Last night I finished reading @AlecMacGillis's book _Fulfillment_. Here are a few thoughts...

Since I work in moral and political theory, I was inclined to read the book as a meditation on the nature of fulfillment, understood ethically, not economically...

Here is, for me, the core of the question of Fulfillment, the book: What is a flourishing existence?

MacGillis suggests that according to Amazon, the answer is:

One click shopping, free shipping, next day delivery.

From the perspective of Amazon - its founders and its managers - a fulfilled life is one that is, at its core, disconnected from community, detached from any determinate history... it is a life of fleeting desires, satisfied immediately. It is a wanton's existence.

MacGillis then goes on to show how this wanton's existence is transmuted into a paradigm for organizing our space and our activity.

The wanton's paradigm organizes our relationship with history and community.

In particular, the wanton's paradigm eliminates complex layers of space of activity that resulted from the slow accretion of generations of community, work, play...

Homes, schools, steel mills, streams, playing fields, churches, union halls all cheek to jowl... wiped away.

What remains are big box fulfillment centers and grey streaks of dull, ecologically devastating interstate.

MacGillis also tells the story of the mindless, dangerous labor in fulfillment centers. How people die pointlessly and alone, the responsibility of their deaths foisted upon them, with Amazon hiding behind the desperation of small town politicians and cowardly OSHA inspectors.

But, for me, the deepest message of the book is how Amazonification remakes the spaces we live in by almost instantly wiping away communities that emerged from the slow accretion of work and struggle.

For example, ornamental bricks from one city are trucked to a development in another, added to the facade and interior walls, all to signify to new, bourgeois residents that they are somewhere that had a past.

Never mind the inaccuracies.

The book accepts that we cannot resist change slowly washing away what is and what was. MacGillis identifies no historical idyll to which we must return, no utopian socialist future where history shall end.

He documents the ravages of 21st century capitalism's diseased tide.

MacGillis offers years-long, lives-long, generations-long stories of people and communities producing and reproducing the material and social bases for flourishing existences.

He overlays that with Amazon's shocking and sudden disruption of all these processes.

MacGillis is especially good at showing how rich the social and material ecosystem must be for diverse populations to re/produce the capacities to flourish.

He then shows how Amazon eliminates these ecosystem's complexity, effectively monocropping the social and economic order.

This monocropping of the political economy has devastated many formerly robust middle-sized cities. Some communities are literally razed to the ground. Like Rome salting the Carthaginian soil, Amazon and its ilk ensure that no trace of once thriving neighborhoods remain.

MacGillis takes great pains to make this a story of regional winners and losers.

But, for me at least, that message felt forced, as his narrative of all that has been lost in Seattle and DC is as powerful as his stories of what is lost in Nelsonville, OH.

Rather, the lesson I take from the book is how the complex bases of a flourishing life are eliminated by the Amazonification of our existence... the relentless reduction of activity to consumption and fulfillment.

Ok back to teaching. Thanks for a great book @AlecMacGillis.