Buy Now by Emily West

Author:Emily West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press

CONCLUSION—FROM THE CHOOSING SUBJECT TO THE SERVED SELF

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be the most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

—Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010

This is the opening quote of Brad Stone’s 2013 book about Amazon, The Everything Store. While the quote is used, in that context, to frame Jeff Bezos as an iconoclast who would go on to become the richest person in the world by 2017, we might also pause to consider the irony in Bezos’s passionate assertion that “we are our choices.” After all, much of Amazon’s efforts are directed toward steering our consumer choices. In an information environment of overwhelming choice, Amazon’s use of dataveillance and predictive analytics to cultivate an intimate, yet automated, service relationship with consumers provides a soothing way out of having to deal with the full extent of those choices.

Beyond just understanding the transfer and creation of value heralded by platform surveillance, we should attend to a broader shift in consumer subjectivity from the choosing subject to the served self. Dominant theories of consumer identity have emphasized the choosing subject, sometimes celebrating these choices as the freedom to construct our individual identities using the resources of the market; other times emphasizing choice as a burden, an obligation, or a disciplinary mechanism. In contrast, the consumer subjectivity constructed by Amazon is a served self, whose needs and preferences are learned over time and then catered to. The work of consumption, in some sense, shifts from consumer to brand.

Alexa represents a pinnacle of this strategy. Certainly, Alexa makes consumption hands-free, eliminating one kind of “work,” at least the effort of typing or tapping on a device. Friction in the act of consumption is literally eliminated. But Alexa also streamlines choices more than a graphical interface would, because long lists of options are time consuming and unwieldy through the medium of voice. Here’s one example of “do’s and don’ts” from the Alexa Design Guide that illustrate how Alexa effectively makes choices for the user in the name of efficiency and streamlining (see figure 4.1).

4.1    Screenshot by author from the Alexa Design Guide: Be Available. Source: “Be Available,” Alexa Design Guide, 2020, https://developer.amazon.com/docs/alexa-design/available.html

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