And really, as a succinct critique of a complex situation, it’s hard to do better than #amazonfail and #glitchmyass.

Huh? It DID. There were a ton of such conversations going on. The one on Making Light is a good example.

Fortunately for Amazon, a “long time” in realtime is equal to about five minutes in clock time. Being beaten with the virtual pillows of a hashmob may not have been pleasant, but it’s not going to cause the company any permanent, or even passing, harm. It was a tempest in a tweetpot, a ripple in the stream.

Hmm, put it together with Meg’s and you’ve got a destructive, unrelenting, pillowfight. I kinda like that.

Personally I think Nick’s optimism that it’s over is likely misplaced. I’d like to discuss that with him, but he doesn’t allow comments on his blog. Clay does allow comments, but doesn’t respond — and also hasn’t responded to my tweets. Kinda like Jeff Bezos and Amazon, they don’t seem to want to talk about it.

privileged people (from what I can tell/remember, both commenter #8 and the author of the article I can’t find (which I’ll link if I find it again—I swear I bookmarked it!) are white men, and quite probably straight) using that anger as an excuse to dismiss marginalized people’s points is distructive

Yeah really. This is part of why I bristled so strongly at Clay Shirky’s essay, and tweeted that I was disappointed that Tim O’Reilly, Dan Gillmor, and Ethan Zuckerman had expressed their support. All of them are deservedly well-known and well-respected as writers about Web 2.0 and in the online civil liberties and human rights community (in fact I introduced Clay when he gave last year’s closing keynote at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy). They really need to be more aware of their privilege.

The impact of Amazon’s fail fell primarily on LGBTQ, feminists, people with disabilities, and authors of erotic fictions. For able-bodied white male non-fiction authors to dismiss this, cast #amazonfail’s success as a failure, and turn the subject to “*I* overreacted, *we* were wrong” … gaah, my teeth gnash. [Not sure about orientation, but like you I suspect most if not all of them are straight.] And as aemeliaclare pointed out Barely and Widely, Shirky didn’t help matters by starting off with the unnecessary Tawana Brawley analogy….

Oh well. As with Join the Impact and Motrin Moms, #amazonfail’s yet another example of marginalized communities using social computing technologies effectively. So I guess it’s not surprising that its interpretation is contested. And perhaps once everybody calms down and looks at it more clearly, some of the people who were so quick to leap to conclusions will continue their self-examination. Hey, a guy can dream

It’s interesting that you and everybody else in this thread are ignoring Nadia’s comment … you know, the one that included “as a queer person and a feminist”. Like Clay Shirky, you seem very eager to condemn LGBTs, feminists, and people with disabilities for speaking up to protest something that — regardless of intent — targeted them.

Meg replied, including

…which feels very close to accusing me of being homophobic.

If you read this blogpost carefully, you’d notice that I’m not condemning LGBTs for reacting to something that affects (not targets, which does signify intent), but expressing concern at anyone who rushed to judge, condemn and call names before the facts were known.

Here was my reply

__________________________________________________________

Meg,

The kind of ugly, prejudiced, underinformed, sneery, rude, kneejerk activity we saw over this weekend on Twitter and around the web makes me concerned, not proud, about the potential of social technologies.

sure seems like condemnation to me. And so does the framing in your headline and through the article, analogizing the “mob” to a destructive wildfire, and concluding that they’re “Destructive. Damaging. Virulent. Unapologetic. Unrelenting.”

By contrast, I’m proud to have been a small part of #amazonfail, and grateful to those who put far more time and energy in than I did. Yeah I wish people weren’t using the word “Nazi” so much … oh well, Godwin’s Law applies on Twitter too. Still, I certainly think this should be viewed as a major success for social network activists.

But if all Amazon see are people waving pitchforks and trying to bring them down through boycotts, … then the real concern gets lost.

Really? See James’ comment above — or Mark Probst’s initial reply from Amazon (”too bad, you lose”). Seems to me to the extent Amazon has responded, and to the extent that the deeper issues have gotten coverage, it’s been due to the high-profile activism. When was the last time that TechCrunch had a front-page article about how heteronormativity and other biases are embedded in supposedly “objective” systems? How broad had the discussion been before about Amazon’s manipulation of their rankings? And so on…

Marginalized groups including queers, feminists, people with disabilities, erotic fiction authors, independent bookstores — and their allies — banded together using social network technologies to cast the spotlight on bad behavior by a large corporation known for being unresponsive, and much deeper structural issues that are usually swept under the table. This led to a swift (albeit very imperfect) response from Amazon, and already some excellent and relatively-high-profile discussions of these deeper issues. In the process, connections have been made that may well turn into alliances and lessons have been learned.

Sounds like a good thing to me.

jon

PS: perhaps “targeted” wasn’t my best choice of words. More precisely I meant something like “primarily and disproportionally impacted as a result of an explicit action and a system with embedded discriminatory assumptions.”