What Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods really means

There is something horrible about this little video. Why do the inhabitants of this suburban home require a recipe for pasta from a jar? Why can’t they turn the lights down using their hands? If the ad were an episode of “Black Mirror”, they would be clones living in a laboratory, attempting to follow the patterns of an outside world they’ve never seen. And yet the ad is not fantastical but descriptive. It’s unsettling because it’s an accurate portrayal of our new mail-order way of life, which Amazon has spent the past twenty-two years creating.

Eventually, governments all over the world will have to ask themselves the question: how big and powerful will we let corporations become? The more powerful they get, and the bigger and bigger the role of money in Washington DC and Brussels, the more I believe we have already reached the point where it’s time to start breaking up some of the most powerful corporations – like the oil giants, like Apple, like Google, like Amazon, and so on.

These companies play such a huge role in the core foundations and functioning of our societies, that we have to start taking steps to break them up. We’ve done it before, and we need to start thinking about doing it again.

Corporations exist to serve society – not the other way around. If, due to their sheer size and power, they become a liability, they have outlived their usefulness.

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