If you don’t live on the web, then you will have literally no idea what #amazonfail was. Don’t worry – it’s gone now, and I’m guessing it had absolutely no impact on your life. In the echo chamber that is the web, however, it was huge; and it’s had a twofold impact.
First it’s shown the way in which bonds of trust between retailer and consumer can be broken very easily on the web, which people seem to think is a big issue – as if anybody “trusts” a web retailer to do anything more than deliver on time, and as if anybody is going to remember this about a month from now. I am confident that the negative impact of #amazonfail will last all the way into next week and then be forgotten just like everything else on the web.
Second it’s clear that the web remains far from the dreams of the technotopians in terms of empowering people’s decision-making through providing better information. Clay Shirky’s mea culpa has attracted a lot of praise for providing a clear-eyed insight into the mechanics of mob rule on the web, but nobody’s noticed that it conceals more than it reveals. Let’s break it down:
- Shirky is human.
- Humans suffer from a huge range of cognitive biases.
- These biases lead them to do stupid things without realising it.
- In particular, people do really stupid things when they get into a crowd filled with lots of other people doing the same stupid thing (which is itself a bias).
- Once those stupid things have been done, it’s almost impossible to go back on them, because that requires that you admit to yourself that you did something stupid (and that’s a whole psychological heory of bias).
To the casual observer of human behaviour, none of these things will come as any surprise. That only makes it more surprising to find that although Shirky – a genuinely insightful thinker who has studied crowd behaviour for many years – realises that he fell into an obvious trap and now regrets it, he doesn’t seem to realise that this is what humans are like, and that no amount of technological progress is going to change that.
The comments on Shirky’s post are filled with people who joined the crowd and now refuse to face the fact that perhaps they were wrong – they’re still whining about how Amazon must have done something wrong, even if that something was “having a database”. My particular favourite is an attempted defense that Shirky links to (for balance) entitled Why Amazon Didn’t Just Have a Glitch:
The issue with #AmazonFail isn’t that a French Employee pressed the wrong button or could affect the system by changing “false” to “true” in filtering certain “adult” classified items, it’s that Amazon’s system has assumptions such as: sexual orientation is part of “adult”. And “gay” is part of “adult.” In other words, #AmazonFail is about the subconscious assumptions of people built into algorithms and classification that contain discriminatory ideas.
Essentially her defense of the cognitive biases of #amazonfail is to attack the cognitive biases of Amazon, and it’s somehow moving to see this testimony to our common humanity, even if that testimony is utterly lacking in self-awareness. The epic fail of #amazonfail is an opportunity for many people to raise that level of self-awareness, but only a few such as Shirky will make the most of that opportunity.
Tags: #amazonfail, Clay Shirky, Twitter
I agree with you that #amazonfail’s an opportunity for people to raise their level of self-awareness. Try reading some of the other perspectives besides Shirky’s with more of an open mind.
jon
Jon, thanks for the comment. Personally I’m biased against the hyperbole that’s often found around technology, which is why I’m interested in phenomena like this. I’m always looking for stronger arguments than the ones I’m presented with. In this case, I’m still struggling to see exactly what it is that Amazon has actually done that people are so infuriated by; and also to see exactly what #amazonfail was supposed to achieve and what it actually achieved.
I’m fully prepared to concede that there may have been more intent behind Amazon’s “glitch” than Shirky will acknowledge, even if I generally think that it’s likely to be a sin of omission rather than one of intent. The problem with getting outraged over rights issues is that if you want to make a strong case, you need to have a case to begin with. The links you provide on your blog give many other perspectives on the situation, but they don’t exactly form a coherent picture. They don’t even provide much evidence for the case against Amazon; but my mind is open if more evidence comes forward.