Okay, I know I’ve recommended him before, but I’m jumping of the Farhad Manjoo bandwagon. Not just because he prefers Amazon shopping to local bookstores—that’s well within the mainstream of course—but because his logic is so anti-intellectual, to use Amazon’s own M.O. to defend its impact on book culture, and paint anyone who has loyalty to a local store as a “bookstore cultist,” not say, someone who likes to (even symbolically) have one’s sales tax contribute to a local economy.
Independent bookstores have “a paltry selection, no customer reviews…a dubious recommendation engine?” Either this is a piece of performance art in which he plays the part of a whiny 12-year old being dragged through a musty store, he swiped this article from an internal Amazon company memo, or maybe it’s just that tech writers for a site like Slate are always going to side with efficient capitalism and technological progress.
(via marathonpacks)
One of the weird things about tech people (and business people in general) is their collective fantasies that they a) choose well and b) spend their time efficiently. The first has been steadily debunked, the second is the secret underpinning of a lot of this thinking and needs detonation.
