How Amazon Changed Your Relationships

Relational Development in the Age of the Corporatized Household

Intro

I have worked in several “corporate” settings, visited Disney World a couple times, and ordered my fair share of Amazon wares. In these places we are all spoiled. The thought of fast delivery systems, perfectly curated “worlds”, and neat and tidy office spaces seems to captivate the American psyche.

We live in a land of extreme luxury so this shouldn’t be a surprise but what is often surprising is how our relationships with large corporations starts to form our human to human relationships on the ground.

We have all heard of the dangers of the “Tiktokification” of our attention spans, the instant everything culture, and the world at our fingertips. However, I wonder how many of us have paused to wonder how this has changed who we trust, how we interact in relationships, and the ways we communicate in intimate settings.

Factors of Trust

Just 200 years ago the idea of trust in society was a alternate reality. To have trust in an institution, a people, or a government was not understood the same as our well established systems of today. Living in virtually any place on earth would mean your web of trust was highly localized. You had friends, family, and the local religious temple by which you understood reality. Government may have had a role, perhaps a family owned business and the owner had your trust. Perhaps this owner was your distant cousin.

For most of human history to “trust” was something of a birthright as you experienced the world around you. This world was often inherited from your parents and change was slow. You would have never dreamed of trusting in a distant government or corporation more than you trusted your family, local, community, or Church. You can actually see this still operational today in rural communities across the globe.

Rural communities hold their trust in the local and in their neighbors. Many of them are the first to reject big government operation and large corporate takeovers. This is in large part because small local communities already have a “family” they don’t need a faceless corporation reshaping their values.

These components of trust have eroded in our modern era. In the lonely and disconnected world we now inhabit, trust is placed somewhere and often not entirely in localized intimate relationships. When we get in trouble we have Triple A, when we need a stick of butter we have Kroger deliver, if we are at work and need something done we call the Fortune 500 instead of the mom and pop.

Our locust of trust has shifted. We now have subscriptions to save our skins, insurance to bail us out, and distant call centers to sort our problems. The cost of all this disconnection and impersonal interaction takes a toll on trust, and once trust has shifted so do our relationships.

Corporate Relating: At Home and At Work

We might be more aware of how we do this at home. Most of us have a kind of hybrid of family & friends + corporations care for us but these are always disconnected. We can see this at work more tangibly in a disaster situation.

In a tragedy (in certain places) there is an entire breakdown of our normal disconnected ways of trust and relating. Communities are forced to come together and face the challenge together. However, in a normal course of our modern life we have insurance, Amazon, and a overly comfortable environment to buffer our need for our neighbors.

This all leads to a kind of intimacy that is “transactional”. We treat friends as assets and work colleagues as our personal customer service on our career ladder. I don’t believe the digital element has exclusively made these things transactional but rather a lack of priority in relationships to see the value in real human connection over “company X will solve my problem”.

This gets into deep psychology that large companies understand:

“If corporations repeatedly solve my problems then I will trust them more and go to them when I need help. My neighbor who is not 24/7 available and is awkward takes forever to help me so I will trust them less.”

This gets to a word I have heard more recently that highlights our situation. Real human relationships require an element of “friction” before we can reach a level of trust. In other words, it takes effort to connect and build trust. Transactions in human relationships simply do not work even though many people try to live this way.

True relationships which foster trust are so valuable in our world today because they cut through the faceless corporate experience we have substituted and show us other human beings actually care. Perhaps there is something to the “random acts of kindness” as they break through the matrix of our corporatized world.

In my experience this can no more be felt than in the work place. Work settings are nearly “antihuman” at this point in history. We all sit behind screens and click buttons yet we wonder why we have no friends and hate our coworkers. The more we have embraced a “antihuman” work environment we have simply paved the way for AI to take our jobs. Its really not much a shocker considering we have been behaving like robots for generations.

It reminds me of the scene in Christmas Vacation when Clark Griswold goes into his boss’s office to drop off his Christmas gift. The scene is hilarious but actually very accurate to corporate relationships…even the inability of his boss to remember his name. This is not even a large corporation problem as I have seen the same corporatization of relationships in small companies. It is more a tragedy of the human condition than something we can easily blame corporate American for.

Comms are Lost

Perhaps the most disconcerting element of this mass corporatization is our lack of ability to communicate meaningfully to our fellow humans. We all see this in our political discourse but it is alive and well across the board as Clark highlights in the above clip. Relationships need communication…not simply talking but meaningful connection both directions. Whether you are speaking of prayer, war, or otherwise, to lose communication back to HQ you are lost.

As a Orthodox Christian I ponder this phenomenon deeply as It seems to my one of the chief ways the Devil wishes to destroy humanity is to remove our ability to communicate to God and to one another. If we lose connection to Jesus Christ as the real “life force” of all of existence than without that life force or Spirit, if you will, then it stands to reason we would just as easily give up our souls contact with fellow humans. We have gone so far down this path that even AI does our communicating for us. We struggle to make sentences so we let a robot shape our language and thus shape how we relate.

I see this even more when I meet older people or folks from communities that are more oral in their culture. The richness of their relational connection is beyond comprehension to us now.

Conclusion

It is hard to fathom what might the world look like in 20 years. In some ways it seems it will be separated by those intimately connection in relationships and those further disconnected by the corporate machine. Like some of the scenes of Star Wars which contrasts the small fringe farming communities on distant planets to the Empire’s vast array of robots, machines, and weaponry.

I believe the only way to properly “resist” the blade runner world we are fast approaching is by putting your trust and work in human relationships. See your friends, family, and treat your coworkers as human beings not assets or cogs in a machine. The temptation to bow to the machine will be great but it is not unlike the temptations others have faces before you. You might be marginalized for not having a AI chip in your head or rejecting pharmaceuticals to boost your work performance but you will have something worth far more… you will get to be exactly as you were created: human.

Remain steadfast friends, God bless you.

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