong, and I am willing to accept that possibility, and if I come to the conclusion that I am wrong, I hope I would have the strength to swallow my pride and apologize. So while I may think you are failing to serve Truth, that is between you and your conscience. I have said my piece, and I appreciate your having listened to me. Perhaps I am wrong. But I am not yet convinced of that.

But if you are lying to yourself about this just to protect your own feelings and pride, then you are committing an offense against Truth, and if you believe you have chosen the side of Truth, you are betraying yourself, your cause, and your conscience when you lie to yourself.

That’s all I have to say, and I am sorry for the unavoidable preachy tone, but that’s just how it is.

– Jacob Davies (04/14 09:20 PM)

Thank you for posting this.

– Dana (04/14 09:27 PM)

THANK YOU. This is why it matters. This is why we can’t just assume it was a mistake and let it go. This is why we’re not paranoid. This is just we happen to live.

– georgia (04/14 11:31 PM)

The computer error isn’t the real problem. The computer error spotlighted a bizarre set of policy decisions on Amazon’s part, and/or successful gaming of the system by large mainstream publishers to the detriment of small publishers.

If (het porn stars) Ron Jeremy’s and Jenna Jameson’s very graphic and detailed autobiographies aren’t flagged, in the metadata, as eligible for the “adult” category, whereas a scholarly biography of Ellen DeGeneres is, then either the publishers are gaming the system or straight sexuality is being filtered less rigorously than queer sexuality.

If how-to books about sex by disability advocates are flagged as “adult”, but more explicit how-to books about sex for a more general audience aren’t flagged as “adult”, either the publishers of the latter are gaming the system or books about disability and sexuality are being filtered more rigorously than books about sexuality for able-bodied people.

So even if the rank-stripping, listing-blocking thing was a programmer’s mistake, the impact spotlights some potentially disturbing approaches to classification.

– Julia Sullivan (04/14 11:41 PM)

“Over the years, the GLBT movement asked for and got recognition as a kind of sub-genre, a special shelf, separate book stores—separate, but equal.

Then GLBT complains that it is segregated on a book list and maltreated on amazon.”

Giving books their own shelf in a bookstore (or having a bookstore that’s solely for those books) makes it easier to find those books. It’s why bookstores separate books into categories in the first place—so that someone looking for, to pick an example at random, books on gardening can find them easily without having to search through a bunch of unrelated books. Since a bookstore deals with physical items, they do pretty much have to choose one category for a book to be in if they want to make it easy for customers to find it (and don’t want to have to have one copy in each category). “GBLT stuff” is a valid category, since it’s definitely something people will look for specifically. Having a shelf for it is just recognizing that. (As for separate bookstores—so? Again, having stuff in one place makes it easier to find… I doubt most mainstream bookstores have as wide a selection of GBLT-themed books as a GBLT-themed bookstore does. Why shouldn’t people run bookstores dedicated to topics that are important to them?)

But! Amazon—the interface, I mean, not the place where they store the books—doesn’t deal with physical objects. A book can be in ten different categories, on ten different “shelves” without any problem. So there’s no good reason to have them separate; doing so doesn’t make them more easily found (and in fact what they did here made them *less* easily found). What Amazon did wasn’t like having GBLT stuff on a different shelf in the store—it was more like having it on a different shelf, and then taking that shelf and moving it behind the counter, or hiding it between a wall and a different shelf, or something. Not the same thing at all.

– Octal (04/15 01:40 AM)

Great post and good points in the comments.

Bart: Great analogy.

– OH (04/15 02:08 AM)

Richard

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and this bloke is gay writer too, one character is gay inthe novel

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richard

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fi novel but future nove.l…....URGENT, richard, URGENT…i am just
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can i send you PDF copy?

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– dan bloom (04/15 03:27 AM)

I personally think that we need to stop thinking about the categorisation of data as neutral and apolitical; that’s a conversation we need to keep having.

This, exactly.

The people who come up with the categories, and who decide what (or who) goes into them, have the power to define how people think about the world.

– Kit Russell (04/15 03:50 AM)

I went in and added up what I have spent at Amazon in the last year…$385, and then closed my account.

The $385 isn’t doing to make a blip on Amazon’s P+L, but it sure will help our one last glbt bookstore in Orlando. Yeah, it means I will have to go downtown instead of a few clicks, but it’s worth it.

