So Amazon is claiming that this is a glitch and that they will be making a statement in the morning.
As my previous post from this afternoon should make perfectly clear, this is not an accident. It's obvious that pro-feminist, pro-sexual health, pro-LGBT, and pro-sexuality work has been targeted in this nonsense. What's become even more apparent is that Amazon's initial response does not take seriously the severity of this charge. This cover-your-ass sort of stonewalling that came as a sort of knee jerk reaction from Amazon is old-style corporate BAU that is no longer tenable in the new age of rapid response social media. One thing that it appears lefties have learned from the Obama Experience is how to make ourselves heard and responding more quickly to corporate information in the wider arena of discourse than traditional corporate communication is capable of. To whit, by the time Amazon gave its half-assed response to the firestorm of bad PR it waded into today, the community of grassroots activists had already been sharing information and doing research that outpaced Amazon's ability to do damage control.
Whether or not this is the birth of Web 3.0 is a question I'll leave to the geeks. As a critic, I think that this is a significant demonstration of guerilla grassroots organizing on a distributed model that could well have strong implications for the way politics is conducted in the future. Moreover, what needs to be recognized out of this is that there are techniques that guerrilla netroots needs to learn and adopt to become even more effective in future.
My own foray into this terrain was an experiment with Twitter. Given the constraints and the rapidity at which dialog is shaped on the internet, old fashioned sloganeering has been given new life. I think this is shown in an interesting way in the success of my experiment, which was to try to give focus to the response to the reaction to the Amazon excuse by labelling it with the Twitter hashtag #glitchmyass. The double entendre and the general stab at humor caught on, and as of this writing, the hashtag is trending fairly well on Twitter and has been picked up as a factoid about reaction in a few different news items about the furor.
What this shows is that there is a new realm of information maneuvering as a form of political tactics that requires a fast reaction adaptability in the blogosphere that is analogous to the strategies for assymetric warfare argued for by Sun Tzu and Che Guevarra in their manuals on military strategy.
There is a rich field for theoretical investigation here, and I think we're only starting to see the beginning of the political praxis that will shape the near future. In the meantime, I look forward to Amazon's statement tomorrow.
My own personal theory is that there was an executive corporate decision made at some point in response to organized complaints about the nature of much of the sexualized materiel present on Amazon, and the task of executing a "Kindler Gentler Amazon" was then delegated to middle managers who were either so incompetent that they actually didn't realize how bad they were fucking up, or worse, were actually significantly biased personnel who specifically targeted the groups hurt by this move. My suspicion, knowing how common the type of neckbearded goon that one is likely to find working in IT who would be capable of fucking up in this particularly egregious way is in the Seattle area, is that it is the latter. Probably we will never know. In the meantime, Amazon will be punished for failing to adapt to the changing arena of discourse that they have helped to create as a pioneering Internet concern. The irony should not be lost on anyone.