I’m not a fan of Amazon.

Never have been. Never will.

Add to that, Uber and other platforms that invariably, force us in some way or another, to have no choice in using them or be physically, and virtually, isolated.

A few months ago, for a lark to see how it works (and the question from some viewers of my YouTube channel who mentioned they have no bookstores or libraries near them as they’ve all been closed – this idea is absolutely nightmarish for me – WHAT KIND OF EARTH ALLOWS FOR BOOKSHOPS AND LIBRARIES TO CLOSE?! – that why don’t I have an Amazon Affiliate link so they can buy the books from my account?

No idea except that I baulked at the idea of Amazon. I thought to myself “why can’t my viewers just find the book themselves?”

Of course, they meant it that if I shared an Amazon link that they’d at least help me by buying it off me and then I get some minuscule percentage off the sale. 😏 Okay, I see that they had good intent of course.

So I capitulated.

I opted for an affiliate link with another company (that since went bust – thanks for nothing Amazon) and another one that was a cooperative between independent booksellers (but who don’t have an Australian site – and of which I’m still waiting for a response).

I was mildly annoyed at the lack of responses and the difficulty in signing up for these affiliate programs with these Amazon competitors but not surprised when I signed up for the Amazon Affiliate program.

Surprise, surprise, how easy it was!

…..The hard bit comes afterwards. 👇

I was sent this above email this morning and once again felt annoyed and miffed. Naturally, I wasn’t pushing hard enough for people to buy.

I failed their Sales 101. I was not their Amazon fan girl. 😏

It was akin to being reprimanded like some new employee in Sales on probation. Fail to make a sale in three months of being on their platform, I’m OUT!

I like how they encourage me to perform, to push, to sell to my audience.

Really? No thanks. I can think of better things to do with my time like read books, coffee catchups with friends, play golf…. Not buy or push more shit on their platform.

As I write this, I’ve just finished reading TechnoFeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis that explains all this. The madness of us all becoming cloud serfs to the few technofeudalists and how, capitalism is well and truly dead.

The issue is that now, I will cancel my account with its affiliate program as I refuse to use social media to push people to buy the books I review. I also know that I’m already within the system where I have uploaded content in the form of reviews, posts, photos, tweets, etc over the many years online that fed their algorithmic engines to get us where we are today.

We are well and truly entrenched into a system that has already modified our behaviours where we are at the whim of algorithms. As Varoufakis says in his book:

The bad news is that the Internet bred a form of capital which killed capitalism but replaced it with something far worse. The good news is that we now have at our disposal tools which we might establish a new commons….we live under a new form of serfdom….