– acorlando (04/15 11:00 AM)

You closed your Amazon.com account because they made a 72-hour classification mistake of 57,310 books, most of which weren’t LGBT at all?

Jeeze, you’re sensitive!

– Dave Nattriss (04/15 11:36 AM)

I think Jacob put it well - it’s intellectually dishonest to tend the flames of outrage when it’s clearly based on an untruth. Clay Shirky’s analysis of what happened sums up what bothers me so much about your post.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/04/the-failure-of-amazonfail/
These tools can cause the same outrage to be driven toward anything, deserving or not, and when the most articulate spokespeople in the mob refuse to acknowledge that they were wrong in hindsight, it’s distressing.

– Jake (04/15 03:44 PM)

It is simply not based on an untruth. My post’s analysis takes Amazon’s version of events for granted and proceeds from there. In fact, I didn’t comment at all on the #Amazonfail fiasco until this post, with the exception of a wise-ass Tweet on Amazon’s PR mismanagement. Perhaps Jacob and Jake are using this forum to comment on other posts and tweets by others, which is fine, these comments can be a general forum on the entire controversy. But I’m not seeing any criticisms that undermine my argument, only ones seeking to invalidate it.

We are having a disagreement of interpretation and consequence, and unfortunately too many commenters need to misconstrue my grasp of the facts in order to dispute with me, and that’s the truly dishonest move.

Thankfully, Clay Shirky doesn’t need to. Though I do think he’s overcompensating for his initial exaggerated reaction that Amazon’s move was intentional.

For another amplification of my take, please see Mary Hodder here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/14/guest-post-why-amazon-didnt-just-have-a-glitch/ (Clay’s post also references hers)

– Richard Nash (04/15 04:15 PM)

Richard,

Really great post. I would, especially, point out that the model of an unspoken social contract should be amplified, and considered with broad applications to the bookselling business.

Many small, as well as not-so-small, booksellers do censor the products they supply, openly and even with clear intent to injure the profits of those writers they disagree with morally. This can be seen in the spectrum of outlets from small religious bookstores to large chains like Wal-Mart, who actually account for a huge percentage of books sold.

One might defend the small religious bookstore first, saying that their decision on what books to carry is a manifestation of the owner’s free speech. But it is clear that, while the controlling interests of Amazon or Wal-Mart may hold, in majority, similar religious or moral beliefs, it is not acceptable for them to do the same.

The reason that this follows logically is because of the increased injury these chains are capable of doing to the author, which could be graphed to increase exponentially with the market-share of the offending bookseller, which would ultimately, in the case of a hypothetical bookselling monopoly, have the effect of complete censorship.

This is why, in a society that prizes free speech, the social contract is important, and as tangible as any written agreement. Amazon is not a monopoly, but it is clear that, by doing something as simple as manipulating an algorithm, they can do great injury.

It is, then, good that Amazon has suffered for their mistake, even if unintentional. Just as the law differentiates between murder and manslaughter, but provides for both to be punished, even if the consequence is only to Amazon’s reputation, it will ideally have the effect of making them more aware of and involved with this social contract in the future.

– James Embry (04/15 06:49 PM)

Power is seductive (once you depart from the Tao, then you get benevolence and righteousness).

Philip Mead points out that
once you eliminate Judith Wright, Pi O, and Lionel Fogarty from Australian poetry, what is left
is both narrow and narrowly propagandistic; utterly misleadling about the nature of current Australian
society, the nature of white settlement and of the governing structures of the country.

Guilty until proven innocent is a good starting point when we are talking about power: the results are
the same whether they are caused by glitches, accidents, inadvertence,or calculation.

– MF (04/17 09:06 PM)

<blush> Sorry about the format errors: accidents from trying to tame the ever-expanding-sideways Notepad screen… Same result no matter the cause…</blush>.

– MF (04/17 09:52 PM)

This is the first time I’ve come across your blog. Very interesting post. Thanks!

– Davin (05/01 05:23 PM)

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I ran Soft Skull Press from 2001 to 2007 when we sold it to Counterpoint for whom I continued to run it until early 2009. I founded Cursor and am publisher of Red Lemonade. I now run content and community for the new cultural discoverer Small Demons. After the jump is my bio, since I know some folks come to this site looking for it, and I thwart them by not having a proper one. read more »