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Amazon has invented a new kind of labor travesty: the chickenized reverse centaur. That's a worker who has to foot the bill to outfit a work environment where they nevertheless have no autonomy (chickenization) and whose body is conscripted to act as a peripheral for a digital system (reverse centaur):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
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@pluralistic I am sorry but this image just reminds me of the movie “Sorry to bother you”.
@pluralistic If anybody still has not canceled Amazon Prime, please reconsider! A no-brainer, after reading this… .
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/23/traveling-salesman-solution/#pee-bottles
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"Chickenization" is a term of labor economics, inspired by the brutal state of the poultry industry, where three giant processing companies have divided up the market so that every chicken farmer has just one place where they can sell their birds. To sell your birds to one of these plants, you have to give them total control over your operation. They sell you the baby chicks, they tell you what kind of coop to build and what lightbulbs to install and when they should be on.
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@pluralistic I was going to comment on the later part of this thread that this is why I dislike Amazon.
Now I learn I have a reason to dislike the US poultry industry.
And makes me wonder how much better / worse things are in Canada.
Both for the chickens and the Amazon subcontracted workers.
The "chicken industry" in the entire civilised world is something YOU DO NOT WANT to look too closely into...
...least you intend on becoming a #vegetarian and an animal rights activist.
They tell you which vet to use and which medicines can be administered to your birds. They tell you what to feed your birds and when to feed them. They design your coop and tell you who is allowed to maintain it. The one thing they don't tell you is how much you'll be paid for your birds - that's something you only discover when it's time to sell them, and the sum you're offered is based on the packer's region-wide intelligence on how you and all your competitors are faring.
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It is calculated to be the smallest amount to allow you to roll over your loans and go into more debt to grow more birds for them.
At its root, "chickenization" is about de-risking, cloaked in the language of entrepreneurship. Chicken farmers assume all the risk for the poultry packers, but they're told that they're their own bosses.
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The only way in which a chicken farmer resembles an entrepreneur is that they have to bear all the risk of failure - without having any upside for success. Packers can (and do) secretly decide to experiment at farmers' expense, ordering some of their farmers to vary their feeding, light and veterinary routines to see if they can eke new efficiencies out of the process.
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If that works, the surplus is reaped by the packer. If that fails, the losses are borne by the farmer, who is never told that they were funding an experiment.
Amazon makes extensive use of chickenization in its many commercial arrangements, tightly defining the working conditions of many "self-employed" workers, like the clickwork "turkers" who power the Mechanical Turk service.
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