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In most of the world, the lockdown has destroyed small businesses while increasing the profits of Big Tech intermediaries like Amazon, who control access to customers on one side, and access to merchants on the other.
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The government of Argentina is trying to avert this fate. Their postal service is launching a "state-owned Amazon" called Correo Compras, which will offer low-cost ecommerce listings to businesses, and do fulfilment through postal workers.
https://www.correocompras.com.ar/
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https://www.correocompras.com.ar/
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Correo Compras competes directly with Mercadolibre, a latinamerican ecommerce titan with a well-deserved reputation for squeezing suppliers and workers - its deliveries are made by precarious gig economy drivers.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/what-would-state-owned-amazon-look-ask-argentina/
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/what-would-state-owned-amazon-look-ask-argentina/
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Correo Compras is making a bet: that by eliminating Mercadolibre's vast margin (45%!), it can pay workers a living wage, offer fair treatment to vendors, and still sell at competitive prices.
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They're also rolling out digital payments (BNA+) provided by the Banco Nacion, competing with Mercadolibre's Mercadopagos, which has seen a surge in usage and profits (thanks to high fees) since the lockdown. BNA+ also builds in instalment payments.
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In many ways, Argentina is well-situated to try the experiment: it has very high internet penetration, a thriving domestic tech industry, and high levels of technological literacy.
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It also struggles with structural poverty, thanks in part to US vulture capitalists who absorb vast amounts of its GDP to service odious debts.
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As @CeciliaRikap points out in her @opendemocracy article on the venture, Correo Compras will give Argentine state planners access to important market information - data that currently sits in private hands thanks to digital surveillance.
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But while data can improve industrial policy, it can also serve state oppression. The debt that is currently crushing the company is partly the price-tag for the former military dictatorship's program of mass surveillance, torture, murder and terror.
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Data collected for beneficial purposes can be weaponized. The Dutch government collected data on minorities so that they could provide settlement services to them. Nazi occupiers used this data to locate minorities and ship them to camps.
https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-have-something-to-hide-40689565c550
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https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-have-something-to-hide-40689565c550
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This is not merely a historical fact. Australia's spy agencies were just caught tapping into data generated by covid exposure notification apps - data that Australians were promised would only be used for contact tracing.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/24/australia-spy-agencies-covid-19-app-data/
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https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/24/australia-spy-agencies-covid-19-app-data/
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It's not a mere historical fact. There are people alive in Argentina today who were spied upon, kidnapped and tortured by their government. Argentina could certainly come under the sway of a brutal dictator again - if it can happen in Brazil, it can happen in Argentina.
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This isn't to condemn Correo Compras. It's an exciting experiment. But it's an experiment. We should try lots of experiments. We could end the practice of worker misclassification, turning low-waged Amazon workers into employees and allowing them to unionize.
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That's already starting to happen. Amazon workers in Alabama - a viciously anti-union state - is having a union vote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/23/amazon-warehouse-workers-union/
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/23/amazon-warehouse-workers-union/
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States could offer postal fulfilment and startup funding for worker co-ops. They could enforce structural separation, forcing companies like Amazon to either offer a platform or sell on it, but not both.
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They could structure taxes so that profits from predatory listing fees were annihilated by tax liabilities. NIST could offer bug-bounties for a free/open source federated clone of Amazon's platform that any co-op could stand up and run.
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As always, the trick is to decide what's "infrastructure" - public goods that need public ownership - and what's a "service" that should be pluralized among many hands to make it harder to gain and abuse power (even state power).
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ETA: in tweet 9, "crushing the company" should read "crushing the country"
